Money

This chapter explains Marx’s concept of money and how it is fundamentally different from other concepts of money in the social sciences. Money is a contradictory object that can be fully understood only through a dialectical approach. Failure to acknowledge the contradictory constitution of money leads to a theoretical misunderstanding of what money in capitalism is. In this regard, the Neoclassical and Keynesian approaches to money are incomplete and inadequate. But the Marxist theory of money also faces its twenty-first-century challenges, among them two in particular: the determination of the value of money and how inconvertible money can function as a measure of value. The last part of the chapter explains how inconvertible money operates in our contemporary international monetary system and how it relates to the existence of fictitious capital.