MARX'S
NOTEBOOK COMMENTS ON JAMES MILL,
ÉLÉMENTS D'ÉCONOMIE POLITIQUE
[From a translation of Mill's book, by J. T. Parisot, Paris, 1823]
by
KARL MARX
Written in the first half of 1844
Full text of conspectus first published in Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe,
Erste Abteilung, Band 3, Berlin, 1932.
English translation Clemens Dutt for the Collected Works
Transcribed for the Internet by meia@marx.org
Marx kept a wide variety of notebooks throughout his life. He often
used them to aid in his study of other authors. A common practice
was to transcribe long sections from a particular book, and then
comment on those sections at some length.
During his time in Paris, Marx kept nine notebooks -- largely
dedicated to his growing interest in economics. They date from the
end of 1843 to January 1845.
The "Paris Notebooks" deal with books by J. B. Say, Adam Smith,
David Ricardo, McCulloch, James Mill, Destott de Tracy, Sismondi,
Jeremy Bentham, Boisguillebert, Lauderdale, Schütz, List, Skarbek
and Buret. Most of Marx's accompanying commentary on these authors
is very fragmentary; and, ideas are often restated far more clearly
in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844).
The exception to this is the material addressing James Mill's book,
Elements of Political Economy (London, 1821). Marx used an 1823
French translation of the English author's tome. The Mill part of
the Paris Notebooks is quite lengthy -- it starts on page 25 of the
fourth notebook and continues into the fifth.
Following a lengthy selection of Mill excerpts, Marx suddenly
"veered off" and began developing a larger, tangential thought.
After writing his thoughts out, Marx returned to more Mill
transcription. Soon, a second digression followed. Upon its
completion, Marx finished up his summarizing. (Only the middle three
parts of this Mill section of the Paris Notebooks are presented
below -- in other words, most of the opening and all of closing Mill
transcriptions are omitted).
This document is very close in nature to the Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts. Some have suggested that the ideas
contained herein might be a glimpse into the missing bulk of the EPM
second manuscript.
"... A medium of exchange... is some one commodity, which, in
order to effect an exchange between two other commodities, is
first received in exchange for the one, and is then given in
exchange for the other." (P. 93) Gold, silver, money.
"By value of money, is here to be understood the proportion in
which it exchanges for other commodities, or the quantity of it
which exchanges for a certain quantity of other things."
"This proportion is determined by the total amount of money
existing in a given country." (P. 95)
"What regulates the quantity of money?"
"Money is made under two sets of circumstances: Government
either leaves the increase or diminution of it free; or it
controls the quantity, making it greater or smaller as it
pleases.
"When the increase or diminution of money is left free,
government opens the mint to the public, making bullion into
money for an many as require it. Individuals possessed of
bullion will desire to convert it into money only when it is
their interest to do so; that is, when their bullion, converted
into money, will be more valuable than in its original form.
This can only happen when money is peculiarly valuable, and when
the same quantity of metal, in the state of coin, will exchange
for a greater quantity of other articles than in the state of
bullion. As the value of money depends upon the quantity of it,
it has a greater value when it is in short supply. It is then
that bullion is made into coin. But precisely because of this
conversion, the old ratio is restored. Therefore, if the value
of money rises above that of the metal of which it is made, the
interest of individuals operates immediately, in a state of
freedom, to restore the balance by augmenting the quantity of
money." (Pp. 99-101)
"Whenever the coining of money, therefore, is free, its
quantity is regulated by the value of the metal, it being the
interest of individuals to increase or diminish the quantity, in
proportion as the value of the metal in coins is greater or less
than its value in bullion.
"But is the quantity of money is determined by the value of the
metal, it is still necessary to inquire what it is which
determines the value of the metal.... Gold and silver are in
reality commodities. They are commodities for the attaining of
which labour and capital must be employed. It is cost of
production, therefore, which determines the value of these, as
of other ordinary productions." (P. 101)
In the compensation of money and value of metal, as in his
description of the cost of production as the only factor in
determining value, Mill commits the mistake -- like the school of
Ricardo in general -- of stating the abstract law without the change
or continual supersession of this law through which alone it comes
into being. If it is a constant law that, for example, the cost of
production in the last instance -- or rather when demand and supply
are in equilibrium which occurs sporadically, fortuitously --
determines the price (value), it is just as much a constant law that
they are not in equilibrium, and that therefore value and cost of
production stand in no necessary relationship. Indeed, there is
always only a momentary equilibrium of demand and supply owing to
the previous fluctuation of demand and supply, owing to the
disproportion between cost of production and exchange-value, just as
this fluctuation and this disproportion likewise again follow the
momentary state of equilibrium. This real movement, of which that
law is only an abstract, fortuitous and one-sided factor, is made by
recent political economy into something accidental and inessential.
Why? Because in the acute and precise formulas to which they reduce
political economy, the basic formula, if they wished to express that
movement abstractly, would have to be: In political economy, law is
determined by its opposite, absence of law. The true law of
political economy is chance, from whose movement we, the scientific
men, isolate certain factors arbitrarily in the form of laws.
Mill very well expresses the essence of the matter in the form of a
concept by characterising money as the medium of exchange. The
essence of money is not, in the first place, that property is
alienated in it, but that the mediating activity or movement, the
human, social act by which man's products mutually complement one
another, is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a
material thing outside man. Since man alienates this mediating
activity itself, he is active here only as a man who has lost
himself and is dehumanised; the relation itself between things,
man's operation with them, becomes the operation of an entity
outside man and above man. Owing to this alien mediator -- instead
of man himself being the mediator for man -- man regards his will,
his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of
him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear
that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the
real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in
itself. Objects separated from this mediator have lost their value.
Hence the objects only have value insofar as they represent the
mediator, whereas originally it seemed that the mediator had value
only insofar as it represented them. This reversal of the original
relationship is inevitable. This mediator is therefore the lost,
estranged essence of private property, private property which has
become alienated, external to itself, just as it is the alienated
species-activity of man, the externalised mediation between man's
production and man's production. All the qualities which arise in
the course of this activity are, therefore, transferred to this
mediator. Hence man becomes the poorer as man, i.e., separated from
this mediator, the richer this mediator becomes.
Christ represents originally: 1) men before God; 2) God for men; 3)
men to man.
Similarly, money represents originally, in accordance with the idea
of money: 1) private property for private property; 2) society for
private property; 3) private property for society.
But Christ is alienated God and alienated man. God has value only
insofar as he represents Christ, and man has value only insofar as
he represents Christ. It is the same with money.
Why must private property develop into the money system? Because
man as a social being must proceed to exchange and because exchange
-- private property being presupposed -- must evolve value. The
mediating process between men engaged in exchange is not a social or
human process, not human relationship; it is the abstract
relationship of private property to private property, and the
expression of this abstract relationship is value, whose actual
existence as value constitutes money. Since men engaged in exchange
do not relate to each other as men, ...
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