Marxist Monetary Theory

Costas Lapavitsasis Professor of Economics at SOAS. He has published widely on money and finance, the Japanese economy, and the Eurozone. He writes often for the international press and his most recent books are Profiting Without Producing (Verso, 2013) and Against the Troika (Verso, 2015, with H. Flassbeck).

"The Wolfson Lecture Theatre (Senate House) was full and lively as Costas led off the afternoon by putting Marx’s analysis of ‘the universal equivalent’ to work in explaining money today in the current conjuncture and its role in overthrowing capitalism. His emphasis was more on the forms than the functions money has taken: commodity money (gold), simple fiat money, credit money, central bank fiat money and electronic monies. Costas foregrounded four ‘stylised facts’ of our current system: first, legal inconvertibility after 1971–1973; second, the quantitative dominance of credit money within the sphere of domestic money; third, the qualitative significance of legal tender as central bank created fiat money; and fourth, the pre-eminence of inconvertible legal tender from a small number of central banks forming international money. Furthermore, Costas made a significant comparison between Bitcoin and gold. [...] As Costas points out in this new book: ‘There is an ideology of money in capitalist society that is similar to religion in both its falseness and necessity.’ I have a firm opinion that everyone on the Left needs to better acknowledge the worth of understanding money as a concept and set of processes, in order to better appreciate money as a weapon of control and to actively resist the power of money to substitute for substantive democracy and genuine governance. Internationally, money is remarkably potent. In his talk, Costas emphasised it as ‘a lever for hierarchy among states’; our global history cannot be told without reference to the British pound, the US dollar and, more recently the €uro — as shown in the sorry story of Syriza’s reign in Greece. So, too, it becomes ‘a mechanism to entrench commercial advantage’ and ‘exercises power over entire societies through fear and identity’." – Anitra Nelson, Progress in Political Economy

• Preface1. Money as Art: The Form, the Material, and CapitalPART I: THE FORMS, THE FUNCTIONS AND THE QUANTITY OF MONEY2. The Theory of Credit Money: A Structural Analysis3. The Banking School and the Monetary Thought of Karl Marx4. The Classical Adjustment Mechanism of International Balances: Marx’s Critique5. Money and the Analysis of Capitalism: The Significance of Commodity MoneyPART II: CREDIT, INTEREST-BEARING CAPITAL, AND THE HOARDING OF MONEY6. Two Approaches to the Concept of Interest-Bearing Capital7. On Marx’s Analysis of Money Hoarding in the Turnover of CapitalPART III: THE ORIGIN OF MONEY AND THE NATURE OF COMMODITIES8. Commodities and Gifts: Why Commodities Represent More than Market Relations9. The Emergence of Money in Commodity Exchange, or Money as Monopolist of the Ability to Buy10. The Social Relations of Money as Universal Equivalent: A Response to InghamPART IV: THE COMPLEX REALITY OF CONTEMPORARY MONEY11. Relations of Power and Trust in Contemporary Finance12. The Monetary Basis of Financialised CapitalismBibliographyIndex