The republication of Suzanne de Brunhoff’s classic investigation into Karl Marx’s conception of “the money commodity” shines light on commodities and their fetishism. The investigation of money as the crystallization of value in its material sense is central to how we understand capitalism and how it can be abolished. Marx on Money is an elegant analysis of how money, credit, debt and value fit into the “logic of capital” that characterizes commodity society.
This ambitious book presents a comprehensive new 'macro-monetary' interpretation of Marx’s logical method in Capital, based on substantial textual evidence, which emphasises two main points: (1) Marx’s theory is primarily a macroeconomic theory of the total surplus-value produced in the economy as a whole; and (2) Marx’s theory is a monetary theory from beginning to end and the circuit of money capital – M - C - M’ – is the logical framework of Marx’s theory. It follows from this 'macro-monetary' interpretation that, contrary to the prevailing view, there is no 'transformation problem' in Marx’s theory; i.e., Marx did not 'fail to transform the inputs of constant capital and variable capital' in his theory of prices of production in Part 2 of Volume III.
This work relates Marx's theory of money to his overall political economy, and places it firmly within the wider context of his political and philosophical thought. It has for some time been held that there exists an epistomological break between the early 'humanist' and later 'scientific' Marx. However, in this ground-breaking study Anitra Nelson links Marx's conecept of money to his early key concepts with particular reference to 'alienation'.
This book provides a contemporary assessment of Marx's theory of money. This theory is often praised as one of Marx's greatest achievements, especially when compared with either classical or neoclassical economics. On the other hand, Marx's theory of money has also been severely criticized, especially that it seems to require that money be a produced commodity. The contributors to the volume provide a wide-ranging and in-depth appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of Marx's theory of money, compared to other theories of money.
Why is money more valuable than the paper on which it is printed? Monetarists link the value of money to its supply and demand, believing the latter depends on the total value of the commodities it circulates. According to Prabhat Patnaik, this logic is flawed. In his view, in any nonbarter economy, the value we assign to money is determined independently of its supply and demand. Through an original and provocative critique of monetarism, Patnaik advances a revolutionary understanding of macroeconomics that highlights the "propertyist" position of Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. Unlike the usual division between "classical" economists (e.g., David Ricardo and Marx) and the "marginalists" (e.g., Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons, and Léon Walras), Patnaik places "monetarists," including Ricardo, on one side, while grouping propertyist writers like Marx, Keynes, and Rosa Luxemburg on the other. This second group subscribes to the idea that the value of money is given from outside the realm of supply and demand, therefore making money a form in which wealth is held. The fact that money is held as wealth in turn gives rise to the possibility of deficiency of aggregate demand under capitalism. It is no accident that this possibility was highlighted by Marx and Keynes while going largely unrecognized by Ricardo and contemporary monetarists. At the same time, Patnaik points to a weakness in the Marx-Keynes tradition namely, its lack of any satisfactory explanation of why the value of money, determined from outside the realm of supply and demand, remains relatively stable over long stretches of time. The answer to this question lies in the fact that capitalism is not a self-contained system but is born from a precapitalist setting with which it interacts and where it creates massive labor reserves that, in turn, impart stability to the value of money. Patnaik's theory of money, then, is also a theory of imperialism, and he concludes with a discussion of the contemporary international monetary system, which he terms the "oil-dollar" standard.
Written during the winter of 1857-8, the Grundrisse was considered by Marx to be the first scientific elaboration of communist theory. A collection of seven notebooks on capital and money, it both develops the arguments outlined in the Communist Manifesto (1848) and explores the themes and theses that were to dominate his great later work Capital. Here, for the first time, Marx set out his own version of Hegel's dialectics and developed his mature views on labour, surplus value and profit, offering many fresh insights into alienation, automation and the dangers of capitalist society. Yet while the theories in Grundrisse make it a vital precursor to Capital, it also provides invaluable descriptions of Marx's wider-ranging philosophy, making it a unique insight into his beliefs and hopes for the foundation of a communist state.
Marx’s only full draft of Volume III of Capital was written in the Economic Manuscript of 1864—1865. The Volume III that we know was heavily edited by Engels. It has been a long-standing question in Marxian scholarship whether or not there are significant differences between Marx’s original manuscript and Engels’s edited version. Marx’s manuscript was published for the first time in German in 1992 in the Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe, Section II, Volume 4.2, but this important manuscript has not previously been translated into English. The publication of this English translation of Marx’s original manuscript is thus an important event in Marxian scholarship. English-speaking Marxist scholars can finally compare Engels’s Volume III with Marx’s original manuscript and evaluate for themselves the significance of the differences.
