When a manuscript has been published, or even simply completed, one often says to oneself: “Today, I would not write it that way.” Some years later one has to say the same thing again, after having done research which makes clear in retrospect the weaknesses of the previous manuscript. But it is no longer possible to retouch the original text, which becomes a way-station on the road of research. Marx on Money is an essay, complementary to other studies already published or still in preparation; instead of retouching the text, it is better to try to put it in context. That is, to emphasize what today, after numerous lively discussions and a vision less restrained by practical social concerns, appear to be strong points which have stood the test, along with certain weaknesses.
The solid part relates primarily to the subject itself, which was previously largely unknown. Marx on Money shows that money is not a technical problem, a subject reserved for study by some specialists, or an area reserved for so-called “bourgeois” political economy. All who want to understand the whole contribution of Marx’s historical materialism should read the first section, of Volume 1 of Capital, where a theory of commodities and money is presented.
Readers can certainly be turned away by the difficulty of that section, where Marx uses a Hegelian terminology. But it is necessary to go through it, for without commodities and money, which crystallize value in particular forms, there is neither surplus value nor capital. One should then seek to know why and how Marx analyzes commodities and money which, although not peculiar to any particular form of production, are not purely economic relationships but social relationships. This last point is clear when one follows the discussion of the reproduction of money as general equivalent, an indispensable reproduction, which takes place through contradictions arising from the diversity of the forms and functions of money. Marx breaks decisively with Ricardo’s economic theory here, as well as with all “bourgeois” economic theories.
Marx’s concept of money is often treated as a simple concept of the money commodity, even as a “metallism” making gold the sole money, so that there would be no perceptible difference on this point between Marx and Jacques Rueff. In contrast, Marx on Money seeks to show the prime importance of the concept of “general equivalent,” and the special position of “the money form” within Marx’s theory of commodities. That is why the analysis of the beginning of Capital is not invalidated by that of commercial and banking credit money in connection with Volume III, where Marx’s notes on credit money in the capitalist form of production are gathered together. The examination of financial circulation shows that credit, while adapted to the needs of capitalism, “is never really contemporaneous with capital.” Thus the formation and circulation of credit money cannot be considered as depending on what is today called a “function of financing,” an expression which masks the compulsions and social, economic, and political contradictions associated with every use of money. Marx on Money has tried to pave the way to a “functional” and at the same time “voluntarist” interpretation of credit money, with state and central bank as “free suppliers” of money.
Nevertheless, this little book has its weak points, not all of which have as yet been eliminated by subsequent books and some of which are still the subjects of research.
In the first place, it is necessary to reconsider what is said in the introduction to justify the placing of the discussion of money at the beginning of Capital. It is written there that Marx followed this course for theoretical reasons. This remains true, but it seems to me today that the theoretical reasons are inseparable from historical considerations, from the fact that value, commodity, and money are social processes.
N.B.: This is by no means to adopt the interpretation of Engels, whereby value in exchange would be viewed as belonging to the period before the capitalist form of production, in which “prices of production” would appear. Such a break between value in exchange and price of production, which has now surfaced again in the neo-Ricardian school led by Sraffa, seems to have no basis. There is no longer a “mercantile form of production,” but only “pockets” of mercantile production and circulation, of greater or smaller extent according to the various types of production. These are characterized by special relations of production. (The term “relations of production” is applied to the socio-economic relationships between direct producers, slaves, peasant serfs, and wage-workers on the one side and, on the other, those who are able to expropriate the products of the surplus labor of the first group in one way or another, surplus value being the form characteristic of the capitalist mode of production.) On the contrary, although elements of mercantile economy come into existence and reproduce themselves (e.g., mercantile exchanges of surplus products between various types of peasants and city dwellers, or between artisans and villagers, etc.), no relation of exploitation and dependence connected with relations of production can reveal itself directly. That is why the producers exchanging their products in mercantile production and circulation, of whom Marx speaks at the beginning of Capital, are considered as individual workers with equal rights to the possession of the commodities which they have themselves produced for exchange. This is a “good abstraction!”
Compulsions and social contradictions are no less present because the relation of exchange between independent producers is included in what Marx calls “a spontaneous organization of production whose threads have been woven and continue to be woven without the knowledge of the producers carrying on the exchanges.” It does not matter that they are the free possessors of the commodities they exchange; they nevertheless do not control the social process of production and exchange. Hence its contradictory character, which shows itself particularly in the operation of a relative “valorization” or “devalorization” of commodities in comparison with each other, and an “appreciation” or “depreciation” of commodities in relation to money, in terms of the “labor time socially necessary” to produce commodities and money at a given time. The meaning of this “law of value” should have been explained at the beginning of Marx on Money. That would have avoided the risk of separating the “economic,” the “social,” the “historical,” and even the “political,” a risk present in certain formulations in the first part, at the beginning of point A and the end of point B, and not sufficiently compensated for by other formulations.
Moreover, the meaning of the disparity between the “market price” and the value of a commodity could have been presented more clearly. This leads to a more general point, which is not made in Marx on Money in spite of a brief critique of Paul M. Sweezy’s ideas on “prices of production.” This point, which has emerged in the course of further research by other Marxists as well as myself, and a number of joint discussions, is that there is in Capital no general theory of prices which would cover both the market prices at the beginning of Capital and the prices of production peculiar to capitalism, which Marx discusses in Volume III. Although the “price form” is clearly analyzed, as is shown elsewhere in Marx on Money, the formation of the various types of prices and their interconnection is never made satisfactorily clear. Nevertheless we do not know whether it is a question of a theoretical gap which Marx might have tried unsuccessfully to fill, or whether the problem is a false one! In the second case we would be speaking of the absence of a general theory of prices in Capital as if such a theory had a meaning and necessarily existed, although in reality we would be asking Marx a question arising from a “bourgeois” idea of the economy and meaningless from a Marxist perspective. True or false problem? The present state of studies on the question does not seem to me to permit an answer.
The second part of Marx on Money has a number of obvious weaknesses. In particular, the discussion of “the financial requirements of equilibrium,” bound up with the discussion of the “balance-sheets” of the capitalists of Department I (production of production goods) and Department II (production of consumption goods), rests on an “uncritical” consideration of the idea of economic and financial equilibrium. It is true that this error is in part compensated for subsequently in the text, where it is pointed out that money, as a particular social relationship, is never “neutral” whether there is equilibrium or not. It is also clearly stated that the “credit system” does not have a merely functional character in relation to the financing of capitalism, and that it is necessary to analyze “financial cycles” and monetary crises with care. Nevertheless, a critical analysis of the concept of equilibrium and its theoretical implications was needed.
These are the principal things which it now seems to me need to be said in regard to Marx on Money. This essay, it must be repeated, is one stage on a long journey, in the course of which both errors and truths will necessarily be launched and subjected to criticism.