Marx on Money (2018)

Book Review from the April 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Marx’s Theory of the Genesis of Money’. By Samezo Kuruma,  (translated and edited by Michael Schauerte. Brill, 2018)

A collection of essays which examines how, why and through what is a commodity ‘money’. It is based solely on the first two chapters of Marx’s Capital, Volume One. Kuruma (1893-1982) was a Japanese academic who specialised in Marxist economics. Schauerte, who provides a 20-page introduction, is a regular contributor to the Socialist Standard.

By beginning with the commodity and the theory of value, Marx was able to bring out what he called the ‘power of abstraction’. This simply means setting aside whatever elements are not relevant to the theoretical question at hand. As Schauerte points out, Kuruma’s interpretation is not original and is simply a close reading of what Marx actually wrote. An important reason for doing this is that Kuruma thought he needed to show that some of his colleagues had misunderstood Marx in important ways. This book is a specialist work and the general reader would perhaps be better directed towards Marx’s Capital itself or some of the widely-available introductions to it.

Lew Higgins