The Nature Of Money And Its Power Dimension

This research tries to endow a “social technology” perspective to the study of the origin and nature of money through interdisciplinary efforts.By using the Marxist methodology,I hope to have a preliminary critique of current dimension of money's power.The first chapter analyzes the tradition of credit money in western money theory history and contemporary money theory.It introduces the viewpoints of Barbon,Macleod,Knapp,Keynes,Wray,Sun through the perspectives of the origin of money and the money mechanism.They all basically think that there is no inherent value inside money,and it is usually an economic technology in recording credit and cleaning debt.They reason why money occupies fluidity in business community,is other subjects,sovereign state normally,bolster its credit.Barbon thinks that the value of commodity comes from scarcity,which comes from the difference of supply and demand of useful stuff.The value of metal comes from the legal system.Macleod thinks the necessity of money is a result of the inequality of exchange,and the function of money represents the debt resulted from unequal exchange.Knapp thinks the chartality of debt and value is the premise of money's existence.The meaning of money is originated from the legal order sustained by the state,rather than the stamp and token on it.Keynes thinks that account money is the primary concept of money.The state theory of money appears its essences only when money evolves to a higher level,and the state money has three forms,commodity money,fiat money and management money.Wray thinks that the money under the modern money theory has no inherent value,and it is a kind of sovereign money.The government first create a kind of account money,and requires that all tax should be paid in this form.Sun treats that the loan issued by the bank as the resource of money circulation.He treats the credit money,rather than the commodity money,as the basis of modern financial system.The money owned by non-bank subject is created by bank ultimately.The second chapter regards the money as a social technology of credit and clearing.This chapter understand the nature of money as means of payment,rather than means of circulation,through the critique of Adam Smith's theory of money's origin.By introducing the Fei of Yap island,the tally of England,the economic practice of early Sumer civilization,I regard credit and recording as the core factor to understand money as means of payment.The concept of universal value unit is the cognitive premise of the creation of money.It is beneficial to break up the “material fetishism” in monetary theory when you see money as a social technology about credit and clearing.There have been many token forms in history.The origins of credit and the means for recording will be used as analytical variates,in order to classify the monetary token forms which have been in existence.Money always participates in transaction,and the core dynamism behind the change of money's token forms is reducing transaction cost.There are many other dynamisms of the change of token forms,such as political control,preserving tradition,saving value.The third chapter thinks that the money theory of Karl Marx is the peak of the commodity money theory,but it surpasses the economic sphere and introduces the domain of socio-historical perspective.Based on his analysis of the inherent contradiction of money,he discovered the production process of surplus value and further uncovered the crisis mechanism of capitalist economy.Using Marxism as methodology,I probe into the implications of money's power in contemporary world.Marx discusses the origin of money through the value expression in commodity value relation.For him,the nature of money is never only the contents about means of payment or means of circulation,but an expression of the social relationships between people,which are based on certain mode of production.The duality between value and use value in commodity results the inherent contradiction of money.This contradiction is an important clue to understand wage labor relationship and surplus value,even the economic crisis of capitalism.In capitalist society,fetishism covers the relationship between people behind materials,and embody invisible relations into visible materials.It transforms unequal relation into visible monetary difference,which is essential for power to unfold itself.Money functions under three layers of constrains,time,spatial and institutional,and it exerts its power in these three dimensions.