by Well, sort of agrees in the post that can be read here: Jehu, “Reply to LK: How Labor Theory of Value destroys Fiat ‘Money’,” The Real Movement, June 12, 2015. My original post is here.We must remember that for Marx money is a special commodity that itself must have a labour value so it can function as a universal medium of exchange and numéraire. That is the basis by which money can exchange for other produced commodities under the law of value in volume 1 of Capital. But fiat money utterly destroys this basis of Marx’s labour theory of value and his theory of exchange value in volume 1.It would follow that the trendy modern Marxist idea of the MELT is entirely intellectually bankrupt too, under Marx’s dogmatic metallist theory of money.In the post above, the Marxist author agrees that modern fiat money has destroyed the ability of money to properly reflect Marx’s labour values. How, then, could Marx’s theory still be right? The answer: modern currency is not really money at all! In addition, prices and labour values diverge as in volume 3, but now fiat money has destroyed even any relation between values and prices of production even as postulated in volume 3 of Capital, since this is (apparently) the trajectory of capitalism as supposedly prophesied by Marx.What is the worth of this argument? It is refreshingly honest at the very least.
Topics:
Lord Keynes considers the following as important: agreement, fiat money, labour theory of value, Marxist
This could be interesting, too:
Stavros Mavroudeas writes ‘Work Intensity and Value Formation’, Ioannides A. & Mavroudeas S., Science & Society Vol. 85, No. 1
Lord Keynes writes Response to Jehu on “Four Questions for LK on Money”
Lord Keynes writes Marx rejected Fiat Money
Lord Keynes writes Louis Boudin on the Contradiction between Volumes 1 and 3 of Marx’s Capital
My original post is here.
We must remember that for Marx money is a special commodity that itself must have a labour value so it can function as a universal medium of exchange and numéraire. That is the basis by which money can exchange for other produced commodities under the law of value in volume 1 of Capital. But fiat money utterly destroys this basis of Marx’s labour theory of value and his theory of exchange value in volume 1.
It would follow that the trendy modern Marxist idea of the MELT is entirely intellectually bankrupt too, under Marx’s dogmatic metallist theory of money.
In the post above, the Marxist author agrees that modern fiat money has destroyed the ability of money to properly reflect Marx’s labour values. How, then, could Marx’s theory still be right? The answer: modern currency is not really money at all! In addition, prices and labour values diverge as in volume 3, but now fiat money has destroyed even any relation between values and prices of production even as postulated in volume 3 of Capital, since this is (apparently) the trajectory of capitalism as supposedly prophesied by Marx.
What is the worth of this argument? It is refreshingly honest at the very least. But there is a strange fallacy of equivocation in the argument. The words “money” and “currency” are given different meanings: money means a produced commodity with the labour value used as a unit of account and “currency” merely a token symbol for the money commodity.
But actually the basic concept of money does not at all require either the metallist or Marxist mythology that it must be a produced commodity.
The basic definition of money is something which fulfils these three functions:
The very idea that money must of necessity be a produced commodity was a delusion and error of economic theory. If fiat money is impossible, then our modern economies would have collapsed decades ago when money was severed from gold in the 1930s for domestic economic transactions, and certainly since the end of Bretton Woods (a system in which gold only had a role in the international payments system anyway).(1) a medium of exchange;
(2) a unit of account, and
(3) store of purchasing power.
Marx was fundamentally wrong about money and modern fiat money certainly explodes the law of value in volume 1 of Capital.