Jim.+196-238

Grundrisse: The Chapter on Money, 3rd part, pp 196-238

196: Commodity circulation requires appropriation through alienation

People produce for the purpose of selling. Production is a means toward an end. Circulation requires an alienation, people giving up the products of their labor. Again, no capitalist/laborer conflict.

197: Circulation as an endlessly repeated process

Bourgeois economists get it wrong when they say circulation is infinite, because they collapse the distinction between money and commodity. They see it as commodities being exchanged for commodities, and ignore the importance of the mediation of money. This is Marx’s dialectical distinction. Bourgeois economists focus “... only on the unity without the distinction, the affirmation without the negation.” Selling the commodity for money and buying another commodity with that money are two separate moments. The distinction matters, apparently, when exchange breaks down and there is a crisis. He doesn’t elaborate.

198: The price as external to and independent of the commodity.

A commodity has an imagined, ideal price before it is exchanged. Once it has actually been exchanged it has a real price or a realized price.

“the product which has become transformed into exchange value, if it is not really exchanged, ceases to be a product.” / Here he is using “product” to mean use value.

commodities not sold are devalued.

199: Creation of general medium of exchange

The more the division of labor develops the greater the need for a general medium of exchange. In a less developed economy people exchange commodities for commodities, but much of their production is for subsistence and only specific things can be exchanged for specific things.

“A fairly developed division of labor presupposes that the needs of each person have become very manysided and his product has become very one-sided.”

200: Exchange as a special business

The fact of separating buying and selling by money means people can hoard money, stockpile commodities, or become merchants.

Sometimes exchange seems unified, sometimes divided

speculation can cause a general rise (fall?) in prices that cannot be explained by values, but by supply and demand.

201: Double motion of circulation

C - M - C: money is the medium for trading commodities, qualitative difference sought

M - C - M: the commodities are the medium; money is the goal (Merchant), quantitative difference sought

commodities exit and get consumed, money continues to circulate

203: money as a measure of value

exchange value expresses a relation, a quantity of social labor time

208: money as medium of exchange

1200 thalers total price of circulating commodities. 100 thalers necessary to circulate commodities in six hours. Each thaler realizes 100 thalers worth of commodities. Money is a symbol.

A fake pound circulating commodities would do the same job as a real one

“The real realization of the price of commodity A is, here, the commodity B...”

money expresses the relation between commodities, so it functions quite fine as a symbol w/o any real value of its own

“...material money as mere medium of exchange is itself symbolic.”

215: “These ‘arithmetical figures’ no more need to be of gold and silver than do the measures of length.”

215 Third Function of Money: accumulation of wealth

M -C -C -M

“Without money, a mass of swaps would be necessary before one obtained the desired article in exchange. Furthermore, in each particular exchange on would have to undertake n investigation into the relative value of commodities. Money spares us the first task in its role as instrument of value and representative of all commodities.”

216: “The third attribute of money, in its complete development, presupposes the first two and constitutes their unity.” /dialectic

an accumulation of gold and silver is not necessarily the accumulation of money

224: “Negro slavery... presupposes wage labor...”

accumulation - pile it up - bring wealth to safety, buried treasure, ornament, ostentation

Protestant ethic?

money wealth (gold and silver) appears to be independent, secure, but its value depends on supply and demand, changing costs of production

/He does talk about capital here, but I don’t quite get his point. To me it would follow that if gold and silver (or bank notes, or accounting money) are not secure value, then they must be invested to maintain their value.

money to settle contracts