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this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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Breadtube if it didn't suck.
Post videos you genuinely enjoy and want to share, duh. Celebrate the diversity of interests shared by chapochatters by posting a deep dive into Venetian kelp farming, I dunno. Also media criticism, bite-sized versions of left-wing theory, all the stuff you expected. But I am curious about that kelp farming thing now that you mentioned it.
Low effort / spam videos might be removed, especially weeb content.
There is a cytube that you can paste videos into and watch with whoever happens to be around. It's open submission unless there's something important to commandeer it with at the time.
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Hudson and Desai are right: money has no value.
In fact, Hudson has yelled at people for regurgitating a “fascist talking point” when someone once asked him, during an interview, that if money has inherent value.
Marx called gold the money-commodity in Vol. 1 because at the time, which was the gold standard era, every economist still bought into Adam Smith’s “money = barter” myth. Marx’s take on money was more nuanced in Vol. 3.
Hudson’s research into the palatial origins of money and interest (popularized by David Graeber in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years) has thoroughly debunked Smith’s barter myth and demonstrated that money is simply debt (and debt is simply a promise).
When the currency issuer gives you money (by purchasing something created with your labor), what you are receiving is an IOU (debt owed to you by the currency issuer) - a promise that you can use that money to exchange for something else. Therefore, money/gold has no inherent value, but merely represents a promise to you by the currency issuer who has the legal monopoly of issuing and coining the currency.
It is now much more accepted in the field that gold emerged as a proxy of money during the Middle Ages because unlike the early civilizations when the population base was much smaller, it was very difficult for the sovereignties of the Middle Ages to legally enforce money as a form of debt, especially when it comes to trade. And they still did it in the colonies where they would force the native population in the colonies to pay a hut tax in exchange for their labor. Therefore, the role of money as debt never went away, simply that the authorities could not feasibly enforce its role during the Middle Ages.
In other words, gold was an inferior substitute of money due to the technological limitations in transportation and communications at the time. In the modern economy with a modern financial system where everything has been digitalized and computerized, there is simply no reason for gold (or any kind of fixed exchange rate regime) to be used as a currency simply because the currency issuer, as a monetary sovereign, can easily enforce their legal authority almost everywhere in the world, instantaneously.
I don't agree that money as a commodity is restricted to Volume 1. You might not have meant it exactly like this, but it seems implied in your comment that Marx only considered money a commodity in a rudimentary stage of analysis, which at a later stage is completely done away with. Certainly in Volume 3, Marx regards money in its fully developed aspects, as a pole fully separated from the commodity; but this is only justified after having traced money from a mere commodity to something more.
In Theories of Surplus Value, Marx repeats the money-as-a-commodity point in several places. I don't think he intended on restricting it to some primitive analysis in Volume 1.
If money is at first a commodity, and if over time a symbol of money representing the material predominates as money in practice, what is actually money then? Is it the symbol or the material it references? I find it impossible to understand a symbol without its referent. As much as paper money lives in an alienated sphere all on its own... I think it must, in the final analysis, ultimately point back to value. The "IOU" you mention is exactly that, a promise that there is a commodity (a value) underpinning that piece of paper, if push comes to shove. I, of course, agree that the symbol does not itself have value.
The historical research about debt is quite fascinating. Hudson and Graeber have done a great service in bringing attention to this. The fact that money is far older than capitalism is something that should make any Marxist scratch their head about the way Marx explains the historical development of money. I recall Radhika Desai, in one of the Geopolitical Economy Hours, saying something like (paraphrasing): "Money has existed for millennia, but capitalist money is of course a new development. The need for something that satisfies the various functions of money, laid out by Marx, causes changes to this pre-existing money so that it can perform these functions. Capital warps and twists this ancient category and converts it into a capitalist one."
In any case I'm happy to read your response and appreciate your insight as always. I'm always willing to learn and I don't pretend to be an expert on this.
I’m not an expert either haha, and happy to discuss. Please give the Hudson article and Graeber’s book a read.
I think many Marxists who are resistant to this view (for example, Michael Roberts) is that they are still very much stuck to the “fixed exchange rate regime” mindset and haven’t realized that a lot of the restrictions no longer apply in a free floating exchange rate system, where money is not tied to gold/another currency.