Conclusion
Money is a concept that logically emerges from the axiomatic premise of the commodity as a unit of free and fair exchange in the marketplace. It embodies the idea of the exchange-value of commodities as a universal equivalent, and thus makes exchange possible at a larger scale than it would be in an economy based on barter (an economy based solely on exchange-value without a proper notion of money). Marx’s argument in the opening chapters of Capital reveals the intricate relationship between the mutually reinforcing ideas of money and the commodity, showing how the latter gives rise to the former in a logical progression.1 Both money and the commodity are real abstractions, or objective fictions, in the sense that they are produced in the world through acts of exchange, rather than needing to be consciously registered in the minds of beholders (as ‘regular’ abstractions or fictions do).
Discussion Questions
Why do some services run at a loss? Uber was famously unprofitable for >10 years, during which, they provided rides at a steep discount compared to what it cost them. Were they being stupid or were they actually realizing value in some other dimension?
How should we interpret OpenAI’s valuation when the scale of capital required to realize its roadmap appears far ahead of present revenue and realized surplus? What assumptions about future profitability, market control, and monetary conditions are being priced into that valuation, and how stable are those assumptions? Is AI company valuations fiscally irresponsible?
What conditions does Marx’s analysis suggest are necessary for something to function as a universal equivalent, and to what extent do cryptocurrencies satisfy or fail those conditions?
What do you think about proposals like UBI (or universal basic tokens, as Sam Altman has
suggested)? To what degree are they propaganda vs useful frameworks for running a society where the value of labour has fallen dramatically?
Footnotes