Louis Proyect wrote:
Actually, Marx does not talk about mercantile capitalism. He talks
about
mercantile capital.
Engels and Marx associate both the "monetary system" and the
"mercantile system" - by which they mean the first forms of
capitalist "political economy" - with the early more primitive forms
of the capitalist "passions."
"Political economy came into being as a natural result of the
expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific
huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an
entire science of enrichment.
"This political economy or science of enrichment born of the
merchants' mutual envy and greed, bears on its brow the mark of the
most detestable selfishness. People still lived in the naive belief
that gold and silver were wealth, and therefore considered nothing
more urgent than the prohibition everywhere of the export of the
'precious' metals. The nations faced each other like misers, each
clasping to himself with both arms his precious moneybag, eyeing his
neighbours with envy and distrust. Every conceivable means was
employed to lure from the nations with whom one had commerce as much
ready cash as possible, and to retain snugly within the customs
boundary all which had happily been gathered in.
"If this principle had been rigorously carried through trade would
have been killed. People therefore began to go beyond this first
stage. They came to appreciate that capital locked up in a chest was
dead capital, while capital in circulation increased continuously.
They then became more sociable, sent off their ducats as callbirds to
bring others back with them, and realised that there is no harm in
paying A too much for his commodity so long as it can be disposed of
to B at a higher price.
"On this basis the mercantile system was built. The avaricious
character of trade was to some extent already beginning to be hidden.
The nations drew slightly nearer to one another, concluded trade and
friendship agreements, did business with one another and, for the
sake of larger profits, treated one another with all possible love
and kindness. But in fact there was still the old avarice and
selfishness and from time to time this erupted in wars, which in that
day were all based on trade jealousy. In these wars it also became
evident that trade, like robbery, is based on the law of the strong
hand. No scruples whatever were felt about exacting by cunning or
violence such treaties as were held to be the most advantageous.
"The cardinal point in the whole mercantile system is the theory of
the balance of trade. For as it still subscribed to the dictum that
gold and silver constitute wealth, only such transactions as would
finally bring ready cash into the country were considered profitable.
To ascertain this, exports were compared with imports. When more had
been exported than imported, it was believed that the difference had
come into the country in ready cash, and that the country was richer
by that difference. The art of the economists, therefore, consisted
in ensuring that at the end of each year exports should show a
favourable balance over imports; and for the sake of this ridiculous
illusion thousands of men have been slaughtered! Trade, too, has had
its crusades and inquisitions."
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/df-jahrbucher/
outlines.htm>
"Just as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when modern
bourgeois society was in its infancy, nations and princes were driven
by a general desire for money to embark on crusades to distant lands
in quest of the golden grail, so the first interpreters of the modern
world, the originators of the Monetary System -- the Mercantile
System is merely a variant of it -- declared that gold and silver,
i.e., money, alone constitutes wealth. They quite correctly stated
that the vocation of bourgeois society was the making of money, and
hence, from the standpoint of simple commodity production, the
formation of permanent hoards which neither moths nor rust could
destroy. It is no refutation of the Monetary System to point out that
a ton of iron whose price is £3 has the same value as £3 in gold. The
point at issue is not the magnitude of the exchange-value, but its
adequate form. With regard to the special attention paid by the
Monetary and Mercantile systems to international trade and to
individual branches of national labour that lead directly to
international trade, which are regarded by them as the only real
source of wealth or of money, one has to remember that in those times
national production was for the most part still carried on within the
framework of feudal forms and served as the immediate source of
subsistence for the producers themselves. Most products did not
become commodities; they were accordingly neither converted into
money nor entered at all into the general process of the social
metabolism; hence they did not appear as materialisation of universal
abstract labour and did not indeed constitute bourgeois wealth. Money
as the end and object of circulation represents exchange-value or
abstract wealth, not any physical element of wealth, as the
determining purpose and driving motive of production. It was
consistent with the rudimentary stage of bourgeois production that
those misunderstood prophets should have clung to the solid, palpable
and glittering form of exchange-value, to exchange-value in the form
of the universal commodity as distinct from all particular
commodities. The sphere of commodity circulation was the strictly
bourgeois economic sphere at that time. They therefore analysed the
whole complex process of bourgeois production from the standpoint of
that basic sphere and confused money with capital. The unceasing
fight of modern economists against the Monetary and Mercantile
systems is mainly provoked by the fact that the secret of bourgeois
production, i.e., that it is dominated by exchange-value, is divulged
in a naively brutal way by these systems. Although drawing the wrong
conclusions from it, Ricardo observes somewhere that, even during a
famine, corn is imported because the corn-merchant thereby makes
money, and not because the nation is starving. Political economy errs
in its critique of the Monetary and Mercantile systems when it
assails them as mere illusions, as utterly wrong theories, and fails
to notice that they contain in a primitive form its own basic
presuppositions. These systems, moreover, remain not only
historically valid but retain their full validity within certain
spheres of the modern economy. At every stage of the bourgeois
process of production when wealth assumes the elementary form of
commodities, exchange-value assumes the elementary form of money, and
in all phases of the productive process wealth for an instant reverts
again to the universal elementary form of commodities. The functions
of gold and silver as money, in contradistinction to their functions
as means of circulation and in contrast with all other commodities,
are not abolished even in the most advanced bourgeois economy, but
merely restricted; the Monetary and Mercantile systems accordingly
remain valid. The catholic fact that gold and silver as the direct
embodiment of social labour, and therefore as the expression of
abstract wealth, confront other profane commodities, has of course
violated the protestant code of honour of bourgeois economists, and
from fear of the prejudices of the Monetary System, they lost for
some time any sense of discrimination towards the phenomena of money
circulation, as the following account will show."
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/
ch02c.htm>
In illustration of the role of the early more primitive forms of the
capitalist "passions" in mercantilism, he quotes from a 1593 Petition
sent by the Cortes to Philip II:
"So as to take possession of superfluous wealth in its general form,
particular needs must be treated as luxuries and superfluities. For
instance, in 1593 the Cortes sent a petition to Philip II, which
among other matters contains the following passage:
'The Cortes of Valladolid requested Your Majesty in 1586 not to
permit the further importation into this kingdom of candles,
glassware, jewellery, knives and similar articles coming from abroad,
which, though they are of no use to human life, have to be exchanged
for gold, as though the Spaniards were Indians.'"
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/
ch02_3.htm>
In Capital, Columbus is quoted in illustration of "crusades to
distant lands in quest of the golden grail".
"With the possibility of holding and storing up exchange-value in the
shape of a particular commodity, arises also the greed for gold.
Along with the extension of circulation, increases the power of
money, that absolutely social form of wealth ever ready for use.
“Gold is a wonderful thing! Whoever possesses it is lord of all he
wants. By means of gold one can even get souls into
Paradise.” (Columbus in his letter from Jamaica, 1503.) Since gold
does not disclose what has been transformed into it, everything,
commodity or not, is convertible into gold. Everything becomes
saleable and buyable. The circulation becomes the great social retort
into which everything is thrown, to come out again as a gold-crystal.
Not even are the bones of saints, and still less are more delicate
res sacrosanctae, extra commercium hominum able to withstand this
alchemy. [43] Just as every qualitative difference between
commodities is extinguished in money, so money, on its side, like the
radical leveller that it is, does away with all distinctions. [43a]
But money itself is a commodity, an external object, capable of
becoming the private property of any individual. Thus social power
becomes the private power of private persons. The ancients therefore
denounced money as subversive of the economic and moral order of
things. [43b] Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled
Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, [44]
greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the
very principle of its own life."
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch03.htm#S3a>
Ted
