ABSTRACT
If the function of money as a means of payment has not been dealt with in the previous chapter, it is because this function completely transforms the role of money in economic relationships. Even if it just means that the transfer of the commodity and its effective payment are separated in time, this separation institutes a debt relationship, which progressively makes money the universal subject-matter of contracts. It therefore plays a decisive role in the general transformation of simple circulation into the circulation of money and commodities specific to capitalism (1). Furthermore, since this function really develops through usury, it produces monetary fortunes on the one side and the impoverishment of a mass of small producers on the other. It speeds up the transition to capitalism by accelerating the conversion of rents in nature or in kind into payments in money, and the social differentiation of peasantry into antagonic classes. The ‘transition problem’ therefore relates to the formation of a production mode in which the exploitation of other’s labour relies on purely economic relationships (2). The fact that England preceded other large countries came neither from its soil rich in fossils, nor from the control of foreign markets, nor even from the exploitation of the American continent. England emerged as the first world economic power because of the historical convergence of factors necessary for the separation between living labour and possessors of the social means of production. Through its combination of agriculture, commerce, social structure and legal system, England rapidly transformed traditional agriculture into intensive exploitation of land and wool from the fourteenth century onwards (3). This specific way of transition justifies the revolutionary character of the producer’s transformation into a capitalist merchant and conversely the conservative role of the big merchant becoming himself a producer (4).
