Capital Par Excellence: On Money as an obscure thing

Against the background of the contemporary debate about financialisation, the paper conceptualises the capitalist labour economy as fundamentally a monetary system. It argues that money is not a capitalist means of organising its labour economy but that it is rather a capitalist end. The argument ex...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Estudios de filosofía (Medellín, Colombia) Colombia), 2020-07 (62), p.33-56
Main Author: Bonefeld, Werner
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
capital
Capitalism
Critical theory
Fetishism
humanities
marx
marxism
money
Neoliberalism
PHILOSOPHY
Political economy
surplus value
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Summary:Against the background of the contemporary debate about financialisation, the paper conceptualises the capitalist labour economy as fundamentally a monetary system. It argues that money is not a capitalist means of organising its labour economy but that it is rather a capitalist end. The argument examines and finds wanting conceptions of money in political economy, including Keynesianism and neoliberalism, and argues that the debate about financialisation is fundamentally based on the propositions of political economy. It holds that Marx’s critique of political economy conceives of money as the form of value and expounds money-making as the purpose of the capital labour economy. Thus, the labour theory of value is fundamentally a monetary theory of value, labour is the means of valorisation, and that is, of money in process, and as such capital. Making money out of money is capital as its most rational. In the form of credit, money posits wealth as a claim on future surplus value.
ISSN:0121-3628
2256-358X
DOI:10.17533/udea.ef.n62a03