Review of Money and Totality by Fred Moseley — The Internationalists

This is a substantial book which the author admits has been 20 years in the making. [1] It deals primarily with Moseley’s own “Macro-Monetary” interpretation of Marx’s economic writings and takes up and rebuts criticisms of this interpretation. However, the book also looks critically at the major interpretations of Marx’s economic work, by Marxist academic economists, which have emerged in the last 100 years, giving a brief description of them and critically examining their failings. Many people may not realise this, but for the greater part of the twentieth century the accepted view among academic Marxist economists, which was generally known as the Standard Interpretation (SI), was that Marx made a fundamental mistake in his economic analysis which needed to be corrected. The key issue behind this is the so-called “transformation” problem, namely the transformation of values into prices of production. The SI and its offshoots claim that Marx failed to do this correctly and his work needs to be corrected. A number of corrections have been proposed and a further number of variations of these corrections themselves put forward in ever greater complexity. Moseley shows how these criticisms and corrections are founded on a misinterpretation of Marx’s work; and that the corrections each violate some other key aspect of Marx’s work. Moseley argues that Marx did not make a mistake and there is no transformation problem whatsoever....

Important if at all interested in Marx and Marxist/Marxian economics.

Monthly Review
Review of Money and Totality by Fred Moseley

Originally published: The Internationalists (August 22, 2019)