ABSTRACT
The monetary reform proposed by Proudhon’s disciples to replace gold by labour time-chits is the first major motive of Marx’s reflexion on money. It pushed him, before demonstrating how a commodity becomes money in Capital, to show in the Grundrisse why money is and must be a commodity. For the basic critique Marx levels at Proudhonians is that their reform ignores the specific opposition between living labour and dead labour in commodity production, and therefore that money must be distinct from the commodity as well it must be at the same time the product of a particular labour (1). Even when the monetary regime loses its gold anchorage, value constraints still shape monetary policies, so that the end of the Bretton Woods system itself proceeds directly from contradictions arising from the overissuing of a money anchored in gold (2). On the other hand, as an examination of recent Institutionalist works shows, as soon as one tries to institute money in another way than on the exchange relation of commodities, one is forced to assume in fact all the social characters specific to commodity production (3). More generally, if economic analysis has failed to integrate money in the modern economic system up to now, with the exception of Keynes who will be discussed later, it is because it relies on conceptions of value that do not establish the necessity of the objective form of value. Perhaps this explains why quantitative theory of money has been able to merge with the theory of utility value as well as with Ricardo’s theory of labour value (4).
