Reconstructing Marx on Money and the Measurement of Value

Nicola Taylor

Chapter 4 in The Constitution of Capital, 2004, pp 88-116 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract A contentious feature of Marx’s Capital is his treatment of money, especially in relation to the logic of circulation. On the one hand, Marx conceives of money as a ‘body of value’, an immediate embodiment of (abstract) universal labour. If time is the measure of labour, then the ‘real’ (non-monetary) measure of value is the time socially necessary to produce the money commodity: gold. Yet, there is also in Capital the outline of an elementary ‘form theory’, wherein monetary abstraction does not arise substantially in production but in the practical relation of commodity exchange, itself a means of associating previously dissociated commodities and labour.2 Now, money is a necessary condition for the existence of the (capitalist) value-form of exchange; it constitutes the value dimension wherein heterogeneous use-values (commodities) are validated as social values and the heterogeneous labours that produced them are validated as social labour.

Keywords: Exchange Relation; Human Labour; Labour Time; Wage Contract; Valorization Form (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-4039-3864-0_4

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DOI: 10.1057/9781403938640_4

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