Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/97

 sooner than all other products, of passing to the constitutive state of value.

These economic reasons are: the "marked preference," already in "the patriarchal period," and other circumlocutions of the same fact, which augment the difficulty, since they multiply the fact in multiplying the incidents which M. Proudhon brings forward to explain the fact. M. Proudhon has not yet exhausted all the pretended economic reasons. Here is one of supreme force, irresistible:

"It is from the sovereign consecration that money springs; the monarchs seize gold and silver and place their seal upon them."

Thus the good pleasure of monarchs is, for M. Proudhon, the supreme reason, in political economy!

Truly it is necessary to be entirely innocent of all historical knowledge not to know that in all times sovereigns have had to submit to the economic conditions and have never made laws for these. Legislation, political as well as civil, could do no more than give expression to the will of the economic conditions.

Has the monarch seized gold and silver to make them the universal agents of exchange by impressing his seal upon them, or have these universal agents of exchange not rather taken possession of the monarch by forcing him to impress his seal upon them and thus give them a political consecration?

The imprint which has been, and is, given to money is not that of its value, it is that of its weight. The fixity and authenticity of which M. Proudhon speaks applies only to the standard of the money, and this standard indicates how much of material metal there is in a coined piece of gold or silver. "The sole intrinsic value of a silver mark," said Voltaire, with his usual