Page:The International Socialist Review (1900-1918), Vol. 1, Issue 1.pdf/37

Rh tional parity of exchange, free coinage and meltage, and the recoinage of foreign coins into domestic coins, all matters to which Marx gave little attention, though they are of fundamental importance.

Let us see if this rule will work both ways. If a country requires only a certain amount of money to correspond with its commodities, then the converse must be true, viz., that with a stable price level a country requires only a certain amount of commodities to correspond with its money; that the money of a country will carry only so much merchandise and no more, and when the channel is full the surplus will overflow. Where will it overflow to? To foreign countries by way of exports. But considering the whole world as one commodity producing country, as in fact it is, for commodities are international, where would the overflow go to? Marx does not answer. He cannot answer because his famous stable price level would break down.

Marx complains of Ricardo that he gives the discussion of the money question an international tinge. (Critique, p. 184.) So did Marx give the labor question an international tinge. Science is international. When the money under consideration is made of an international metal subject to free coinage, recoinage and decoinage, no other method of consideration, except from the international standpoint, is worth anything.

To claim that gold has an intrinsic value, and that therefore only so much can circulate in a country as corresponds with the quantity of merchandise in that country is to confuse concrete labor value with social labor value, and implies that the social labor value of a product can never change. The concrete labor expended in producing a product is ascertained at the time of production of that particular product, and, of course, never changes for that particular article. But the social labor value of that particular article when it becomes a commodity and mingles with other like articles produced at different times and under different conditions, is subject to constant fluctuations. If it has an intrinsic value or value of its own, as Marx expresses it, such value is at any rate not fixed.

Now, gold differs from other articles in several particulars; first, it is not produced normally in indefinite quantities, but is discovered accidentally in uncertain and irregular, but always comparatively small quantities; second, it is indestructible, and there being a large stock on hand the annual output affects the total quantity but little, an dtheand the [sic] social labor value of the annual output, considered apart from the old stock on hand, is a matter of almost no consequence; third, it is an article endowed by law, through free coinage, with the peculiar and unique quality of universal salability, so to speak. This quality can be given only to a comparatively scarce article. To give it to an article capable of in-