Appendix: Additional Notes

• • Preface
  • Chapter 1: The Commodity
  • Note A. Historical Notes on the Analysis of Commodities
  • Chapter 2: Money or Simple Circulation
  • Note B. Theories of the Standard of Money
  • Note C. Theories of the the Medium of Circulation and of Money
  • Appendix: Introduction by Karl Marx
  • Appendix: Index to the 7 Notebooks
  • Appendix: Original text of Second and beginning of Third chapter
  • Appendix: Additional Notes
  • Appendix: Draft Plan of the Chapter on Capital
  • Appendix: References to My Own Notebooks

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Written in August-October 1858

Printed according to the manuscript

First published in: Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Oekonomie. Appendix. Moscow, 1941

Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 29

Marx wrote these notes on the cover of Notebook B': the first note is on its right side, the other four on its reverse. The third note largely reproduces the text on page 4 in Notebook II, the "Chapter on Money" of the 1857-1858 manuscript.

THE AESTHETIC PROPERTY OF GOLD

“Gold is flaming fire,

Because it sparkles in the night,

Mainly standing out among haughty wealth”

Pindar

INVARIABLE VALUE OF MONEY

“As means of payment, money—money for itself—should represent value as such; in fact, however, it is only an identical quantum [of some homogeneous substance] of variable value.”

MONEY AS MONEY (WORLD COIN, ETC.)

Money is the negation of the means of circulation as such, of coin. But it at the same time includes it as its determination: negatively, since it can always be reconverted into coin; positively, as world coin; but as such it is indifferent to its form determination and is essentially commodity as such, ubiquitous commodity, not locally determined. This indifference expresses itself above all in that money is now money only as gold and silver, and not as a symbol, with the form of coinage. Hence the façon put on money as coinage by the State has no value, only its metallic content gives value to the coin. As such a general commodity, as world coin, gold and silver do not have to return to their point of departure, the movement of circulation as such is not necessary at all. Example: Asia and Europe. Hence the lamentation of the adherents of the mercantile system that gold vanishes among the heathens, and does not return. (We are not yet concerned here with the fact that, as the world market itself develops, the world coin is itself gradually involved in circulation and rotation.)

Money is the negation of itself as simple realisation of the prices of commodities, where the particular commodity always remains the essential factor. Rather, money becomes price realised in itself, and as such also the material representative of universal wealth. Money is also negated in the determination in which it is only a measure of exchange values. For it itself is the adequate reality of the exchange value, and it is such in its metallic existence. The determination of measure must here be posited in it itself. It is its own unit, and the measure of its own value, its measure as wealth, as exchange value, is the quantity of itself which it represents. The number of its own measuring unit. As a measure, its amount was of no consequence; as a means of circulation, its substance, the material of which its unit is composed, was of no consequence; as money in this third determination, its own amount as a definite material quantity (for instance, the number of pounds) is essential. Given its quality as general wealth, there is no further distinction in it other than the quantitative one. It represents a greater or lesser amount of general wealth, depending on whether a greater or lesser number of a determinate measure magnitude of itself is possessed. If it is general wealth, one is the richer the more of it one possesses, and the sole right process is its accumulation. By its concept, it has withdrawn from circulation. Now this withdrawal from circulation, its hoarding, appears as an essential object of the greed for enrichment, and as the essential process of enrichment. In gold and silver I possess general wealth in its pure form; the more of it I hoard up, the more general wealth I appropriate to myself. If gold and silver are general wealth, then, as certain quantities, they represent it only to a certain degree, i.e. inadequately. The whole must keep driving beyond its own limits. This accumulation of gold and silver, which takes on the appearance of their repeated withdrawal from circulation, is simultaneously the safeguarding of general wealth against circulation, in which it continually gets lost in exchange for some particular wealth which eventually disappears in consumption.

“The [Greek] tragedians contrast δίχν and χeρδoς”

FORM OF PROPERTY

The property in the alien labour is mediated through the property in one's own labour.