Proudhon believes that lending is evil because there is no change in ownership, only of possession. This means that the same capital can be loaned over and over without the ownership of it changing hands. But, as described earlier, this is not peculiar to loaned capital; it is a feature of all capital. It is advanced, returned with a profit, and advanced again. Proudhon does not distinguish between commodities and money, as against capital. Commodities and money exchange for equal values, but capital is only advanced on the basis of returning along with and additional sum of value.
For Proudhon,
“Everything should be sold but nothing lent. In other words: In the same way as he wanted commodities to exist but did not want them to become “money”, so here he wants commodities, money, to exist but they must not develop into capital. When all fantastic forms have been stripped away, this means nothing more than that there should be no advance from small, petty-bourgeois peasant and artisan production to large-scale industry.” (p 526-7)
Marx quotes Proudhon where he expresses a subjectivist concept of value, as merely exchange-value.
““Since value is nothing but a proportion, and all products are necessarily proportional to one another, it follows that, from a social point of view, products are always values, and stable values at that. For society, the difference between capital and product does not exist. This difference is quite subjective, it exists only for individuals” (op. cit., p. 250).” (p 527)
But, value is not merely a proportion. It is an objectively determinable quantum of labour, which is only relative to the extent that social productivity changes, so that this quantum itself changes. It is exchange-value, not value that is merely a proportion, but that proportion is itself only determinable because the commodities whose exchange relation is measured, themselves have independently determinable values.
“And the subjective, and moreover erroneous, abstraction that, because the exchange-value of commodities expresses a proportion, it expresses every possible proportion between commodities and does not express a third thing to which the commodities are proportional—this false “subjective” abstraction is the social point of view according to which not only commodity and money, but commodity, money and capital are identical.” (p 527)
Having failed to provide any scientific analysis of surplus value, profit or interest, Proudhon falls back on morality and the imperative.
““All labour must produce a surplus” (op. cit., p. 200).
With which moral precept the surplus is naturally defined very nicely.” (p 527)
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