by Kumar David-October 10, 2015
Underlying this diverse range of inquiries is the seminal role of money; that is credit, interest, and money creation by banks and state. Amazingly, this was long before central banks emerged - the Fed was created in 1913. Marx was getting deeply into money as a universal commodity; money was sharing with labour the position of primary determinant of the capitalist economic order. He sees money as the universal commodity via which all exchange is mediated and influenced (not a convenient medium of exchange only). He realises that value is discernible only in a market where all commodities, labour power included, are exchanged for and via this universal commodity. Surely he is evolving a Money Theory of Value which integrates Generalised LTV as a conceptual building block; but he did not complete this theoretical leap explicitly. The value of a commodity is now redefined as its exchange vale, which is its market price, which in turn is its average cost of production plus the prevailing equilibrium rate of profit (the average rate of surplus-value in the economy or the average rate of social exploitation).