Abstract
A contentious feature of Marx’s Capital is his treatment of money, especially in relation to the logic of circulation. On the one hand, Marx conceives of money as a ‘body of value’, an immediate embodiment of (abstract) universal labour. If time is the measure of labour, then the ‘real’ (non-monetary) measure of value is the time socially necessary to produce the money commodity: gold. Yet, there is also in Capital the outline of an elementary ‘form theory’, wherein monetary abstraction does not arise substantially in production but in the practical relation of commodity exchange, itself a means of associating previously dissociated commodities and labour.2 Now, money is a necessary condition for the existence of the (capitalist) value-form of exchange; it constitutes the value dimension wherein heterogeneous use-values (commodities) are validated as social values and the heterogeneous labours that produced them are validated as social labour.
I thank Christopher Arthur, Riccardo Bellofiore, Martha Campbell, Fred Moseley, Patrick Murray, Geert Reuten and Tony Smith for their erudite comments on various drafts of this chapter, and also Michael Eldred for his critical and stimulating interventions on the final draft. I am, of course, responsible for any errors remaining.
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© 2004 Nicola Taylor
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Taylor, N. (2004). Reconstructing Marx on Money and the Measurement of Value. In: Bellofiore, R., Taylor, N. (eds) The Constitution of Capital. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403938640_4
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