[ The Precious Metals as Expression of the Money Relationship]
From what has been said, we may conclude that a particular product (commodity) (material) must become the money subject, which exists as the property of every exchange value. The subject in which this symbol is to be represented is not a matter of indifference, since the demands made on the representing subject are contained in the circumstances — conceptual definitions, determined relationships — of that which is to be represented. The analysis of the precious metals as the subjects of the money relationship, the incarnation of that relationship, does not therefore lie, as Proudhon believes, outside the sphere of political economy,[44] just as little as the physical nature of colours and of marble lies outside the sphere of painting and sculpture. The properties which the commodity has as exchange value, and which are not identical with its natural properties, express the demands to be made on the commodities which are xax' e£oxr)v(1) the material of money. At the stage of which alone we can speak so far, these demands are most fully realised in the precious metals. As instruments of production, metals as such are preferred to other commodities, and among the metals the one which is first found in its physical perfection and purity — gold. Next comes copper, then silver and iron. As Hegel would say, the essence of metal is best realised in the precious metals.
T H E PRECIOUS METALS UNIFORM IN THEIR PHYSICAL QUALITIES, SO THAT EQUAL QUANTITIES OF IT SHOULD BE SO FAR IDENTICAL AS TO PRESENT NO GROUND FOR PREFERRING THE ONE FOR THE OTHER. This is n o t t r u e of EQUAL NUMBERS OF CATTLE AND EQUAL QUANTITIES OF GRAIN, f o r e x a m p l e . 4 5 (a) Gold and Silver in Comparison with the Other Metals
The base metals oxidise in the atmosphere; the precious metals (mercury, silver, gold, platinum) are not changed by the atmosphere.
Aurum (Au). Density =19.5; melting point: 1200 °C.
"The glittering gold is the most splendid of all metals and therefore in antiquity was already called the sun or the king of metals. Fairly widely found, though never in great quantities; it is therefore also more valuable than the other metals. As a rule it is found pure, partly in large nuggets, partly in small grains embedded in other minerals. From the erosion of such minerals originates the gold-bearing sand which many rivers carry and from which gold can be washed because of its great density. Extraordinary ductility of gold: a grain can be drawn out into a filament 500 feet long, and beaten into a leaf of a thickness of scarcely Vaoo.oooth [of an inch]. Gold resists all acids and is dissolved only by free chlorine (aqua regia, a mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid). Gilding."[46]
Argentum. (Ag). Density=10. Melting point=1000° C. Bright appearance; the most friendly of all metals, very white and malleable; can be made into beautiful objects and drawn into fine filaments. Silver is found pure; very often alloyed with lead in silver-lead ores.
This much about the chemical properties of gold and silver. (The divisibility and fusibility, uniformity, etc., of pure gold and silver are well known.)
Mineralogical [properties]: Gold. It is certainly remarkable that the more precious the metals are, the more sparsely and separated from the commonly occurring substances they appear, higher natures remote from the commonplace. Thus, as a rule gold is found pure, crystalline in various cubic forms or in the most diverse forms: irregular nuggets and grains, sand and dust, in which latter form it occurs embedded in many rocks, i.e. in granite, whose disintegration gives rise to gold-bearing sands in [1-29] rivers and in the gravel of alluvial soils. Since in this state the density of gold reaches 19.4, even those fine particles of gold can be obtained by stirring the gold-bearing sand in water. From this mixture the metal is precipitated first, because of its greater specific weight, and is, as they say, washed out. Silver is the metal most often associated with gold, and native alloys composed of both metals are encountered which contain 0.16 to 38.7% silver; this of course results in variations in colour and density.
Silver. In the considerable variety of its minerals, it occurs as one of the more abundant metals, both pure and alloyed with other metals or combined with arsenic and sulphur. (Silver chloride, silver bromide, carbonic silver oxide, bismuth-silver ore, sternber-gite, polybasite, etc.)
The main chemical properties of all the precious metals are that they do not oxidise in the atmosphere; and of gold (and platinum), that they are not dissolved by acids (gold only by chlorine). Not oxidising in the atmosphere keeps them pure, free from rust; they present themselves as that which they are. Their resistance to dissolution by oxidisation: imperishability (so highly praised by the gold and silver fanatics of antiquity).
Physical properties: specific gravity, i.e. much weight in a small volume, specially important for an instrument of circulation. Gold 19.5; silver 10. Brilliance of colour: the lustre of gold, the whiteness of silver. Splendour, ductility; hence so suitable for jewellery and the embellishment of other objects. The whiteness of silver (which reflects all light rays in their original mixture); the red-yellow of gold (which absorbs all the colours in the light rays falling upon it and reflects only the red). [They have] very high melting points.
Geognostic properties: they are found pure (particularly in the case of gold), separate from other substances, isolated, individualised. Individual occurrence independent of the elemental.
As for the other two precious metals: (1) Platinum, not distinguished by its colour: grey in grey (soot of metals); too rare; unknown to the ancients; became known only after the discovery of America; in the 19th century discovered also in the Urals; only chlorine will corrode it; it is always found pure; specific gravity=21; will not melt at the highest temperatures; its value primarily scientific. (2) Mercury, occurs in a liquid form; vaporisa-ble; its fumes poisonous; can be absorbed by liquid mixtures (amalgams). (Density =13.5, boiling point=360° C.)
Thus, neither platinum, still less mercury, suitable as money. One geognostic property common to all the precious metals: rarity. Now, rarity is an element of value (leaving aside demand and supply), in so far as that which is in itself not rare, the negation of rarity, the elemental, is without value because it does not appear as the result of production. In the original determination of value, that which is most independent of conscious and willed production has the greatest value, assuming a demand for it. Pebbles are of no value, relativement parlant* because they are available without production (they do not even need looking for). If a thing is to be the object of exchange, have exchange value, it must not be available to everyone without the mediation of exchange; it must not appear in so elemental a form as to be common property. To that extent rarity an element of exchange value, therefore this property of the precious metals important, even apart from the precise relationship of demand and supply.
If we look generally at the superiority of the metals as instruments of production, the advantage of gold is that it is au fond* the first metal discovered qua metal. And this for two reasons. Firstly, because of all metals, gold appears in nature as the most metallic, distinct and distinguishable metal; secondly, because in its preparation nature undertook the work of art, and for its first discovery only ROUGH LABOUR, neither science nor developed instruments of production, required.
"Certain it is that gold must take its place as the earliest metal known, and in the first record of man's progress it is indicated as a standard of man's position" (2)
(because as surplus, the first form in which wealth appears. The first form of value is use value, the everyday aspect which expresses the relationship of the individual to nature. The second form exchange value alongside use value, its command over the use values of others, its social relation: itself originally the value of things for Sunday use, over and above immediate basic neces-sities).
[1-30] VERY EARLY DISCOVERY OF GOLD BY MAN:
"Gold differs remarkably from the other metals, with a very few exceptions, in the fact, that it is found in nature in its metallic state. Iron and copper, tin, lead, and silver are ordinarily discovered in chemical combinations with oxygen, sulphur, arsenic, or carbon; and the few exceptional occurrences of these metals in an uncombined, or, as it was formerly called, virgin state, are to be cited rather as mineralogical curiosities than as common productions. Gold is, however, always found native or metallic... Therefore, as a metallic mass, curious by its yellow colour, it would attract the eye of the most uneducated man, whereas the other substances likely to lie in his path would offer no features of attraction to his scarcely awakened powers of observation. Again gold, from the circumstance of its having been formed in those rocks which are most exposed to atmospheric action, is found in the débris of the mountains. By the disintegrating influences, of the atmosphere, of changes of temperature, of the action of water, and particularly by the effects of ice, fragments of rock are continually broken off. These are borne by floods into the valleys and rolled into pebbles by the constant action of flowing water. Amongst these, pebbles, or particles, of gold are discovered. The summer heats, by drying up the waters, rendered those beds which had formed river channels and the courses of winter torrents, paths for the journeys of migratory man; and here we can imagine the early discovery of gold" [pp. 171-72].
"Gold most frequently occurs pure, or, at all events, so nearly so that its metallic nature can be at once recognised", both in streams and in "quartz veins" [p. 8].
"The specific gravity of quartz, and of most other heavy compact rocks is about 2 V2» whilst the specific gravity of gold is 18 or 19. Gold, therefore, is somewhere about 7 times as heavy as any rock or stone with which it is likely to be associated. A current of water accordingly having sufficient strength to bear along sand or pebbles of quartz or any other rock, might not be able to move the fragments of gold associated with them. Moving water, therefore, has done for the auriferous rocks formerly, just what the miner would do now, break it, namely, up into fragments, sweep away the lighter particles, and leave the gold behind it" [p. 10].
"Rivers are, indeed, great natural cradles, sweeping off all the lighter and finer particles at once, the heavier ones either sticking against natural impediments, or being left wherever the current slackens its force or velocity" (see Gold (Lectures on), London, 1852) (pp. 12 and 13).
"In all probability, from tradition and early history, the discovery of gold in the sand and gravel of streams would appear to have been the first step in the recognition of metals, and in almost all, perhaps in all the countries of Europe, Africa and Asia, greater or smaller quantities of gold have from very early times been washed by simple contrivances from the auriferous deposits. Occasionally, the success of gold-streams has been great enough to produce a pulse of excitement which has vibrated for a while through a district, but has been hushed down again. In 760 the poor people turned out in numbers to wash gold from the river sands south of Prague, and three men were able in the day to extract a mark (Vglb.) of gold; and so great was the consequent rush to the 'diggings', that in the next year the country was visited by famine. We read of a recurrence of similar events several times within the next few centuries, although here, as elsewhere, the general attraction to surface-spread riches has subsided into regular and systematic mining" [pp. 93-95].
"Two classes of deposits in which gold is found, the lodes or veins, which intersect the solid rock in a direction more or less perpendicular to the horizon; and the drift-beds or 'streams', in which the gold mingled with gravel, sand, or clay, has been deposited by the mechanical action of water, upon the surface of those rocks, which are penetrated to unknown depths by the lodes. To the former class belongs more specially the art of mining; to the latter the simple operations of digging. Gold-mining, properly so called, is, like other mining, an art requiring the [1-31] employment of capital, and of a skill only to be acquired by years of experience. There is no art practised by civilised man which requires for its full development the application of so many sciences and collateral arts. But although so essential to the miner, scarcely any of these are necessary to the gold-washer or streamer, who must trust chiefly to the strength of his arm, or the buoyancy of his health. The apparatus which he employs must necessarily be simple, so as to be conveyed from place to place, to be easily repaired if injured, and not to require any of those niceties of manipulation which would cause him to lose time in the acquiring of small quantities" [pp. 95-97].
The difference "between the drift-deposits of gold, best exemplified at the present day in Siberia, California, and Australia; and the fine sands annually brought down by rivers, some of which are also found to contain gold in workable quantities. The latter are of course found literally at the surface, the former may be met with under a cover of from 1 to 70 feet in thickness, consisting of soil, peat, sand, gravel etc. The modes of working the 2 must be identical in principle"[p. 97].
who attacks the poorer, but more lasting, deep-going lodes, must aid himself with all the resources of the nicest art" [p. 98].
"Gold has justly been considered the noblest of metals from various physical and chemical properties. It is unchangeable in air and does not rust." (This unchangeability precisely its resistance to the oxygen of the atmosphere.) "Of a bright reddish yellow colour when in a coherent state, and very dense. Highly malleable. Requires a strong heat to melt it. Specific gravity [19.3]" [pp. 72-73].
Thus three types of gold production: (1) In river sand. Simply found on the surface. Washing. (2) Deposited in BEDS. DIGGING. (3) MINING. Its production therefore does not require any development of the productive forces. Nature here does most of the work.
(For the roots of the words for gold, silver, etc., see Grimm(3); here nothing but general concepts of lustre and colour are suggested which are soon transferred to the words. Silver is white, gold is yellow. Bronze and gold, bronze and iron interchange their names. Among the Germans, bronze in use earlier than iron. Direct relationship between aes and aurum.(4))
Copper (brass, bronze: tin and copper) and gold used before silver and iron.
Endnotes
[44] In his Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la misère, Proudhon claimed that the use of precious metals as money was above all due to the "sovereign consecration", the interference of sovereigns who took possession of "gold and silver and affixed their seal to them". Marx showed the fallacy of this attempt to explain the origin of money by purely political factors and to attribute to the person wielding political power the ability to lay down economic laws at will (see present edition, Vol. 6, p. 147).—110
[46] The source of this passage, quoted in German, has not been established. Though there are no quotation marks, there is every indication that the further text, too, is an abridged excerpt from some German source.— 111