Episode 14

A careful study of Asiatic,particularly Indian,forms of communal property would indicate that the disintegration of different forms of primitive communal ownership gives rise to diverse forms of property.For instance,various prototypes of Roman and Germanic private property can be traced back to certain forms of Indian communal property.

4."La ricchezza e una ragione tra due persone."Galiani,Della Moneta ,p.221.In Volume III of Custodi's collection of Scrittori classici Italiani di Economia Politica.Parte Moderna,Milano,1803.

5."In its natural state,matter ...is always destitute of value."McCulloch,A Discourse on the Rise,Progress,Peculiar Objects,and Importance of Political Economy,Second Edition,Edinburgh,1825,p.48.This shows how high even a McCulloch stands above the fetishism of German "thinkers"who assert that "material"and half a dozen similar irrelevancies are elements of value.See,inter alia ,L.Stein,op.cit .,Bd.1,p.

170.

6.Berkeley,The Querist,London,1750

7.Thomas Cooper,Lectures on the Elements of Political Eonomy,London,1831(Columbia,1826),p.99.

8.Friedrich List has never been able to grasp the difference between labour at a producer of something useful,a use-value,and labour as a producer of exchange-value,a specific social form of wealth (since his mind being occupied with practical matters was not concerned with understanding);he therefore regarded the modern English economists as mere plagiarists of Moses of Egypt.

9.It can easily be seen what "service"the category "service"must render to economists such as J.B.Say and F.Bastiat,whose sagacity,as Malthus has aptly remarked,always abstracts from the specific form of economic conditions.

10."It is another peculiarity of measures to enter into such a relation with the thing measured,that in a certain way the thing measured becomes the measure of the measuring unit."Montanari,Della Moneta,p.

41in Custodi's collection,Vol.III,Parte Antica.

11.Aristotle makes a similar observation with regard to the individual family considered as the primitive community.But the primitive form of the family is the tribal family,from the historical dissolution of which the individual family develops."In the first community,indeed which is the family,this art"(that is,trade)"is obviously of no use"(Aristotle,loc.cit.).

12."Money is,in fact,only the instrument for carrying on buying and selling"(but could you please explain what you mean by buying and selling?)"and the consideration of it no more forms a part of the science of political economy than the consideration of ships or steam engines,or of any other instruments employed to facilitate the production and distribution of wealth"(Thomas Hodgskin,Popular Political Economy ,London,1827,pp.178,179).

Historical Notes on the Analysis of Commodities Karl Marx's A CONTRIBUTION TO THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMYA.Historical Notes on the Analysis of Commodities The decisive outcome of the research carried on for over a century and a half by classical political economy,beginning with William Petty in Britain and Boisguillebert [1]in France,and ending with Ricardo in Britain and Sismondi in France,is an analysis of the aspects of the commodity into two forms of labour --use-value is reduced to concrete labour or purposive productive activity,exchange-value to labour-time or homogeneous social labour.

Petty reduces use-value to labour without deceiving himself about the dependence of its creative power on natural factors.He immediately perceives concrete labour in its entire social aspect as division of labour .[2]This conception of the source of material wealth does not remain more or less sterile as with his contemporary Hobbes,but leads to the political arithmetic,the first form in which political economy is treated as a separate science.But he accepts exchange-value as it appears in the exchange of commodities,i.e.,as money,and money itself as an existing commodity,as gold and silver.Caught up in the ideas of the Monetary System,he asserts that the labour which determines exchange-value is the particular kind of concrete labour by which gold and silver is extracted.What he really has in mind is that in bourgeois economy labour does not directly produce use-values but commodities,use-values which,in consequence of their alienation in exchange,are capable of assuming the form of gold and silver,i.e.,of money,i.e.,of exchange-value,i.e.,of materialised universal labour.His case is a striking proof that recognition of labour as the source of material wealth by no means precludes misapprehension of the specific social form in which labour constitutes the source of exchange-value.

Boisguillebert for his part,in fact,although he may not be aware of it,reduces the exchange-value of commodities to labour-time,by determining the "true value"(la juste valeur )according to the correct proportion in which the labour-time of the individual producers is divided between the different branches of industry,and declaring that free competition is the social process by which this correct proportion is established.But simultaneously,and in contrast with Petty,Boisguillebert wages a fanatical struggle against money,whose intervention,he alleges,disturbs the natural equilibrium or the harmony of the exchange of commodities and,like a fantastic Moloch,demands all physical wealth as a sacrifice.