One Last Question About Money and MMT

There’s one last thing I’d like to tie-in with other articles I’ve read, as well as ask readers here. There was a dig at Proudhon in the footnotes and it reminded me of Michael Robert's critique of MMT? The Modern Monetary Trick

Marx mentions that money “crystallizes out of the process of exchange”. Money comes out of commodity exchange and footnote (4) critiques the “craftiness of petit-bourgoise socialism, which wants to perpetuate the production of commodities while simultaneously abolishing the ‘antagonism between money and commodities’.

This reminds me of Michael Robert’s critique of MMT theory, posted above, where he says that MMT “separates money from value, and … fails to recognize the reality of social relations under capitalism…”

A more in-depth quote form the article

MMT differs from Marx’s theory of money in saying that money is not tied to any law of value that drags it into place like “gravity”; instead, it has the freedom to expand and indeed change value itself. Money is the primary causal force on value, not vice versa!

This echoes the ideas of French socialist Pierre Proudhon in the 1840s. He argued that what was wrong with capitalism was the monetary system itself, not the exploitation of labour and the capitalist mode of production. Here is what Marx had to say about Proudhon’s view in his chapter on money in the Grundrisse: “can the existing relations of production and the relations of distribution which correspond to them be revolutionised by a change in the instrument of circulation?” For Marx, “the doctrine that proposes tricks of circulation as a way of, on the one hand, avoiding the violent character of these social changes and on the other, of making these changes appear not to be a presupposition but gradual result of these transformations in circulation” would be a fundamental error and misunderstanding of the reality of capitalism.

In other words, separating money from value, and indeed making money the primary force for change in capitalism, fails to recognise the reality of social relations under capitalism and production for profit. Without a theory of value, MMTers enter a fictitious economic world — one where the state can issue debt and have it converted into credits on the state account by a central bank at will and with no limit or repercussions in the real world of productive capital.

Now I know that MMT is very popular among leftists and our friends in the News Mega. So I may be opening a huge can of worms, but this appeared very interesting and I’d love to hear ideas on Robert’s criticisms if anyone is familiar with them. I am still absorbing it, so I have nothing to add. When reading Marx’s passage about money, I immediately think about how it compares and contrasts to Graeber’s work on debt. So any ideas would help in my understanding.