Mattick’s review of the Reitter translation
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Most of the points he makes are valid enough but there is something odd about this passage:
“Marx seems far ahead of his time in explaining why money need not be a commodity, since it is its role in circulation and not its physical substance that allows it to represent commodity values. This is why, he stresses, it is in credit money—like today’s Federal Reserve Notes, the basis of the worldwide money system—that ‘money … takes on its own peculiar form of existence …’”
The first sentence is correct: gold (or silver) coins don’t need to circulate but can be replaced by metallic tokens or pieces of paper (or, these days, a computer code). Other writers before Marx had made this point.
But the second sentence doesn’t follow from the first and is incorrect. Marx did not say, let alone “stress”, that “credit-money” was money’s particular form of existence.
The full quote is the Penguin translation of part of this passage from chapter 3, section 3B (Means of Payment) of Volume I of Capital:
“Credit-money springs directly out of the function of money as a means of payment, in that certificates of debt owing for already purchased commodities themselves circulate as a means for transferring those debts to others. On the other hand, the function of money undergoes expansion in proportion as the credit system itself expands. As the means of payment money takes on its own peculiar forms [NB forms plural not form as in Mattick] of existence, in which in inhabits the sphere of large-scale commercial transactions. Gold and silver coin, on the other hand, are mostly relegated to the retail trade.”
In other words, he is talking about money as a means of payment not about money in general. He was not defining money as debt.
A footnote indicates that what Marx had in mind were bankers’ and merchants’ bills, which were accepted as means of payment (until their due date). He was not talking about Federal Reserve Notes, which fit his description, earlier in the chapter, of an “inconvertible paper money issued by the state and given forced currency”. And dollar bills are hardly the basis of the world money system. Maybe he is thinking of US Treasury Bills?
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