Re: Marx and fiat money

[Eubulides <paraconsistent@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lance Murdoch" <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>



> After several unsuccessful stabs at starting Marx's Capital, I have
> finally made it through a chapter or two.  I already have a problem
> though, which is perhaps due to the age of the material.
>
> Towards the end of Chapter 1, Marx makes it pretty clear that gold is a
> commodity just like any other commodity.  But due to certain qualities
> (it's homogeneity and so forth), it has become a universal commodity, it
> has become money.  So this brings a question to my mind - well what
about
> nowadays?  In the USA we used fiat money ever since Auguest 15th, 1971.
>
> So then I get to Chapter 2.  In one of the footnotes, Marx says
>
> "Long before the economists, lawyers made fashionable the idea that
money
> is a mere symbol...This they did in the sycophantic service of the royal
> power, supporting the right of the latter to debase the coinage, during
> the whole of the Middle Ages, by the traditions of the Roman Empire and
> the conceptions of money to be found in the Digest."
>
> Marx seems to be saying in Chapters 1 and 2 of Capital that money is a
> commodity like any other.  Thus if American fiat money truly were not
> backed by a commodity with a certain magnitude of value, it is
worthless.
> Note Marx does not say that fiat money is historically impossible, as he
> notes the pressure put by the state "power" on lawyers and economists to
> claim that fiat money has worth.
>
> So is this Marx's theory?  It would seem a tenet of Marxian thought that
> fiat money is worthless (or at least that it would be implied that it is
> backed by gold or some other commodity in an emergency, if not in actual
> current legality).
>
> -- Lance

=====================

http://www.marxmoney.com/

See especially the essay by Duncan Foley.