ounces of gold, if there were a total of twenty million ounces, the price of the commodity and the value of money rising or falling in inverse ratio to the quantity of gold in existence.[1] But the world of commodities consists of an endless variety of use-values, whose relative values are by no means determined by their relative quantities. How, then, does Hume conceive this exchange of the volume of commodities for the volume of gold? He contents himself with the meaningless, hollow idea that every commodity is exchanged as an aliquot part of the entire volume of commodities for a corresponding aliquot part of the volume of gold. The process of the movement of commodities due to the antagonism between exchange value and use-value which commodities bear within themselves, and which manifests itself in the circulation of money, becoming crystallized in different forms of the latter, is thus done away with, giving place to the imaginary mechanical equalization process between the quantity of precious metals to be found in a country and the volume of commodities existing there at the same time.
SIR JAMES STEUART opens his inquiry into the nature of coin and money with an elaborate criticism of Hume and Montesquieu.[2] He is really the first to ask this question: is the quantity of current money deter-
- ↑ This fiction is literally advanced by Author:Montesquieu. [The passage from Montesquieu is quoted by Marx in his Capital, v. I. Part 1, Ch. III, section 2, b, foot-note. Note by K. Kautsky to 2nd German edition].
- ↑ Steuart, l. c. v. I., p. 394 seq.
