The Transcendental Force of Money: Social Synthesis in Marx

Abstract

Instead of defining money as a means or tool for social communication and exchange, Marx determines money as the really existing universal and the existing form of an abstract social mode of domination. His conception is the consequence of transforming Kant's concept of “thinghood” into a social and material concept, which most scholarship overlooks. As such, it confronts us with the problem of how we should think of really abstract social relationships and a form of social reproduction that is itself abstract because it depends upon the money form. In this paper I first analyze Marx's early concept of money as the “thing-in-itself,” after which I reconstruct how this aspect is finally turned into a social concept in the Grundrisse.