INTRODUCTION: PRIMITIVE AND MODERN MONEY

Money is central to our lives. But what exactly is it? A definition is surprisingly elusive. Money is, puzzlingly, both a thing and a relation. And the relation – because it is one of power that is interpersonal and unspecific, over the labour not of another but of others in general – tends to be mystified, to be disguised as a thing. Further, different kinds of thing, used in different kinds of transaction in different kinds of society, have all been called ‘money’: mediaeval coinage, the silver of second millennium bc Mesopotamia, large stone discs on the Pacific island of Yap, the shells circulated on the Trobriand islands, the money used in advanced industrial societies (‘modern money’), and so on.

A detailed analysis of ‘money’ will be provided in due course (1c). I begin here with modern money, which – unlike some other kinds of money – is a mere token, without use-value or even (sometimes) physical embodiment. If imagined nevertheless – as it generally is – as a thing, intangible yet promiscuous, what sort of thing is it? Apparently a token or symbol, commanding the labour of others. But a symbol of what? Not, surely, of all or any one of the numerous goods and services that it can be exchanged for, but rather of the homogeneous, numerical exchange-value abstracted from – so as to embody command over – goods and services.