A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy, Chapter 2.3 Money, b. Means of Payment - Part 5 of 8

Marx describes the way commodity exchange, from the start, leads to such purchases on credit.

“At first it happens that in the course of circulation certain commodity-owners confront one another repeatedly as buyers and sellers. Such repeated occurrences do not remain merely accidental, but commodities may, for example, be ordered for a future date at which they are to be delivered and paid for.” (p 142)

This does not, of course, mean, as Paul Mason concluded on the back of the work of David Graeber, that the first exchanges were not conducted on the basis of barter, or that, out of this process of exchange, a money-commodity does not arise, and that, instead, exchange took place on the basis of “credit”, because the existence of such credit, i.e. payment at some later date, itself requires first that the commodities being exchanged/sold have been reduced to an amount of universal labour/value, and measured against a money commodity. What Paul Mason and Graeber confuse is the role of money as measure of value, and money as currency/means of circulation/payment.

Some use-values are of a kind where purchase and payment cannot coincide. If I rent a house, I must pay a month's rent in advance, but, I only obtain the consumption of this use-value at the end of the month, or vice versa, if I pay a month in arrears.

“These relations can be fully developed even before the credit system comes into being, although they are the natural basis of the latter. It is evident however that the evolution of the credit system, and therefore of the bourgeois mode of production in general, causes money to function increasingly as a means of payment to the detriment of its function both as a means of purchase and even more as an element of hoarding. For instance in England, coin is almost entirely confined to the sphere of retail trade and to petty transactions between producers and consumers, whereas money as means of payment predominates in the sphere of large commercial transactions.” (p 143)

Money becomes the exclusive means of payment, replacing, for example, payment in labour service. This illustrates the extent to which relations based upon exchange-value dominate society. This is what Boisguillebert resented, but, as Lenin describes, was also opposed by the Narodniks, who sought to protect the relations based on labour service. Engelhardt, for example, argued that doctors should own land, so that they could be paid for medical services by labour service performed on it.

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