Proudhon makes the same error as Ricardo in confusing the value of gold as commodity with its value as money/currency.
“Gold and silver, then, are value which has reached a state of constitution: they are the incorporation of M. Proudhon's idea. He could not have been happier in his choice of an example. Gold and silver, apart from their capacity of being commodities, evaluated like other commodities, in labour time, have also the capacity of being the universal agents of exchange, of being money. By now considering gold and silver as an application of “value constituted” by labour time, nothing is easier than to prove that all commodities whose value is constituted by labour time will always be exchangeable, will be money.” (p 75)
Every commodity represents a quantity of social-labour-time, and, under barter, that fact enables commodities to be bought by other commodities of an equal value. As every commodity acts as money, none are money. Each has the potential to be money, because each is a commodity, and represents a quantity of social labour-time, which is why, contrary to Proudhon's assumption, many different commodities have acted as money commodity. The fact that every commodity is potentially money, is not the same thing as every commodity being money, because being money involves one commodity being separated from the rest as the universal measure, but also as being universally accepted in exchange.
Proudhon needs to make this argument, because his schema for future society is one in which petty commodity production and exchange continues, but without money. In essence, every commodity, then, is money, its constituted value determined by the labour required for its production, relative to other commodities, so that, in place of money, all that is required is to provide the producers with labour notes, equal to the labour performed.
Marx quotes Proudhon,
“The special function which usage has devolved upon the precious metal, that of serving as a medium for trade, is purely conventional, and any other commodity could, less conveniently perhaps, but just as reliably, fulfil this function. Economists recognize this, and cite more than one example. What then is the reason for this universal preference for metals as money? And what is the explanation of this specialization of the function of money – which has no analogy in political economy?... Is it possible to reconstruct the series from which money seems to have broken away, and hence to trace it back to its true principle?” (p 76)
This formulation presupposes the existence of money, Marx notes, rather than explaining how money comes into existence.
“The first question he should have asked himself was, why, in exchanges as they are actually constituted, it has been necessary to individualize exchangeable value, so to speak, by the creation of a special agent of exchange. Money is not a thing, it is a social relation. Why is the money relation a production relation like any other economic relation, such as the division of labour, etc.? If M. Proudhon had properly taken account of this relation, he would not have seen in money an exception, an element detached from a series unknown or needing reconstruction.” (p 76)
Again, Proudhon falls into the error of Ricardo and other idealist bourgeois economists of seeing money simply in its form as currency, as something invented by society to perform the function of facilitating exchange. But, money does not first arise as currency, but as universal equivalent form, i.e. measure of value, and does so precisely because of the need to reduce all of the different forms of concrete labour used in the production of different commodities, to one standard of universal labour.
“He would have realised, on the contrary, that this relation is a link, and, as such, closely connected with a whole chain of other economic relations; that this relation corresponds to a definite mode of production neither more nor less than does individual exchange. What does he do? He starts off by detaching money from the actual mode of production as a whole, and then makes it the first member of an imaginary series, of a series to be reconstructed.” (p 76)
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