La mercancía general y su misterio

Sobre el significado del dinero en la crítica de la economía política

Abstract

The General Commodity and its Mystery. On the meaning of Money in the Critique of Political Economy.

In the Marxian critique of political economy, money is understood as the universal commodity set apart from the world of particular commodities. The fact that gold occupied that position in Marx’s time has been used to justify discounting his monetary theory as a variant of the nineteenth century metallist concept of money. It has been left out of the contemporary monetary debate—wrongly.

The Marxian approach not only has the capacity to explain the irrationality of the monetary system on the basis of the irrationality of the capitalist mode of production. It also permits a categorical analysis of the contemporary monetary system and the history of its emergence. Contrary to the generally accepted view, the elimination of gold backing did not make the monetary commodity disappear. It only changed it. Today, the tradable debt claims and sureties that central banks accumulate in the course of “money creation” occupy the position of monetary commodity. This change in the monetary commodity was inevitable as a means to liberate capital accumulation from dependency on prior surplus-value generation in reaction to the crisis of valorization that started in the seventies. But it also created new potentialities for crisis. Unlike gold, the new monetary medium is itself threatened by the crisis of devaluation.