Marx on Money by Suzanne De Brunhoff

Author:Suzanne De Brunhoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

A. THE STRUCTURES OF CREDIT

In Volume III of Capital Marx returns to the question of credit a number of times. The place he assigns to loans and the lenders of money-capital is clearly indicated in a digression in a discussion of financing:

“The circulation of commodities always requires two things: commodities which are thrown into circulation, and money which is likewise thrown into it.”53 This phrase obviously refers to the general theory of money.

The “special conditions” of the reproduction of the social product are subject to “the general law … by which the money which the producers of commodities advance into circulation returns to them when the circulation of commodities takes place normally.” (This is in regard to the financing of reproduction.)

From which it incidentally follows that, if behind the producer of the commodities himself there is a financial capitalist who in turn advances money capital (in the strictest sense of the word, capital value in the form of money) to the industrial capitalist, then the exact point to which that money will flow back is the pocket of the financial capitalist. Thus although money passes more or less through everybody’s hands, the mass of the money in circulation belongs to the department of finance capital, concentrated and organized in the form of banks, etc. It is the way in which it advances its capital which, in the last analysis, produces the constant return of that capital to it in the form of money, although this process is in turn made possible by the reconversion of industrial capital into monetary capital.

This third point, “incidental” in the context of the system of reproduction, is fundamental in introducing the analysis of the structures of credit.

Marx is here about to put the third stage of his monetary theory, the “system of credit,” in place. He has already indicated that credit functions in a circular pattern, and has at the same time shown that the relations between money, money-capital, and credit depend on the specific relationships between economic agents, with the capitalist class here divided into industrial capitalists and financial capitalists, who share the surplus value. The majority of the constituent elements of the monetary theory of credit have thus already been introduced before being brought together again in Part V of Volume III of Capital. The same is true of the idea of financial capital, referred to in the passage cited above and defined in Chapter XIX of Volume III.

Financial capital is money-capital, a fraction of total capital. But it is money-capital functioning “autonomously” to provide the financing of capitalist operations: its “capitalist function consists exclusively in performing these operations for the entire class of industrial and commercial capitalists.”54

A technical division of labor takes place between the capitalists who take charge of the financial function and industrial capitalists. It reflects the role of money-capital in the circulation of capital, but is never total, “Because a part of the technical operations connected with money circulation must be carried out by the dealers and producers of commodities themselves.

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