Friday, March 1, 2013

Money Wisdom #91

"The labour theory of value committed Marx, and his successors, to a version of the commodity theory of money, with all its attendant errors. To this extent, Marx's general theory of money was mistaken. He could not have been more wrong, and the error could not have been more unequivocally stated. 'The principal difficulty in the analysis of money is surmounted as soon as it is understood that the commodity is the origin of money ' (Marx 1970: 64). Most importantly, this attachment to the labour theory of value of commodity-money prevented Marx from realizing that his theory of capital as a social relation applied also to money."

Geoffrey Ingham The Nature of Money (2004) p.61