Note 168 — Chapter VIII
Reading edition
Benjamin Franklin, Remarks and Facts Relative to the American Paper Money (1764), page 267.
Marx thus speaks of Franklin as an economist: "The first sensible analysis of exchange-value as labor-time, made so clear as to seem almost commonplace, is to be found in the work of a man of the New World, where the bourgeois relations of production, imported together with their representatives, sprouted rapidly in a soil which made up its lack of historical traditions with a surplus of humus. That man was Benjamin Franklin, who formulated the fundamental law of modern political economy in his first work, which he wrote when a mere youth (A Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency), and published in 1721." A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, by Karl Marx, English translation by N. I. Stone, 1894, page 62.