Money

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 3a

Illustration from Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan”

Money

“The commodity that functions as a measure of value, and, either in its own person or by a representative, as the medium of circulation, is money.”

It would not be remarkable that in a work called “Capital” and in a chapter called “Money”, Karl Marx would proceed to define it; except that bourgeois economists cannot do so, even up to today. 

Marx’s definition of money (“the perfected form of the general equivalent”) sits within a concrete overview of all the circumstances of capital, whereas bourgeois economists can never present a full picture of society, but only disconnected snapshots of abstract parts of the whole.

The second title of the book is “Critique of Political Economy”. Karl Marx had read everything of consequence that had been written, from the time of Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan” (1651), and had made notes from his reading in a manuscript called “Theories of Surplus Value”, which is also sometimes called “Capital, Volume 4”. The table below is a list of names of political economists mentioned in that work, sixty altogether; and there are many others that are mentioned in the text or in the footnotes of Volume 1, including in the chapter given as a download for today, below.

Karl Marx was not an economist. Capital is not a book of economics. It is a critique of the entire body of Political-Economic thought up to the time of its writing, with conclusions drawn about the development of Political Economy (not economics) into the future. Political Economy is the study of human political relations, and not just money relations.

In this chapter Marx describes Money and Price, the conversions between Use-Value and Exchange-Value, and then the transformation of commodities into money and back again from money into commodities, which is the series “C – M – C”.  Marx spends time on this quite simple description, because he is going to build on it later. Therefore it is advisable to read it at least once in full. But don’t get stuck. If you stick, skip.

Scrooge McDuck: miser

Finally, Marx deals in this chapter with hoarding of money, and with the practical use of money. All of these things are going to be useful while we go through the book.

Top picture: a 17^th-century vision of the bourgeois state, from the cover of Hobbes’ “Leviathan”. Above: a 20^th-Century vision of a miser (hoarder), “Scrooge McDuck”. Below (table): some authors covered by Marx during his preparations for writing “Capital”.

Names of “political economists” studied in Marx’s “Theories of Surplus Value” (Capital, Volume 4):

Sir James Steuart	John Stuart Mill	Massie	Robert Torrens
Quesnay	Germain Garnier	Buat	James Mill
Turgot	Charles Ganilh	Anonymous English Author	Prévost
Paoletti	Ferrier	Rodbertus	Thomas De Quincey
Adam Smith	Earl of Lauderdale	David Ricardo	Samuel Bailey McCulloch
Schmalz	Count Destutt de Tracy	Anderson	Wakefield
Verri	Nassau Senior	Darwin	Stirling
Say	Pellegrino Rossi	Roscher	John Stuart Mill
Storch	Chalmers	Hopkins	Ravenstone
Ramsay	Necker	John Barton	Ramsay
Mercantilists	Linguet	Nathaniel Forster	Cherbuliez
Ricardo	Sir Dudley North	Carey	Barbon
Sismondi	Locke	James Deacon Hume	Richard Jones
D’Avenant	Berkeley	Hodgskin	Proudhon
Petty	Hume	Thomas Robert Malthus	Luther

·        The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Capital V1, Chapter 3, [part], The Medium of Circulation, Money.