The Study Of Marx’s Monetary Theory

Marx’s monetary theory, which is an important part of his political economic system, is formed during his criticizing bourgeois political economy and revealing the nature and truth of bourgeois production relations. His understanding of currency goes through four stages.Firstly, during the period from the Jewish Problem to Die heilige Familie, the currency is read as the representation of people’s alienated relationship by Marx on the position of humanism. He thinks that the currency, which is the medium of people’s exchange relationship in the first place, gradually turns to become the purpose of the relationship. It is the currency that causes the alienation of people’s exchange relationship, urges people to pursue innumerable money and become the slave of the money, and leads to the confusion of all the natural quality and people’s characters.Secondly, during the period from The Outline of Feuerbach to lohnarbeit und capital, historical materialism is established and developed. Starting from the specific, historical and realistic society, Marx brings the dimension of social relations into his theories, and realizes that the currency can only turn to the medium of experienced exchange relations in the society with private ownership. In addition, labor and labor force are distinguished from each other. Marx discovers that the essence of the exchange between workers and capitalists is in fact the exchange between wage labor and capital. However, during this period, the relations of production is mostly understood as those of distribution and exchange, which causes that Marx attributes the opposition of the capitalists class and the workers class to the proverty, the result of unequal distribution, which the workers class can’t bear, so that Marx still can’t catch the revolutionary source and inner contradictions of the society with private ownership.Thirdly, after comprehensively studying the traditional political economy, especially the theories about the currency in London, Marx starts to rethink and criticize David Ricardo’s quantity theory of money and labor theory of value, which he has always been dependent on. Marx establishes his conception of history and his political economic method which is described as’from the abstract to the concrete’in Economics Manuscripts from1857to1858. In the Currency Chapter, Marx criticizes Darimont’s opinions about publishing and using the money that represents certain working hours, and comes up with the opinion that just founding a new currency system makes no difference to the current relations of production, nor to the maladies of the capitalist society. Marx makes a preliminary discussion on the inner connection of the goods and the currency, as well as that of the value, the exchange value and the price. He solves the problem of the currency’s origin by analyzing the inner contradictions of the goods for the first time, states the functions of the currency specifically, and makes a preliminary explanation on his thoughts about the fetish of money. In the Capital Chapter, Marx begins to distinguish the currency from the capital in a real way. The capital, which is the complete form of the currency, can be exchanged with the labor, and save itself in circulation. However, the fact of the exchange of the capital and the labor is that the capital actually occupies the living labor and gains the surplus labor that can increase the capital’s value by giving the workers the salary that can only keep them living. Therefore, the truth and essence of the currency, as well as the secrets that are hidden behind the currency can be discovered only when the essence of the capital, as well as the inner contradictions and relationships of the capital productions, is clearly analyzed.Fourthly, the currency and its complete form, the capital, contribute to the perversion of people’s relationships. On one hand, the currency turns the social nature of individual labor and the social relationships of individual workers into the form of object, and the capital turns the relation between the workers and the capitalists into the relation of objects. On the other hand, the participation of the commercial capital and interest-bearing capital pushes the mystery of the capital and the complete materialization of social relations to their extreme and ultimate level, and the capital thus accomplishes its pure form of fetishism.