He defines exchange value, however, just as it _appears_ in the process of exchange of commodities, viz. as money; and money he defines as an existing commodity, gold and silver. Laboring under the ideas of the monetary system, he declares the special branch of labor which is devoted to the production of gold and silver as the labor which determines exchange value. What he really means is that the labor of members of society must produce not direct use-values, but commodities or use-values which by means of exchange are capable of assuming the form of gold and silver, i. e. of money, i. e. of exchange value, i. e. of embodiments of universal labor. His example, however, shows strikingly that the recognition of labor as the source of material wealth by no means excludes the misconception of the particular social form in which labor constitutes the source of exchange value. In his turn, Boisguillebert, if not consciously, at any rate actually reduces the exchange value of a commodity to labor-time, since he determines “true value” (la juste valeur) by the right proportion in which the labor-time of individuals is distributed among the several branches of industry, and defines free competition as the social process which determines these correct proportions. At the same time, however, and in contrast with Petty he wages a fanatical war against money which, by its interference, disturbs the natural equilibrium or harmony of exchange of commodities and, like a wanton Moloch, demands all natural wealth as sacrifice. It is true that this assault on money was called forth by certain historic conditions. Since Boisguillebert attacked[18] the blind destructive lust after gold which possessed the court of Louis XIV, his tax collectors, and his nobility; on the other hand, Petty extolled in the greed of gold the mighty impulse which spurred on the nation in her industrial development and in her conquest of the world-market; still, there asserts itself here a deeper antagonism of principles which constantly recurs between true English and true French[19] Political Economy. Boisguillebert sees, in fact, only the material substance of wealth, its use-value, the enjoyment[20] of it, and considers the capitalistic form of labor, i. e. the production of use-values as commodities and the exchange of those commodities, as the natural social form in which individual labor attains its end. When he is, therefore, confronted with the specific character of capitalistic wealth as in the case of money, he sees in it the usurping interference of extraneous elements and gets into a rage about the capitalist system of labor in one form while utopian-like he praises it in another.[21] Boisguillebert furnishes us with proof that one may treat labor-time as the measure of value of commodities, and at the same time confound labor embodied in the exchange value of commodities and measured by time, with the direct natural activity of individuals.