Inflation and Deflation (1956)

From the July 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

“In so far as the payments balance one another, money functions only ideally as money of account, as a measure of value. In so far as actual payments have to be made, money does not serve as a circulating medium, as a mere transient agent in the interchange of products, but as the individual incarnation of social labour, as the independent form of existence of exchange value, as the universal commodity. This contradiction comes to a head in those phases of industrial and commercial crises which are known as monetary crises. Such a crises occurs only where the ever-lengthening chain of payments, and an artificial system of settling them, has been fully developed. Whenever there is a general and extensive disturbance of this mechanism, no matter what its cause, money becomes suddenly and immediately transformed, from its merely ideal shape of money of account, into hard cash. Profane commodities can no longer replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes valueless, and their value vanishes in the presence of its own independent form. On the eve of the crisis, the bourgeois, with self-sufficiency that springs from intoxicating prosperity, declares money to be a vain imagination. Commodities alone are money. But now the cry is everywhere: money alone is a commodity. As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth.”  

(‘Capital” pages 154-155, chapter 3, on “Money or the Circulation of Commodities.” Kerr edition.)

Letter: This Money Business (1963)

Letter to the Editors from the April 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

This Money Business

Sir,

Socialists must be “suckers” if they swallow the half-baked stuff written by Dick Jacobs in the December "SS”.

Money is indispensable in a complex industrial society such as ours. It represents a claim on society, which should be everyone's right. In a society that genuinely believed in the brotherhood of man. this would be recognised.

What is wrong is that anyone should have to work for money in order to live, for this today turns him into a slave. It is unnecessary. Today, with mass-production and technology, fewer and fewer people are actually needed to do the necessary work of society. The rest have to find unnecessary work through industries designed to induce people (with or without money) to acquire unnecessary wants, or in expensive war preparations etc.

Dick Jacobs definition of money—a "'medium of exchange and measure of value” is only something he has read out of a book! Money—whatever its form—is the country’s credit.

Today, this is mostly manipulated by the Joint Stock banks for their own profit, when this function should belong to society. Hence, what should be free, accumulates as debt, with interest. This, with our huge National Debt, leads to inflation.

While shells, gold, or anything else that is scarce, can be used as currency—in Europe in 1945 cigarettes filled the role—paper does just as well if there is confidence in it. It is costless, and in a properly organised society it can be scientifically adjusted to society’s actual needs.

Common ownership of wealth doesn’t touch the problem, let alone solve it! That way can only lead to another tyranny! It is society's control over its own credit that matters. For then, but only then, will it be possible to make everyone, unconditionally, and as by right, a shareholder in Great Britain Ltd. And whether we call that “Capitalism” or “Socialism ” won’t matter two hoots!

This is neither more nor less than practical Christianity.

L. Knight

Guernsey, C.I.

Reply:

You criticise the article in the Socialist Standard for December, 1962, and attempt to show why money will continue to be necessary.

Both on grounds of historical accuracy and of theory your arguments are quite unconvincing.

Your first contention is that money is indispensable because we live in a “complex industrial society.” You omit to say which complexities you mean. They are of two kinds (a) the technical complexities of production and transport and (b) the financial and commercial complexities of capitalist private property.

Of course, money is indispensable to the latter. But equally the existence of money is not related to the complexities or absence of complexities of production and transport. This you know very well because you accept that money functioned in primitive communities where there were no such complexities.

Your second line is that “money—whatever its form—is the country’s credit yet, as you know, it functioned when and where there was no credit system and no banks.

As a side line you link up inflation causally with the existence of a huge national debt. It is no more true than its converse. The currency deflation in Britain in the nineteen twenties was carried out alongside a huge national debt.

We accept (we have been saying it for half a century) that with capitalism removed the production of socially useful articles and services could be vastly increased, so that a Socialist world, with people taking freely what they need, is a practical proposition. But you, without giving any reason whatever, still want the consumption of these articles to be dependant on the possession of money.

You actually use the phrase that living by right should be “unconditional,” yet you want it to be conditional on the possession of money.

You manage to discuss the existing social system without mentioning its fundamental basis, that the means of production and distribution are privately owned and concentrated in the hands of a small minority. It is precisely because you turn a blind eye on this basic fact of capitalism that you can pretend that the difference between capitalism and socialism is a mere matter of words.

It also leads you into the absurdity of supposing that armaments exist to provide work for redundant workers. The armed forces exist for the purpose, very necessary to the capitalists, of protecting their ownership against the dispossessed class at home and foreign capitalist groups abroad.

Our contributor was quite right; and it is not Socialists who are (to use your word) “suckers” but those who cannot see the realities of capitalism.

Editorial Committee.

A “Clarion” mare’s nest. (1906)

From the August 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Clarion is a comic paper, but never more so than when it treats of economics. Its latest outbreak is entitled, with unconscious humour, “Mind Your Own Business”, and advocates the adoption on a large scale of the Guernsey plan of raising money for municipal expenditure by issuing notes redeemable at term and acceptable in payment of taxes.

The people of Guernsey are reputed to have raised £4,500 in this way, about 100 years ago, calling in £450 annually to be destroyed until this whole had been redeemed, and they are understood to have never repeated the experiment.. The Clarion writer, however, to rid the municipalities of their debts and to obviate all further borrowings, advises the wholesale adoption of the Guernsey idea, no doubt upon the principle that since a man may take a fraction of a grain of strychnine without serious harm, he may therefore take a few ounces with impunity.

To show what an utter nostrum this currency fad is, it is only necessary to pass in review the conditions governing the currency.

The earliest form of exchange we have knowledge of is barter – the direct exchange of one thing of use for another, as, for example, cattle for implements of war, or these for ornaments, and so on. A stage higher in civilization we find the exchange of goods has become more frequent and that the old method of barter has become too cumbrous. Among tribes whose chief wealth was cattle we naturally find cattle being used as measure of the values of other things and as the medium of exchange. Cattle, however, soon gave place to the “precious metals”, whose use for ornament, whose durability, convenience and divisibility peculiarly fit them for use as exchange medium or money.

Gold and silver would, therefore, tend to be generally accepted in exchange for other things of equal value: that is to say, for things requiring approximately the same amount of toil to obtain. With the further advance of Society, and the still greater frequency of exchange; the numerous disputes between buyer and seller respecting the quality or weight of the silver or gold used to facilitate exchange, led to the adoption of an official stamp or coinage to secure uniformity, and as a guarantee of weight and quality of the metal. Here we have money in its complete form; but whatever metal may be serving as the universal equivalent it had its origin as a simple commodity, and was singled out by reason of its convenience to serve as the expression of value in general.

It will now be seen that money is wealth, although the Clarion man cannot grasp the fact because he does not distinguish between popular and scientific terminology. Popular phraseology calls everything money which serves as circulating medium, whether it really be money or only a credit substitute for it. Accurately speaking, however, money comprises solely the coins of the standard metal; since notes and tokens are merely instruments of credit and not really money any more than theatre or soup tickets.

The significant fact is that to-day through no matter what mechanism of exchange, it is only those who have commodities for sale which are desired by others, who can exchange at all, either directly or indirectly; and only then when there are individuals in the same position as themselves (i.e., having commodities for sale desired by the other commodity owners) to exchange with. The fact is at the bottom of all exchange, whether the medium of circulation be gold, notes or whatnot. Clearly, then, the amount of circulating medium is determined by the value of the goods to be exchanged by these possessors of the desired commodities, who are facing each other so much more easily through the institution of money.

It is, therefore, the disorganisation of production and distribution which causes gluts and crises, and the currency fluctuates in quantity as required by the circulation of commodities.

The remedy, then, is not the inflation of the currency with paper, for that cannot improve the conditions of production, but to so organise industry that what is required is produced, and that those who produce are not robbed but get the full value of their product. The remedy, in short, is SOCIALISM; and there are no short cuts through the currency.

We can, by considering briefly the credit side of our question, more clearly see the childishness of the currency faddist’s idea, that to be rolling in money we need only set our printing presses to work turning out millions of paper notes.

In a system of production for exchange a large amount of circulating medium is continually going from hand to hand, being sought after, not for its intrinsic worth, but for the purpose of being exchanged again for the article desired. Obviously, then, so long as the Government is stable and has a monopoly of the coinage, it, or its agents, may replace part of the currency by tokens or notes, provided always that the credit of the Government be good and that the total issue does not exceed the minimum amount of currency at par that is always required in circulation. The difficulty of making mere tokens acceptable is got over partly by their convenience, and by making them legal tender in payment of debt in certain proportions.

Should, however, the Government swell the currency beyond the amount which the circulation of commodities can absorb, then the standard is depreciated and the value of the circulating medium is diminished by the amount of the excess.

Modern Governments, in their own interests and from bitter experience, go quite as far as is safe in the issue of paper currency, (indeed, only the financially bankrupt oversteps this limit) and the more extensive use of symbols or tokens can only have the effect of increasing the speculative character of industry and adding to the existing distress; whilst if the paper issue inflates the currency beyond the amount needed at par to do the work, then prices rise and the separation of real and nominal value commences; and although a £1 note might still purchase a nominal £1 worth of provisions, the £1 worth of provisions would, with every fresh issue, grow smaller by degrees and beautifully less, the workers, as is usual being the first to suffer.

From the time of the Assignats of the First French Republic to our own day we have numerous instances of the dire effect of the inflation of the currency with paper, and at the bar of History the currency faddist stands irrevocably condemned. For confirmation one has only to turn to some of the instances given by Mulhall and other statisticians of the United States in 1836, 1864 and 1868; of Russia from 1817 onwards; of Austria from 1810 to 1850; of Italy in 1867; of Sweden in 1834, instances when the paper issues depreciated the currency from 15 to 80 per cent., causing a corresponding rise in prices and terrible distress. Even in England in 1814 owing to an over issue of notes the price of an ounce of gold had risen (in notes) from £3 17s. 10 ½d to £5 4s., other prices rising proportionately.

We see, then, how “credit money” works in practice, and to clearly understand why that is so let us here recall the economic law: – “The amount of circulating medium that can be absorbed is governed by the sum of the prices of the commodities to be purchased during any period, divided by the number of times the average £1 in coin or notes changes hands during that time”. If the amount exceeds this there is an over-supply of the medium and prices rise, for the currency is depreciated. Paper is not hoarded, since it is entirely useless and valueless out of circulation, the gold is held in preference, (since it is intrinsically of value) and, if the currency is depreciates by an overissue of notes, the gold remaining in circulation becomes more valuable as bullion than as coin, and is consequently melted down or exported. Thus it is that “bad money drives out good”. With a sufficient margin of standard metal circulating side by side with notes the currency adjusts itself naturally to the fluctuations of trade by the coining or the melting down of gold, but if all the gold be driven out of circulation, then every fluctuation in the volume of trade causes either a shortage or an over-supply of circulating medium with corresponding fluctuations in prices; because a pure paper currency even under the best conditions can only be adjusted artificially to the fluctuations in the amount of trade, and that only when the evil has been made manifest by the rise or fall in prices.

But, it may be objected, although you show us under what conditions notes may circulate and the limits under economic law to their quantity, you do not show why municipalities cannot issue notes in order to avoid borrowing.

Having disposed of the general principle of the “paper money” faddist, let us answer this final objection.

Provided that sufficient of the standard metal is left in circulation as a safety valve to provide against fluctuations, and the notes are issued cautiously and from one central authority, municipalities may issue notes with safety as Guernsey is reputed to have done. Those, however, of the middle class who are anxious to reduce taxation by this means, conveniently forget that by the proposed redemption of the notes in payment of taxes a large portion of the revenue is thereby turned into so much unprofitable waste paper. The point which we wish to emphasise in this connection is that the amount the municipalities can issue, even under the most favourable conditions, is ludicrously small compared with their needs; and that is the joke.

In the first place, by far the greater part of the commerce of this country is carried on already (as far as the master class is concerned) by means of a perfectly sound system of credit. As long ago as 1889 the business of the principal clearing houses alone amounted to £7,620,000,000 for the year. Indeed, as Marx has pointed out, gold is practically driven into the retail trade, and the amount in circulation is much smaller than most people suppose, whilst it does not increase proportionately to the increase in trade.

In order to give the municipal note enthusiast plenty of rope, we may even for the moment disregard the historic and economic evidence which, as we have seen, shows the dangers of an increase in “paper money”; we may even assume that the amount of gold in circulation may be entirely replaced by credit notes. They admittedly cannot exceed this without causing a depreciation of the currency and a rise in prices. But when all the gold is driven out of circulation by the notes, where are we then?

Mulhall shows that the amount of gold circulating in this country to be about £102,500,000. We will, therefore, to please the currency faddist, assume that no ill effects follow from the displacement of this sum by notes. Now (excuse me smiling) the outstanding liabilities on loans of local authorities in Great Britain are over £400,000,000, or about four times as much as would be available from the currency! Could folly farther go? Some even have intimated that the National Debt also could be liquidated by this means, but the National Debt alone is over £762,000,000. Yet it is proposed to make the currency an universal milch-cow!

Verily, instead of a milch-cow the Clarion has found a Mare’s Nest.

F.C.Watts

The Evolution of Money: From Barter to Inflation (Pt. 1) (1980)

From the February 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since inflation is a monetary question and nothing but a monetary question, it cannot be understood without first knowing what money is. To most people money is the notes and coins they use to buy things, a convenient technical device for ensuring the smooth exchange and distribution of goods. While it is indeed such a medium of exchange, the currency we use today is not, strictly speaking, money at all, but only tokens for it. But to explain money it is convenient to start with this role of medium of exchange.

Exchange, as the exchange of goods, only exists in societies where there is private property: the goods involved pass from one property owner to another. In societies where there is no private property, where wealth is regarded as the common property of all the members of society, there is no exchange. People don't get what they need through exchange but directly, either by being given it or by taking it in accordance with established rules for sharing wealth. The original human societies were organised on this basis, without property and without exchange –and without money.

Exchange probably originated not within such primitive communistic societies but between them, and would have been on the basis of barter, the direct exchange of so much of one good for so much of another. Barter is the most primitive form of exchange and has obvious problems which don't need explaining at length. A person with two pots who wants a blanket must find another person with a blanket who wants two pots before any exchange can take place. At a certain stage in the evolution of exchange, the need becomes apparent for a good which can be exchanged for all goods. Then the person with the two pots can exchange them for this good and then later exchange this good for a blanket. The good that can be exchanged for all other goods is precisely money, and this gives us the basic definition: money is the good or commodity that can be exchanged for all others.

Various goods have functioned as money in the history of humanity, from cowrie shells to cattle (the word 'pecuniary' comes from pecunia, the Latin word for cattle), but in the end the most convenient have proved to be the precious metals, silver and gold. With barter, goods exchange in proportions determined by the amount of time it took to make them. Primitive people would have had a pretty shrewd idea of how long it took to make particular goods and would have regarded an exchange as fair where the goods involved had taken more or less the same period of time to make (or to gather from nature). Thus, if two pots habitually exchanged for one blanket, a blanket took twice as long to make as a pot.

In other words, commodity exchange is essentially an exchange of equivalents. When one good becomes money, this is not altered. The person with the two pots is not going to exchange them for the money-good unless both goods are considered equivalents. The money-good itself must therefore have value, must be the product of labour. This leads us to the second function of money, that of being a store of value. Someone who has exchanged their goods for the money-commodity is not obliged to exchange the latter straight away for some other good. They can keep and, if wanted, store and accumulate the money-good.

The money-commodity can best perform its role if it is not too bulky — if, in other words, it concentrates a relatively large amount of value in a relatively small bulk. This is precisely what the precious metals do. They are 'precious', or valuable, because it takes considerable labour to obtain a small amount of them. This feature would be a disadvantage had the precious metals not another characteristic — that of being easily divisible. A precious stone such as a diamond also concentrates much value in a small bulk, but because it cannot be easily divided it can't serve as the money-commodity, since the differing values of goods to be exchanged (the different times it took to make them) demand that the money-good be available in finely distinguished different amounts.

The precious metals, gold and silver, because they possessed these two features and had a fairly stable value, eventually emerged everywhere as the money-goods. Once one good has become money then exchange becomes buying and selling. Selling is the exchange of a good for the money-good, while buying is the exchange of the money-good for a good. This is still the case today but is no longer obvious because of the complications brought about by the subsequent evolution of money. The price of a good is its labour-time value expressed in amounts of the money-good. (1) This, being the standard of price, is money's third function. Prices were in fact originally expressed directly as weights of gold or silver.

The next stage in the evolution of money is the introduction of coins. About 2,500 years ago a ruler of Lydia (now Turkey) struck the first coin by stamping its weight on a piece of precious metal (electrum, an amalgam of gold and silver). This stamp served as a guarantee that it really did weigh the amount indicated. And this is all coined money is: a piece of the precious metal which is the money-commodity stamped with a guarantee of weight. At first anybody could issue coins, merchants as well as rulers, but this soon became a government monopoly.

The names of coins were originally weights of the metal of which the coins were made. Thus a pound (£) was originally, in early medieval times, a pound (lb) of silver. But over the years, if only because coins lose weight through wear and tear (but in practice for other reasons as well, as we shall see), the names given to coins came to differ from the names of the units of weight. This did not mean that the money-commodity had ceased to be measured in terms of weight; it merely meant that the money-commodity could always be translated into the more usual unit. Indeed, the new unit of monetary weight was legally defined in terms of the general unit of weight. Thus, in Britain for most of the nineteenth century, the gold coin known as a sovereign or pound was legally defined as being slightly more than a quarter of an ounce of gold (one ounce of gold was equal to £3 17s l0½d). In other words, 'pound' was an alternative name for about a quarter of an ounce of gold. Similarly, other names of currencies – dollar, mark, franc –were also alternative names for (other) weights of gold (or silver).

Gold and silver coins can lose weight not only through wear and tear but also through people deliberately filing them down, a criminal offence generally punished in the past by death. But there was a third way which was perfectly legal and unpunishable, since the 'criminal' was the government itself! Governments discovered soon after the invention of coins that issuing underweight coins – stamping one weighing, say, only 0.24 ounces as a 'pound' or 0.25 ounces –was an easy source of finance, at least in the short term. Such debasement of the coinage, however, had an unfortunate side-effect: it led to a rise in prices, not just of some goods but of all goods, a rise in the general price level. Since exactly the same mechanism operates here as with modern inflation, let's examine it in more detail.

Exchange, remember, is the exchange of equivalents (of equal amounts of socially necessary labour), selling is the exchange of a particular good for a certain amount of the money-commodity; and price is the expression of the value of a good in terms of amounts of the money-commodity. Say that four blankets are worth the same as an ounce of gold. That means that it takes as much socially necessary labour to produce four blankets as it does to produce one ounce of gold. The price of one blanket would then be a quarter of an ounce of gold, or £l.

This is an underlying real economic relationship which remains in force whatever the government does. If the government debases its coins by stamping 'pound' (quarter-ounce) on coins weighing only one-eighth of an ounce, (2) then this economic reality does not change. One blanket will still tend to exchange for a quarter-ounce of gold. If the government, by debasing the coinage, in effect changes the weight designated by the name 'pound' from a quarter-ounce to one-eighth of an ounce, then the price of one blanket will no longer be £1, since this now signifies one-eighth not one quarter of an ounce. The price will now be £2, the new way of indicating a quarter-ounce of gold. All other prices will also rise in the same proportion of 100 per cent. Prices will in fact tend to rise in the same proportion that the coinage has been debased. This would not happen immediately and all at once but would be spread out over a period of time as the effect of the debased coinage worked its way through, but the end result will be the 100 per cent rise in prices.

What will have happened is that the government's action will have changed the standard of price. This is a purely monetary matter and is in the end just a question of definition, of the weight of the money-commodity named by the word 'pound'.

The general level of prices can also change for real economic reasons as well as through the action of a government, intended or otherwise. If the amount of socially necessary labour required to produce an ounce of gold changes — if its value changes — then the prices of all other commodities are necessarily affected. To come back to our example of four blankets equal to one ounce of gold, we saw that this meant that four blankets and one ounce of gold contained the same amount of socially necessary labour, let us say five hours. Suppose that as a result of a new mining machine the average time it takes to produce one ounce of gold falls by ten per cent, to 4½ hours, while the time taken to produce four blankets remains unchanged. Four blankets will now no longer tend to exchange for one ounce of gold but for the amount of gold that can now be produced in five hours, 1.11 ounces. Since no government monkeying with the currency is involved here, 'pound' remains the name of one ounce of gold, so the price of four blankets now rises to £1.11. This happens to the price of all other goods too. This has in fact occurred a number of times in history, the last being in the thirty years up to the First World War when the value of gold fell due to the opening up of the South African and Alaskan gold mines.

A rise in the value of gold, on the other hand, due for instance to geological difficulties in working mines as they get older, would have the opposite effect, leading to a fall in the general level of prices.

The amount of money in circulation — the total weight of the coins made of the money-commodity (say, gold) which circulate as the currency — is determined by the workings of the economy and depends on three factors and their changes in particular:

1. the number of buying and selling transactions to be carried out, or the level of economic activity;
2. the total of the prices of the goods and services involved in these transactions (reflecting their value as measured by the amount of socially necessary labour they contain);
3. the average number of transactions carried out by a single coin in a given period (since coins of course circulate and are not cancelled after use), or the 'velocity of circulation' of money.

Other factors can be introduced, such as the number of debts to be settled and taxes, to be paid, and their amounts, but the basic formula is:

• Amount of money (total weight of gold) needed =
• Number of transactions x total price Velocity of circulation

This has been expressed algebraically as M = TP/V, and is known in the history of monetary theory as the Quantity Theory of Money.

Various versions of it exist, not all of which are correct. But if it is understood not as an equation but as a formula for what determines the amount of money (weight of gold coins) needed by the economy, then it is a key concept for understanding inflation. For it is saying that the amount of money needed by the economy at any time is a real economic fact determined by other economic facts, and as such not something that can be changed at will by government action. In fact it continues to be valid even when gold itself does not circulate as the currency and has been replaced in this role by paper and metallic tokens.

Adam Buick

1. "A relation between a weight of metal and the value of an object" is how Belgium's leading economist, Fernand Baudhin, who died in 1977, defined price in his Dictionnaire de l'économie contemporaine (1973 edition).

2.  This of course is an unreal example, but the mathematics is easier to follow.

Link to Part 2.

Cooking the Books: Has Money Gone? (2012)

The Cooking the Books column from the May 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

In an article “The decline of money” (Weekly Worker, 9 March) Hillel Ticktin argues that money did not exist in the USSR, does not exist in China and that fiat money issued by governments even in the West isn’t really money.

Marx saw money as having two basic functions: (1) a medium of exchange or circulation, i.e. the means through which articles produced for sale get bought and sold; and (2) a measure of value, i.e. a common unit in which the value of articles produced for sale can be expressed as a price, and is thus a standard by which they can be compared.

“The natural form of money”, Ticktin writes, “would be a commodity that could itself be produced with labour-power and would therefore have its own value.” This was certainly the typical form of money in Marx’s day and the form he discussed the most. This money-commodity (usually gold or silver) does not have to circulate itself and be used for payments. It can be replaced in circulation by tokens, including paper ones issued by the government.

Marx identified two kinds of paper token money: tokens that were convertible on demand into a fixed amount of the money-commodity and tokens which were not. The former created no problem. The latter, however, could create a problem if they were issued in a greater amount than the amount of the money-commodity that would otherwise circulate. In this case, if they circulated alongside gold or silver, the value of the tokens would depreciate, i.e. they would buy less than their face-value. If they were the only currency (as is the case today) this would result in a rise in the general price level, i.e. in a change in the standard of price.

An inconvertible paper currency has to be managed by the government or some state institution such as a central bank which, to avoid depreciation or inflation, has to calculate the correct amount to issue. In Marx’s day the case where the only currency was paper token money was a hypothetical one which he only discussed in passing. He was rather sceptical that it would work, on the grounds that it would not be possible in practice for a government to get the amount right and so there would be no stable standard of price.

Marx scepticism proved to be misplaced. He was right that there was likely to be a changing standard of price, but not that capitalism would be unable to cope with this. It has, and in fact this has become the norm, with most governments aiming at a price level rising at 2-3 percent a year.

The difference between a money-commodity and paper money, says Ticktin, is “that paper money is issued by governments and controlled by governments. It is effectively a nationalised form of money. It is not a spontaneous form, as with gold.” That is so, but Ticktin goes on to claim that “this nationalised form means that money is not really money as we understood it. One cannot say that £1 is equal to so much abstract labour. It is decided by governments and whomsoever is actually dealing with the money supply.”

It may not be the form of money Marx knew, but it is still money. It is still the medium of exchange and still a measure of value and standard of price even if a changing one. Ticktin is concerned that this “nationalised money” is controlled by ruling class technocrats instead of democratically in the interests of the working class. As if it could be.

We want, like Marx, a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources and production directly to meet people’s needs instead of for sale and profit and where money would therefore be redundant.