A Marxian theory of money, credit and crisis

The essential aim is to reconstruct the original Marx's original theory of money in order to assimilate more recent theories of endogenous money and credit-creation. It will be argued that Marx's original commodity theory of money is quite limited and historically specific to his own era. However, commodity money only represents a particular historical form of the universal equivalent. It is therefore necessary to distinguish the various forms and functions of money and how these have evolved historically. The more modern forms of inconvertible paper money, credit, and bank money have evolved as specific capitalist money. It is proposed that the original Marxian theory needs to be rehabilitated in order to provide an analytical framework by which to interpret the emergence of finance capital and monetary circuits of credit. By doing so, it is thus possible to examine the modern dynamics of recurrent financial crises from the standpoint of the general laws of capital accumulation under the conditions of oligopolistic competition