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and that each commodity has ‘a’ money value as well as a ‘value’; for Lipietz notes,
‘in contrast to commodities [money] need not be validated but is validated a
priori’(1988:19). Money as a social institution, unlike all other commodities whose
saleability, i.e. their social validation, is always a contingent element within the circuit
of valorisation, must be expository of an intrinsic saleability. That is to say,
institutional design of money is a bystanding validation of the commodity circuit with
all its contingencies; it is, to some extent, a fictitious commodity in its farness from
other commodities as strictly socially validatable labour. One other element of money
as social institution resorts to the ‘conceptual-representational’ extent of value.
Practically, each commodity is partially an imposture for all other commodities in
terms of value; yet, a social institution such as money can be a conceptual stunt(i.e.
universal equivalent) for ‘value in process’ so far as this mode of socialisation of
value is routinely rehearsable in that money then is not only an institutional referent
for extant income, but more profoundly, for later income.
As many argue, this regulationist money analysis is very substantial. It is both
Marxian(in that, it is about money as validation and money as a form of capital) and
Keynesian(insofar as regulationists consider money as the most tradeable asset)(Grahl
1991, Guttmann 2002). This said, the real substantial consequences of the
understanding of money as a social institution are most explicit in the regulationist
study of ‘credit money’. Needless to say, the monetary system is a profoundly
variable amalgam of commodity money and credit money, ‘of a fragmented system
and a centralized system’ of validation/monetanisation; this fact alone simultaneously
expatiates upon the ‘differentiated scale of validity’ for manifold forms of credit
money and the hierarchised system of banking(Lipietz 1988:222). These injunctions
are a prolegomenon to the regulationist excursion into the ‘debt economy’ in which
monetary form of economic imperative(realisation of surplus-value in the form of
money) can rebound as a consequence of indebtedness as well as real sale of
commodities.
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