And I hope you don't mind if I revive this thread so belatedly, I've been meaning to reply but buried under a mid-semester mountain.
> Mostly about the choices he makes about what to abstract from and what
> to include in a given theoretical explanation. Often, it seems to me,
> he complicates his abstract models unnecessarily by including elements
> that are really secondary and contingent. If you email me, I'll reply
> with a copy of his chapter on public debt and money. And you'll tell
> me what you think.
I'd love to read it. I see from his CV he has quite a few early papers on portfolio theory, asset pricing and growth which I would like to get around to checking out, since I've been wading around in 1950s and 1960s mainstream monetary theory for my historical research and it would be interesting to see where he was coming from before he took the Marxian turn.
> Another (though minor) point is that I'd be totally shameless about
> connecting my analysis to Marx's. Marx allowed for two different
> historical forms of evolution of fiat money. In his unpublished
> chapter, Foley develops the debt route, which is -- no doubt -- the
> more interesting and relevant. But I admit that's a rather minor
> stylistic choice.
I like his take in his 1983 Social Concept paper, where he writes about the role of gold in Marx's theory of money and different ways of theorising the falling away of the gold link. I basically agree with his perspective - I think Marx had essentially a long-period theory of the value of money based on commodity/foreign exchange anchoring, and never had much of a need to talk about what happened in the short period - but it's the short-period that matters now the anchor is gone.
> One of the reasons why I'd do this is the recent debate sparked by
> David Graeber's book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Post-Keynesians
> and MMT people (Chartalists) have relied on the book to promote the
> notion that money is ultimately a legal or fiduciary form, rather than
> an economic (relations of production, in Marx's terms) form.
> (Actually, it may be more complicated, because often times it seems
> that Chartalists view credit as rooted in human nature, which would be
> a feature of societies with a higher degree of objectivity than
> economic relations. In any case, the Chartalists skip the economic
> layer: money and credit are either human nature or entirely
> legal/political conventions that can be manipulated rather
> arbitrarily.) Graeber, an anthropologist, claims to have found
> evidence that credit predates barter, historically, which -- allegedly
> -- refutes Marx's view of credit as logically and historically
> posterior to basic commodity exchange and the most basic functions of
> money (i.e. measure of value and medium of exchange).
Yeah - I read an early draft of Graeber's book (or maybe a shorter version - it was a long essay) a couple of years ago and I was thinking about it again after his interview with Doug. I agree with your take. The same basic line (that money is in essence a creature of the State) is put in the opening chapter of Keynes' 'Treatise on Money'. Explaining the historical origins of money is not the same as explaining its present role in the capitalist system - it seems to me that much chartalist argument makes the mistake of thinking something's essence is determined by its origins. It's telling that Keynes' narrative jumps from Hannibal's crossing of the Alps to Napoleon's two millennia later - it elides the rise of capitalism and its long adaptation and transformation of the monetary system it inherited from feudal society. Not that Graeber makes the same elision, and he obviously has a lot of interesting things to say - but I can't abide chartalism!
Mike Beggs