Ricardo and Marx were rival theologians, but “honestly,” “scientifically” devoted to the same God. What indulgent tenderness Marx displays in observing Ricardo’s excesses, because after all they were excesses in the right direction … “Ricardo, e.g., who believes that the bourgeois economy deals only with exchange value, and is concerned with use-value only exoterically …” Oh, what a noble error!⁴⁹¹

“Thus Ricardo’s ruthlessness was not only scientifically honest but also a scientific necessity from his point of view.⁴⁹² But because of this it is also quite immaterial to him whether the advance of the productive forces slays landed property or workers. If this progress devalues the capital of the industrial bourgeoisie it is equally welcome to him. If the development of the productive power of labor halves the value of the capital fixe, what does it matter, says Ricardo. The productivity of human labor has doubled, thus here is scientific honesty. Ricardo’s conception is, on the whole, in the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie, only because, and in so far as their interests coincide with that of production or the productive development of human labor. Where the bourgeoisie comes into conflict with this, he is just as ruthless to it as he is at other times toward the proletariat and the aristocracy.”

Ricardo and Marx therefore each put themselves, respectively, on the side of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but only as long as those two classes guarantee maximum productive development. And, in the same way that Marx imagined Ricardo standing ruthlessly against the bourgeoisie, so too we can imagine Marx standing ruthlessly against the proletariat. For the objective—alas—is never anything less than man, indeed the human species, a good intention that Darwin’s dreary catechism already corroborated. Marx shook his head in irritation: “They reveal a failure to understand the fact that, although at first the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals and even classes, in the end it breaks through this contradiction and coincides with the development of the individual; the higher development of individuality is thus only achieved by a historical process during which individuals are sacrificed …” Nietzsche, however, understood it.⁴⁹³ Every so often, in his last years, he threw himself, like a visionary bookkeeper, into plans and calculations regarding those classes, human types, nations, generations that had to be sacrificed, that ought meekly to submit to one immense experiment.

Geldkristall

In the world of analogy (which is, among other things, the world of qualities) we come across digital emissaries (gold), and in the world of digitality (which is, among other things, the world of quantities) we come across analogical emissaries (gold).

First case: “What does a solely quantitative difference between things presuppose? The identity of their qualities.⁴⁹⁴ Hence, the quantitative measure of labors presupposes the equivalence, the identity of their quality.” But, in order to represent convention (therefore the suppression of qualities), we cannot rely, at first, on something conventional (paper money): we need a material that becomes more and more precious as it gets closer to eliminating the differentiating qualities, something closer to pure exchangeability. The digital emissaries present in gold are divisibility, uniformity, and invariability (“the only qualities necessary to make a measure of value a perfect one are, that it should itself have value, and that that value should be itself invariable,” writes Ricardo: but one single quality is sufficient to compromise the realm of quantity).⁴⁹⁵ And Marx is irritated by those naïve people who fail to understand this: “The study of the precious metals as subjects of the money relations, as incarnations of the latter, is therefore by no means a matter lying outside the realm of political economy, as Proudhon believes, any more than the physical composition of paint, and of marble, lie outside the realm of painting and sculpture.”⁴⁹⁶ Finally: “The precious metals uniform in their physical qualities, so that equal quantities of them should be so far identical as to present no ground for preferring this one to the others.⁴⁹⁷ Not the case, for example, with equal numbers of cattle and equal quantities of grain.”