Marx notes that Steuart also discovered the law that currency based on credit always returns to its point of departure, and he also examined the role of interest rate differentials between countries on the export and import of precious metals. As the discussion, here, is only of simple circulation, Marx does not examine this further. These ideas are, however, discussed in Capital III.
Marx says,
“Symbolical money or credit money – Steuart does not yet distinguish these two forms of money – can function as means of purchase and means of payment in place of the precious metals in domestic circulation, but not on the world market. Paper notes are consequently “money of the society,” whereas gold and silver are “money of the world.”” (p 166-7)
In fact, that is no longer the case. Even under the Gold Standard, when Britain was the global hegemon, the Pound acted as world reserve currency. Many prices were set in £'s, and £'s were used as global currency for their purchase. Certainly, after WWII, when the US became hegemonic, and the Dollar became world reserve currency, that was true, and the US greatly benefited from it. It printed paper $'s and paid for its increasing imports with them, with the exchange-rate fixed at $35 to an ounce of gold, which was an increasing fiction.
Ultimately, that led to the $ being no longer convertible to gold, after 1971, and with the introduction of floating exchange rates, imports are paid for either in the currency of the exporting country or else in Dollars. Gold and silver are, now, just globally traded commodities like any others, and their prices are determined in the same way as other commodities. Every country now holds foreign currency reserves, and gold forms just a small component of such reserves. In 2021, it accounted for just 13% of global foreign currency reserves.
Marx comments,
“Louis Blanc transforms the “money of the society,” which simply means internal, national money, into socialist money, which means nothing at all, and quite consistently turns John Law into a socialist.” (Note *, p 167)
The same is true of today's left proponents of Modern Monetary Theory. There is, however, an element of truth, in respect of credit money, which represents a claim on a proportion of social labour-time. As Marx says, in Capital III, Chapter 27, in a workers' state, in transition from capitalism to socialism,
“The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale. The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.”
Stripped of all its capitalist content, in which it can be hoarded, loaned and otherwise turned into capital, all of which is a function of social relations, it is not much of a step from this credit money to the situation Marx describes in The Critique of the Gotha Programme.
The labourer “receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labour cost. The same amount of labour which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.
Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labour, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labour in another form.”
The difference of this from the labour notes of Bray, Gray and Proudhon is that, no longer is there production of commodities, and competition, but a planned production of use values to meet society's needs.
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