Engels quotes from Duhring's lengthy rant against Marx, the substance of which is that Marx claimed that “capital was born of money at the beginning of the sixteenth century.” (p 258).
This follows on from Duhring's claim that this “barren conception”, representing “half historical and half logical” arguments is the product of Marx insisting upon the “dialectical-historical idea toying with metamorphoses of concepts and history” that produces “only bastards of historical and logical fantasy.” (p 258). By this method, Duhring says, Marx rejects the view of established political economy according to which capital “is a produced means of production.” (p 258)
Engels says,
“This is like saying that fully three thousand years ago metallic money was born of cattle, because once upon a time cattle, among other things, functioned as money. Only Herr Dühring is capable of such a crude and inept manner of expressing himself.” (p 258-9)
To this day, most economists, including many who call themselves Marxists, do not understand what money is, confusing it with money tokens and credit, i.e. currency. Just as Duhring reduces the concept of capital to the vulgarity that it is something that can be simply produced – which confuses it with constant capital/means of production, which is a view also encountered amongst some of today's vulgar “Marxists” - so, too, the idea is put forward that “money” can be produced/created, by which what is really meant is that “money tokens”, or credit can be created. That view, for example, put forward by MMT is more akin to the notions of John Law than the analysis provided by Marx.
In A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy, and later, in Capital I, Marx only arrives at a discussion of money after a detailed analysis of the development of commodities and commodity exchange, something that occurred around 7 – 10,000 years ago. That analysis, and the way the individual value of the product becomes the basis of, and becomes transformed into, the market value of commodities, which, in turn, forms the basis of their exchange-value, including the specific exchange-value against a money commodity, i.e. their price, is expanded further in Theories of Surplus Value, and in Capital III.
Money, in the form of a money-commodity – be it cattle, gold or silver etc. - only arises as a result of a long period and process of commodity production and exchange that first takes the form of barter. Money does not arises, as Ricardo mistakenly believed, as currency, as simply a convenient way of facilitating such exchanges, and circulation of commodities, but as the means of indirectly measuring the value of commodities, and, thereby, determining the ratios in which they should exchange. It becomes the proxy for abstract labour. And, as Marx sets out, in A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy, on this basis, even in those first transactions, the money commodity itself is not needed as currency. Indeed, simple representations of it – money tokens or credit – will suffice, such as leather strips, provided that these tokens can, themselves be trusted to be honoured as a claim on a given amount of social labour-time.
To see the idiocy of MMT, it thinks that by simply putting into circulation an endless and increasing number of bits of leather, it is the same as “creating” more cattle! The actual result is to debase the leather strips as currency, and to undermine overall trust in both the currency and credit.
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