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Historical Materialism #104
Money and Totality: A Macro-Monetary Interpretation of Marx's Logic in Capital and the End of the Transformation Problem
This ambitious book presents a comprehensive new 'macro-monetary' interpretation of Marx's logical method in Capital , based on substantial textual evidence, which emphasises two main (1) Marx's theory is primarily a macroeconomic theory of the total surplus-value produced in the economy as a whole; and (2) Marx's theory is a monetary theory from beginning to end and the circuit of money capital - M - C - M' - is the logical framework of Marx's theory. It follows from this 'macro-monetary' interpretation that, contrary to the prevailing view, there is no 'transformation problem' in Marx's theory; i.e., Marx did not 'fail to transform the inputs of constant capital and variable capital' in his theory of prices of production in Part 2 of Volume III.
415 pages, Hardcover
First published October 19, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 16, 2021
When Michael Roberts called Anwar Shaikh's Capitalism the book of the year, I picked it up and set to reading. In the end, it turned out to be too dry to finish in one go — I imagine students daily confronted with conflicting economic models and practical equations will find it of great value, but I lack footing in the field. When the next year he called Moseley's Money and Totality the book of the decade, I stuck to the PDF. I found myself similarly overwhelmed, but this time for opposite reasons. Progress.
Moseley is primarily an economist, but one could be forgiven for treating him as a philologist. His main thing, like Michael Heinrich, is having an encyclopedic knowledge of not just the contents of all vols of Capital, but any drafts, references and commentaries Marx produced related to them. Through this, he maps the development of Marx's core concepts and their interdependence, very helpfully relating the three volumes to one another, establishing which level of abstraction each is on, and so on. That's for the macro-monetary interpretation part; the rest, however, is much more arcane.
The "transformation problem", which has haunted marxist economics for a century now and which has to varying degrees been absorbed, rebutted or added to by thinkers in the field, comes down to the accusation that Marx 'forgot' to transform the values of the MoP at the beginning of a production cycle into prices, which leads to two separate circuits (value and price) coexisting and more importantly rendering 'value' as a concept redundant. So far so good, and Moseley does an admirable job in gathering up all the most robust counterpoints, finding flaws with each of them and proposing his own. This latter discussion, however, which takes up half the book, has such a high angels-dancing-on-the-heads-of-pins vibe that started to question the entire point. If all these schools exist side by side and they each make quantifiable analyses and predictions, and Kliman and Shaikh for instance do, surely it would suffice to put them to the test of practice? Instead, they're all measured by how coherently they fit into the interpretation of Capital Moseley proposes. What difference they make in real life is never made clear. This nearly scholastic nitpicking reaches its zenith by the middle of the book, when Moseley dismisses Pierro Sraffa's framework by positing that in it, a hypothetical fully-automated economy would still produce profit, while for Marx it wouldn't. Cool, but what do they say about the actual state of the world economy? You won't find it in this book.
Moseley is primarily an economist, but one could be forgiven for treating him as a philologist. His main thing, like Michael Heinrich, is having an encyclopedic knowledge of not just the contents of all vols of Capital, but any drafts, references and commentaries Marx produced related to them. Through this, he maps the development of Marx's core concepts and their interdependence, very helpfully relating the three volumes to one another, establishing which level of abstraction each is on, and so on. That's for the macro-monetary interpretation part; the rest, however, is much more arcane.
The "transformation problem", which has haunted marxist economics for a century now and which has to varying degrees been absorbed, rebutted or added to by thinkers in the field, comes down to the accusation that Marx 'forgot' to transform the values of the MoP at the beginning of a production cycle into prices, which leads to two separate circuits (value and price) coexisting and more importantly rendering 'value' as a concept redundant. So far so good, and Moseley does an admirable job in gathering up all the most robust counterpoints, finding flaws with each of them and proposing his own. This latter discussion, however, which takes up half the book, has such a high angels-dancing-on-the-heads-of-pins vibe that started to question the entire point. If all these schools exist side by side and they each make quantifiable analyses and predictions, and Kliman and Shaikh for instance do, surely it would suffice to put them to the test of practice? Instead, they're all measured by how coherently they fit into the interpretation of Capital Moseley proposes. What difference they make in real life is never made clear. This nearly scholastic nitpicking reaches its zenith by the middle of the book, when Moseley dismisses Pierro Sraffa's framework by positing that in it, a hypothetical fully-automated economy would still produce profit, while for Marx it wouldn't. Cool, but what do they say about the actual state of the world economy? You won't find it in this book.
September 26, 2022
While this book is a good critique of Sweezy's, Bortkiewiez', Morishima's and Steedman's "critiques" to Marx theory, Moseley's theory is flawed as well (if not worse than the others mentioned).
Moseley's monetarist interpretation may be useful to make some great examples of marxist concepts, but in the long run, because money isn't the only essential concept of marxist theory (contrary to what Moseley believes), this whole work ends up vulgarizing Marx's conception of the economic spheres/capital circuit (ignoring the consume sphere/moment), constant and variable capital (reducing them to simply costs of production, therefore not treating the falling rate of profit), capital (only paying attention to money capital and not all of it's other forms), abstract labour (reducing it to simply salary Moseley can't understand the abstraction of concrete labour and the universal equivalencies of the production of commodities), means of production, technological innovation, relative surplus value, means of subsistence, etc.
I would recommend only reading this if you are interested in the critique of the other authors mentioned, but be warned: this is a simplistic reduction of Marxist theory to money circulation (which is important, but it doesn't represent the totality of economic phenomena Marx treated).
Moseley's monetarist interpretation may be useful to make some great examples of marxist concepts, but in the long run, because money isn't the only essential concept of marxist theory (contrary to what Moseley believes), this whole work ends up vulgarizing Marx's conception of the economic spheres/capital circuit (ignoring the consume sphere/moment), constant and variable capital (reducing them to simply costs of production, therefore not treating the falling rate of profit), capital (only paying attention to money capital and not all of it's other forms), abstract labour (reducing it to simply salary Moseley can't understand the abstraction of concrete labour and the universal equivalencies of the production of commodities), means of production, technological innovation, relative surplus value, means of subsistence, etc.
I would recommend only reading this if you are interested in the critique of the other authors mentioned, but be warned: this is a simplistic reduction of Marxist theory to money circulation (which is important, but it doesn't represent the totality of economic phenomena Marx treated).
March 2, 2019
I don't have especially great math skills, so reading this book was a bit of a slog, but Moseley's reading and explanation of CAPITAL and the "transformation problem" is the only one that makes complete sense to me, given what I read of CAPITAL Vol. 1 and Vol. 3. So, if you care about this sort of thing, by all means read this book!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews