Money and Totality

MONEY AND TOTALITY:
A Macro-Monetary Interpretation of Marx’s Logic In Capital and the End of the “Transformation Problem”
a book discussion with author Fred Moseley
at Unnameable Books
600 Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn, NY

Correcting a longstanding misinterpretation, Moseley argues that there is no ‘transformation problem’ in Marx’s economic theory. This ambitious book presents a comprehensive new ‘macro-monetary’ interpretation of Marx’s logical method in Capital which emphasizes two points: (1) Marx’s theory is primarily a macroeconomic theory of the total surplus-value produced in the economy as a whole; and (2) Marx’s theory is a monetary theory and the circuit of money capital, M-C-M, is its logical framework.

“The complete form of the process is therefore M-C-M’, where M =M + ∆M, i.e. the original sum advanced plus an increment. This increment or excess over the original value I call ‘surplus-value’.”
—Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1

“The capitalists, like hostile brothers, divide among themselves the loot of other people’s labor, so that on an average one receives the same amount of unpaid labor as another.”
—Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, Volume 2

Fred Moseley is Professor of Economics at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of The Falling Rate of Profit in the Postwar United States Economy and editor of Marx’s Logical Method: A Reappraisal, New Investigations of Marx’s Method, Heterodox Economic Theories: True or False?, and Marx’s Theory of Money: Modern Reappraisals.