Who said “abolish money”?

[DJP]

Incidentally, if you look through Marx the only time you will find “abolishing money” mentioned is when he criticises Proudhon. Obviously, we don’t have to copy everything from Marx mindlessly but I think there is a strong indication here. We need to explain clearly what the problem is, and that way people can work out for themselves what the solution is.

Jumping straight to some effect or feature of socialism is to put the cart before the horse and can lead to gross misunderstanding.

[ALB]

Yes, in Marx’s day there were people who wanted to “abolish money” and replace it by “labour notes”. In a footnote near the beginning of chapter 2 of Capital he refers to a group

“which wants to perpetuate the production of commodities while simultaneously abolishing the ‘antagonism between money and commodities’, ie abolishing money itself … (Penguin translation)

He compares this to abolishing “the Pope while leaving Catholicism in existence” since “money only exists in and through this antagonism”, and refers readers to what he wrote in a previous book he published, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy where he discuss the views of a currency reformer called John Gray.

Here he says Gray was inconsistent:

“as Gray presupposes that the labour-time contained in commodities is immediately social labour-time, he presupposes that it is communal labour-time or labour-time of directly associated individuals. In that case, it would indeed be impossible for a specific commodity, such as gold or silver, to confront other commodities as the incarnation of universal labour and exchange-value would not be turned into price; but neither would use-value be turned into exchange-value and the product into a commodity, and thus the very basis of bourgeois production would be abolished. But this is by no means what Gray had in mind – goods are to be produced as commodities but not exchanged as commodities.”

And

“The fact that labour money is a pseudo-economic term, which denotes the pious wish to get rid of money, and together with money to get rid of exchange-value, and with exchange-value to get rid of commodities, and with commodities to get rid of the bourgeois mode of production, – this fact, which remains concealed in Gray’s work and of which Gray himself was not aware …”

In other words, money won’t cease to exist unless commodity production (the production of goods for sale) does. As long as goods are produced for sale money is needed and will arise because it is needed.

Socialists want to replace commodity production by production directly for use on the basis of the common ownership of the means of life — which will abolish the need for money.

[ALB]

Here’s a translation of what an anonymous French intellectual wrote in 1979 under the heading “Abolish Money or Abolish the Commodity?”

“Money is currently the essential concrete representation of the exchange value of the commodity, of its real substance. Abolishing money is to abolish only one concrete representation of exchange value. This exchange value can well take on other faces, other forms of concrete representation. So to abolish money is not at all to abolish the commodity. Obviously abolishing the commodity will abolish its substance, exchange value, and its concrete representation, money.”

What the French intellectual forgot to spell out was that the commodity (as an item of wealth produced to be sold) only comes into existence where there is private property and private production as exchange of products can only take place between separate owners. So to abolish the commodity can only be done by replacing private ownership by common ownership.

What we socialists advocate is the common ownership of productive resources; this will end production for sale and so the commodity, and so exchange value, and so money.

[Author]

Posts