Marx on Money

Discussion

Anitra Nelson:

Discussion in particular: Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft) written during 1857–1858. T

"his work is often considered a crucial read to grasp Marx’s methods of analysis, with Marx diving off Hegel as one might a springboard. Yet our group has immediately plunged into deep swirling waters of postcapitalist debates over money. This is hardly surprising given that Notebook I of Grundrisse centres on money.

In his ‘Chapter on Money’, Marx critiques certain thinking on money by economists and the positioning of money by his political opponents in radical socialist transformation. He draws on ideas from both of the two main trains of monetary thought, a commodity theory of money and a credit theory of money. We see glimpses of his developing what will become a unique theory of the money commodity and links to earlier work characterised as an alienation theory of money (Nelson 1999).

In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Marx pointed out that ‘the extension of products and needs becomes a contriving and ever-calculating subservience to inhuman, sophisticated, unnatural and imaginary appetites’. Moreover, money and prices resulted in a ‘distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternisation of impossibilities’. But it is even more sinister – ‘the divine power of money – lies in its character as men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature’ so that ‘[m]oney is the alienated ability of mankind’. (Italics as in the source.)

Opposing familiar interpretations of Marx’s vision and theories of change that sweep aside money and circulation as if secondary to production, we read in Grundrisse that ‘the money relation is itself a relation of production if production is looked at in its totality’ (Marx, 1993: 214). Moreover, withdrawn from circulation ‘accumulated to form a treasure … as a result of circulation’, money ‘closes the circle with itself’. In other words, consolidated as a measure, medium and potential investment, ‘[t]his aspect [of money] already latently contains its quality as capital’ (Marx, 1993: 216). Money defines capital: capital is money making more money. Once money exists, payment of labour is not only possible but also probable. Money is the connective tissue, language, and unit of calculations driving the everyday productive practices of capitalists in their production for trade.

In Grundrisse, Marx even seems to position himself as what has become known as a ‘nonmarket socialist’ – socialism is impossible without attending to abolishing class, state, market, waged labour and money immediately in the transformational process:

Strike out money, and one would thereby either be thrown back to a lower stage of production (corresponding to that of auxiliary barter), or one would proceed to a higher stage, in which exchange value would no longer be the principal aspect of the commodity, because social labour, whose representative it is, would no longer appear merely as socially mediated private labour. (Marx, 1993: 214)

This line of thought was never lost. A year before Marx died, in their ‘Preface to the 1882 Russian edition’ of the Communist Manifesto (reprinted in Miéville, 2022: 239), he and Engels speculated whether ‘the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development’. After all ‘more than half the land [was] owned in common by the peasants’ there while in North America small and middle-sized famers were being out-competed by ‘giant farms’ alongside ‘a mass industrial proletariat and a fabulous concentration of capital funds’.

Marx held money in contempt as the seed and regenerative tool of capital, and sought transformation to realise a world resplendent in real, social and ecological values. Such values reverberate through his work and provide the material of his standpoint against money. Money, which is at one and the same time ‘the existing and active concept of value’ and ‘the general confounding and confusing of all things – the world upside down – the confounding and confusing of all natural and human qualities’. In contrast, socialism ‘proceeds from the theoretically and practically sensuous consciousness of man and of nature as the essence’ and realises ‘a new manifestation of the forces of human nature and a new enrichment of human nature’."

(https://www.ppesydney.net/value-par-excellence-money-versus-real-values/)

More information

• a doctoral study on Marx’s concept of money, resulting in Marx’s Concept of Money: The God of Commodities (1999/2014) and

• Life Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies, a non-market socialist collection published in 2011 that I co-edited (with Frans Timmerman). The latter is akin to a twenty-first century sequel to

• Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century (1987) edited by Maximilien Rubel and John Crump.

• Capitalism Nature Socialism published my article ‘“Your money or your life”: Money and socialist transformation’ (2016)