Petty, however, as an English/Irish economist was constrained within the ideas of the Mercantilist/Monetary School. So, he took exchange-value as it appears as money prices, and money being the only given money commodity of the time – gold or silver.
“... he asserts that the labour which determines exchange-value is the particular kind of concrete labour by which gold and silver is extracted. What he really has in mind is that in bourgeois economy labour does not directly produce use-values but commodities, use-values which, in consequence of their alienation in exchange, are capable of assuming the form of gold and silver, i.e., of money, i.e., of exchange-value, i.e., of materialised universal labour. His case is a striking proof that recognition of labour as the source of material wealth by no means precludes misapprehension of the specific social form in which labour constitutes the source of exchange-value.” (p 54)
In other words, this was a kind of commodity fetishism, but fetishising the precious metal constituting the money commodity. Its quite true, as Marx later describes, that the specific concrete labour used in the production of the money commodity comes to act as the proxy for universal labour, but jumping straight into this assumption, on the basis of superficial appearances misses out several required steps of analysis. The same is true of taking the superficial appearance of prices, as cost of production plus average profit, without first analysing profit as derived from surplus value.
Boisguillebert reduces exchange value to labour-time, but confuses abstract and concrete labour. He eulogises commodity exchange, but wages a fanatical struggle against money, much as later Sismondi waged a struggle against capital. Boisgillebert's la juste valeur (true value) is determined “according to the correct proportion in which the labour-time of the individual producers is divided between the different branches of industry, and declaring that free competition is the social process by which this correct proportion is established.” (p 54) In part, his campaign against money was driven by opposition to the need for gold of Louis XIV. By contrast, Petty “acclaims the greed for gold as a vigorous force which spurs a nation to industrial progress and to the conquest of the world market”. (p 54-5)
This inevitably leads to the encouragement of industrial production, as the means of ensuring that exports exceed imports, and it is the specific material advantages that Britain enjoyed, in that regard, that enabled it to become the premier industrial power. Similarly, it is Ricardo who sees this development of industrial capital, as an end in itself, whereas it is Sismondi that seeks to hold back the development of capital.
Petty can also be contrasted in his materialist analysis of this development with much later writers such as Max Weber. Even at the time that Holland was the leading trading nation, and France was on the rise, Petty argued that it was the specific material conditions and advantages that Britain enjoyed that would enable it to conquer the world market. This is in contrast to Weber's Protestant Ethic, in which he argued that it was the adoption of the ascetic prescriptions of Protestantism that enabled the development of capitalism.
“Thus he shows for example that the conquest of the world market by Holland, which was then regarded as the model country by English economists just as Britain is now regarded as the model country by continental economists, was brought about by perfectly natural causes “without such Angelical Wits and Judgments, as some attribute to the Hollanders” (op. cit., pp. 175-16). He champions freedom of conscience as a condition of trade, because the poor are diligent and “believe that Labour and Industry is their Duty towards God” so long as they are permitted “to think they have the more Wit and Understanding, especially of the things of God, which they think chiefly belong to the Poor.” “From whence it follows that Trade is not fixt to any Species of Religion as such; but rather ... to the Heterodox part of the whole” (op. cit., pp. 183-86).” (Note **, p 52)
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