Subject: [OPE-L:1899] Re: Re: the money supply
From: Duncan K. Foley (foleyd@cepa.newschool.edu)
Date: Sat Dec 11 1999 - 22:07:07 EST
Just a remark on something Claus said:
>My strongest statement is not that gold is money today,
>but that there can't be the least doubt that in Marx's theory money must be
>a commodity. This means that the assumption of a purely abstract money must
>have a theoretical explanation, which Marx didn't provide.
If we view modern moneys as state-credit moneys, which they seem to be,
then we can say more about them in the Marxist framework than that they are
"purely abstract". The valuation of state credit is "fictitious capital",
that is the capitalization of revenues, like land prices. These moneys
would be analytically similar to the assignats of the French revolution,
which were based on land prices. Does anyone on the list know whether Marx
wrote anything about the assignats, by the way?
Duncan
Duncan K. Foley
Department of Economics
Graduate Faculty
New School University
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