Money
Reading Capital: Money, or the Circulation of Commodities
The fourth entry in a section-by-section reading of Marx’s Capital. Chapter Three settled what money is; here Marx shows what money does — and the answer is far more unsettling than ‘medium of exchange’ suggests. Money can make prices lie, it can break the link between selling and buying (where Marx plants the first seed of economic crisis and his quarrel with Say’s Law), and it can detach itself from goods to become an object of pursuit in its own right. The objections this time come from fiat money and the quantity theory; the replies, from endogenous money and the monetary theory of value.
Read more →Reading Capital: Of Exchange
The third entry in a section-by-section reading of Marx’s Capital. Chapter Two sets the commodities in motion and introduces the people who carry them. It is one of the shortest chapters in the book, but it does two distinctive things: it derives the legal person — owner, contract, rights-bearing individual — from the bare fact of exchange, and it tells the story of how money is actually born, as something a whole society stumbles into without meaning to. The major objections this time come from the anthropology of money and the theory of law.
Read more →Reading Capital: The Form of Value and the Fetishism of Commodities
The second entry in a section-by-section reading of Marx’s Capital. Having found labor inside the commodity, Marx now asks how invisible value ever becomes visible — a chain of small logical steps that leads to money — and then pulls back the curtain on the whole arrangement in his famous account of commodity fetishism. Section 3 is the hardest stretch in the chapter and Section 4 the most beloved; together they finish Marx’s portrait of the commodity, with the central objections and replies set side by side.
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