Demonetize it!

Money and value. Thoughts on a relation

Franz Nahrada

I think that at the core of the issue of demonetization is the problem of value, and no critique of money can work without resolving the question what is the relation between money and value. Here are my provisional points or thoughts.

* Money fills the void that society has not decided about the importance of things, needs and actions.
* Money is always different from value but at the same time money is basically there to express something like value (though no one can deternine what value is without money)
* Value is a concept of power, of the quantity in which one good can acquire all other goods, represent them all. This is its secret. Value is social power in things. Some call this mad, some call this sick, some call this fetishism.
* Nothing is valued by itself in a society where everything is submitted to value
* If value was not rooted in and created by labor, nobody would ever care to produce
* Value is the aim of production, and not usefulness, durability or beauty
* Value is always threatened by comparison
* Everything is always estimated as value
* Value is the true ruler of production; value that wants to be more value. That’s the only logic value has.
* The production of value gets more difficult as the production of things gets easier; the more things we produce under equal circumstances, the less value they have individually
* Production of value is always speculative; you can’t find out about the value of commodities before you sell them all
* The best way to produce value is to conquer the market by scale and intensity of production
* The condition to do that is to engage speculative money, called capital
* If trees wore a price tag, use of nature would even be more exclusive to money.

We are to find a different solution here, we don’t do value-theory as our prime motive. But in order to find the alternative, we need to know what to avoid.