Thread by @adnanahusain

#WeeklyMarx Instalment 5, #GoodMorningMarx Day 35 of Capital v. 1,, pgs. 237-269, Chp 3, sec 3b-c, Chp 4, Chp 5. So much to cover here since we stopped at p. 209 in instalment 4 with Marx forecasting the possibility of crises in the capitalist economy because of contradictions

arising in his analysis of the circulation of commodities even in a perfectly functioning market according to the conceptions of the liberal political economists he is critiquing, namely Smith, Ricardo and those following Say's law that posits because every sale is a purchase and

every purchase a sale that an equilibrium would exist between producers and consumers. But Marx was showing in the previous section how there was no requirement that the seller spend the money realized in the sale of the commodity... He will discuss the conditions later that

he suggests will lead to crises in capitalism later. That was up to p. 209. So we have a lot to get through just to catch up to this week's readings and to summarize them! Onward, then... Sec 2b "The circulation of money" examines these exchanges from the perspective not of the

commodity but now of money in these transformations and the social metabolism he is studying. Money occludes the change of form of commodities and the social labor involved by money as a means of circulating commodities. It seems as if it is money that moves. "Money...haunts the

sphere of circulation and constantly moves around within it. The question therefore arises of how much money this sphere continuously absorbs." p. 213. Marx discusses the contradictory tensions between money as a measure of value and as a means of circulation. This leads him to

conceptualize the velocity of the circulation of money, "the number of times the same piece of money turns over within a period of time," to analyze the working of commodity prices to critique the "absurd hypothesis" that commodities enter circulation w/o price, money w/o value.

Sec 2c "Coin, The Symbol of Value" begins by drawing a distinction between the national/internal business of coining and establishing a standard measure of prices as a state function and the international or universal sphere of the world market to examine gold/silver as coin and

bullion. The circulation of money creates a divergence between nominal and real metallic content that increasingly emphasizes the symbolic value of currency, hence paper money and "credit-money." Marx argues that paper money arises from the circulation of metallic money (coins)

in the simple exchange of commodities whereas credit-money relates organically to money as a means of payment. p.225: "Paper money is a symbol of gold, a symbol of money...Only in so far as paper money represents gold, which like all other commodities has value, it it a symbol of

value." Question: how do we understand Marx's analysis for modern conditions without a gold standard, with an increasingly cashless economy, new private currencies, etc...? Something worth discussing as we assess what is at stake in his overall analysis of the capitalist mode of

production this rooting of money in gold as a commodity that becomes a universal equivalent in the system of exchange. Perhaps he already foreshadows the problem or resolves it by reflecting that in C-M-C exchange, money need lead only a symbolic existence. "Since it is a

transiently objectified reflecting of the prices of commodities, it serves only as a symbol of itself, and can therefore be replaced by another symbol." But he, insists, "the symbol of money must have its own objective social validity," the consequence of state legal enforcement

that allows paper money "a purely functional mode of existence in which it is externally separated from its metallic substance." A lot more to discuss here. But fundamentally previous sections are about how in the system of exchange and circulation of commodities, money is

supposed to stay in circulation as a lubricant of exchange in C-M-C while commodities are produced into and fall out of circulation through consumption for their use-values. However, in section 3 "Money"Marx argues introduces some countervailing points and contradictions, first

of which is hoarding (sub-section a). When C-M takes place, what if the seller wants the money and not another commodity, or seeks to replace the commodity form with its money form? The change of form becomes an end in itself to secure "that absolutely social form of wealth

which is always ready to be used." Read p 229 to see how lyrical and literary Marx can be about the fetishization of money! But through it, social power (the mobilized and converted social labour time in commodity form transferred into a money-form) becomes the private power of

private persons. This is why, as Marx notes, ancient societies and religious traditions condemned money so vehemently: it destroys the moral and social order, respects no distinctions. The hoarder's political economy is "to sell much and buy little" through the three cardinal

capitalist virtues of "work, thrift, and greed." The second contradiction arises from money as a form of payment, from which credit-money emerges when there is a time gap between the commodity exchange and the transfer of money. In sub-section b "means of payment" he examines the

conditions where the mechanisms of payments are disrupted in an industrial or commercial environment that can lead to a "monetary crisis" where money changes from "money of account" to cash. He concludes: "The development of money as a means of payment makes it necessary to

accumulate it in preparation for the days when the sums which are owing fall due. While hoarding, considered as a independent form of self-enrichment, vanishes with the advance of bourgeois society, it grows at the same time in the form of the accumulation of a reserve fund of

the means of payment." In other words, such accumulation, which in one aspect has absolutely no limit, is endemic to the system of commodity production and circulation, despite the ideal functioning of the market according to the classical political economists. Such accumulation

transforms social power inequitably into private power. We see around us the consequences of such social inequality in a society based on capital. What Marx is describing is how this commodity production and circulation system is not just described by C-M-C in an exchange of

equivalents but actually an M-C-M circulation that arises from social necessity, quite apart from the individual lust for gold, but endemically to resolve the contradiction between money as a measure of value and as a means of circulation. The crucial part of this argument is

p234: "The value form of the commodity, money, has now become the self-sufficient purpose of the sale, owing to a social necessity springing from the conditions of the process of circulation itself." Tweet thread limit reached! Continuing with Chp 3, 3: c "World Money" next tweet