Monetary Functions In The Process Of Modernization

This paper discusses the social and historical functions of the money during the modernization process. In essence, it critically inspected the modern civilization and human living conditions through dialectical analysis on the functions of the money, in order to conduct the research of economic philosophy in the historical materialism's field: on one hand, it makes the research of economics obtain the general methodology significance of social criticism, on the other hand, it implements the methodology of historical materialism for specific researches, but not for some abstract methodology principles. From the perspective of economic philosophy, this paper studied and explained the great influence of human being's life made by money, how the social and historical function of money were built, developed and changed on the basis of economic function and the recent trend of money and monetary form and function. This paper has been divided into five chapters, which history materialism and logic unified methodology features.In Chapter 1, it discusses the origin of the money and its economic function on the basis of critique results of Marxist Political Economy, generally explained the money's social function on the basis of discussion of money's economic functions and pointed out the possibility of money intermediating social life in traditional society although many restrictions still exist and make some areas inaccessible for money. Along with the development of productivities, the capitalist production relations have generally been established. At the same time, money broke through almost all limits and entered into all the fields of human social life. The process that brought about the disintegration of the traditional way of life, greatly promoted the development of human society. However, it also brought about far-reaching negative influence and many major problems humanity facing today are always linked to it with a greater or lesser extent. Chapter2 and Chapter3, as the emphasis of this paper, provide a detailed explanation for it. We not only discussed the evolutive characteristics of the money's economic function during the modernization process, but also disclosed the distortion and deformation in the social life field brought about by the money on the basis of Marxism's "Critiques to Alienation". Although the present mainstream is still the deepening and development of money capital, it showed some new trends and characteristics. Chapter4 explores the latest trend of monetary form development in the background of globalization, and on this basis reveals the extremalization of social function of the money, which is a contemporary status. While we stress that the historical materialism provides a methodology basis for the study on the social and historical function of the money. But undoubtedly, it is never short of deeply thinking on the social function of the money in the history of mankind. Therefore, Chapter5 selects three main thoughts in the perspective of thinking history, simply overviews their thoughts about money or views related with money functions, and to make a preliminary evaluation from the position of Marxist.Through these specific research and explanation, the paper sought to show that money, as a product of specific historical stage, has become the most basic and universal historical intermediary between people in the contemporary general capitalization. In other words, the money principle fully implements in almost all social spheres of life in the widespread capitalization of human society, and becomes the universal characterization of social relations. In the process of modernization, the monetization of people's social relationship has brought mankind dual impacts, and such impacts are increasingly deepened. The developments of human future will depend on the real impact generated by the principle of the capital and money as well as "seek advantages and avoid disadvantages". As it should be, such a realistic possibilities and actual conditions of control and go beyond are provided by the development of history itself, and all of these are waiting for us to go deeper and explore more.