Peter May — A communist manifesto for money?

I am reposting the article below by Wally Mooney (with permission) which was an indirect reply to Paul Mason’s recent article.

I thought it was a very lucid and well-argued piece on why Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)’s conclusions as to how money is created is factually correct and that is the case whether you are a Marxist or a Capitalist or somewhere in between. For me it also illuminated Marxist ideas (with which I have to imagine, Paul Mason presumably agrees).

Must-read, IMHO.

Wally Mooney has this essentially right.

Opponents rightly fear the job guarantee as a step in this direction through increasing labor bargaining power by termination the buffer stock of unemployed that the ownership and managerial class uses to "discipline" workers and the central banks employs to control inflation using NAIRU (non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment).

Aside: Peter may writes: "I was rather surprised that there was so much to agree with here – yes there are a few controversial and, for me, dubious ideas such as 'there can be no capitalist system without money' which I’d suggest should be: no proper economy without money…."

While there may not be a proper economy without money, isn't arguing that. Marx is saying that money — a monetary production economy — is the basis for capitalism since capitalists use money to produce goods for sale for more money — investment is for return, that is, profit. The profit comes from the wage being less than the market price of commodities produced by wage labor. The end-in-view is not to provide a rationale for abolishing money but rather for terminating the extraction of economic rent in the form of "surplus value," profit accruing from unpaid labor time. 

Unpaid work is a form of slavery. The argument that workers agree to it is bogus, since in a monetary economy in which goods are rationed by ability to pay for them, income from a job is necessary for those without other income or assets, which is most workers. So there is no choice but to accept a job offer in which the work is at a disadvantage.

See Karl Marx. Capital Volume One, Part II: The Transformation of Money into Capital, Chapter Four: The General Formula for Capital.

This is similar feudal land lords extracting economic rent from agricultural. Capitalism is a continuation of feudalism in another guise, with the factory being substituted for the manor and the capitalist standing in for the land lord.

Progressive Pulse
A communist manifesto for money?
Peter May