KARL MARX

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98 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
comparison of the relative alienations of the capitalist and the worker. 140
But the manuscript broke off, unfinished.
In spite of the incompleteness of the manuscript, it is possible to infer
what the remaining portion would have contained. In his notebooks of
this time, Marx set down his reflections on his reading of the classical
economists. His note on James Mill's Elements of Political Economy is
exceptionally long and rich: in it Marx dealt with the categories of classical
economics he had planned to discuss in the unfinished part of his manuscript
on alienated labour - barter, competition, capital and money. He
concentrated on the dehumanising effect of money and private property,
finishing with an account of his conception of unalienated labour which
was the positive side of his critique of alienated labour. Marx began his
note by criticising Mill's attempt to formulate precise 'laws' in economics,
a field so chaotic and open to constant fluctuation; and proceeded to
comment on Mill's description of money as the medium of exchange. In
capitalist society, Marx argued, money alone gave significance to man's
relationship to his fellow men and even to his products.
The note-books deal extensively with the problem of credit. Credit
only increased the dehumanising power of money:
Credit is the economic judgement on the morality of a man. In credit,
man himself, instead of metal or paper, has become the mediator of
exchange but not as man, but as the existence of capital and interest.
Human individuality, human morality, has itself become both an article
of commerce and the form in which money exists. Instead of money,
paper is my own personal being, my flesh and blood, my social value
and status, the material body of the spirit of money. 141
The credit system, according to Marx, had four main characteristics: it
increased the power of the wealthy - for credit was more readily available
to those who already had money; it added a moral judgement to an
economic one, by implying that a man without credit was untrustworthy;
it compelled people to try to obtain credit by lying and deceit; and finally,
credit reached its perfection in the banking system. In a short section on
money later in the manuscript Marx quoted extensively from Goethe's
Faust and Shakespeare's Timon of Athens to show that money was the ruin
of society. Since money could purchase anything, it could remedy all
deficiences: it was 'the bond of all bonds'. 142 'Since money is the existing
and self-affirming concept of value and confounds and exchanges all
things, it is the universal confusion and exchange of all things, the inverted
world, the confusion and exchange of all natural and human qualities.' 14 '
In truly human society where man was man - then everything would