Economic-Philosophic Manuscript Of 1978 As It Were Part III— Robert Paul Wolff

Capital as such – self-expanding value, money that has been freed from all natural encumbrances and can finally realize its true, insane [verrückt] destiny, which is to beget more money ad infinitum – does not exist in the physical quantities model. The “metaphysical” objectification of exchange relationships, productive activities, and technical relations in money is an essential fact of capitalism. It is not one of the historical, psychological, or political background conditions of that matrix of technical coefficients “to which, of course, much study must be devoted.” Nor is it one of a number of arrangements that can be conjoined to the self-same matrix – as though a society were a modular construction of prefabricated units! Capitalism requires commodity production, and wage labour, which presuppose money. Money [exchange value per se] must be divorced entirely from any physical form, from any use value, from any particular system of production. It must be available, promiscuously, instantaneously, unencumbered by religious, historical, cultural, linguistic, or geographical constraints. The obsession with gold is a passing phase, a last clutching at the security blanket of economic infancy. Only those whose minds have not transcended their senses require, from time to time, the sensory reassurance of clinking coins. The true inhabitants of our brave new world can make do entirely with credits and debits in disembodied accounts.

This was written in 1978 and never surfaced publicly until now.

On could say that "money" as such is not not a physical object that is produced, that is a commodity. A "money thing" is only a token of money, which remains "metaphysical" rather than physical. This non-physical "stuff" (stock and flow) is what serves as the "spirit" that animates modern production economies based on commodity production by wage labor and goods exchanged for a money price in markets. Moreover, there is no evidence that were ever any barter economies that subsequently transformed into money-based economies. 

Capitalism added industry as privately owned technology operated by wage labor to agriculture based on titled land, gradually replacing agricultural workers with technology, making workers available for factory work in industry. This radically changed the means of production and thereby the dominant relations of production, as well as the superstructure built on this foundation.

While capitalism did not invent money or markets, it made them central economically and financially. In the pre-industrial agricultural age, most of the work was done either by slaves or serfs. Slaves and serfs received only what was needed for social reproduction, that is, minimal support, while the land owners enjoyed the bulk of the result of the work as economic rent. Commodities produced by crafts were minimal in such economies.

In the industrial age, commodity production took over from agriculture and former agricultural workers became factory workers. While agricultural works could be sustained from what they produced, with the surplus extracted as economic rent, this was not so of industrial workers. They were paid a wage amount to less than what they produced to purchase commodities in money-based markets. The surplus value of what wage-labor produced in excess of what workers were paid was extracted as economic rent by the owners of capital goods (land, natural resources, and technology used as means of production). Pretty much the same arrangement as previously.

While this shift manifested in the physical, behavioral world, it resulted from the metaphysical (non-physical) inputs of growing knowledge as the basis of technological innovation, including management and finance in addition to industry, and "money" as a system of debt and credits underlying and driving modern monetary production economies.

The Philosopher's Stone
ECONOMIC-PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPT OF 1978 AS IT WERE PART III

Robert Paul Wolff