I was just looking through this thread and saw this comment. The money stuff is quite interesting to think about. You will like chapter 3 if you’re into money

While not a historical “origins of money” it is an excellent logical argument as to WHY money arises within a society based on commodity exchange.

Yeah exactly! I don’t think it is entirely ahistorical but we certainly have today more detailed archaeological knowledge about the historical development of money.

Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson are two Marxists who have interesting views on money. Hudson in particular is one of the world’s experts on money, having led teams at Harvard to study debt in the ancient Near East. What he found is that debt is a constant through societies, and that what keeps the world stable is periodic debt jubilees; something that modern liberal governments explicitly refuse to do.

Marx clearly also understood money to not be exclusive to capitalism, saying in Capital ch 3:

The class-struggles of the ancient world took the form chiefly of a contest between debtors and creditors, which in Rome ended in the ruin of the plebeian debtors. They were displaced by slaves. In the middle ages the contest ended with the ruin of the feudal debtors, who lost their political power together with the economic basis on which it was established. Nevertheless, the money relation of debtor and creditor that existed at these two periods reflected only the deeper-lying antagonism between the general economic conditions of existence of the classes in question.

Desai, for her part, believes in the basic accuracy of the historiography of money in Capital. But she adds that in reality it was not so neat and tidy. Capitalist money, rather than developing on its own foundation, attached itself to the real conditions in which capitalism found itself in the 15th century or so. So in some ways, the chaos of the monetary system has its roots in trying to force a thing to take on a form required by capitalism (as outlined in Capital) which may be unnatural to it.

Finally, it is easy for one to forget that there are two kinds of money, and Marx only discusses one kind in volume 1: commodity money. Today, money is primarily credit money i.e. debt, created by private banks independently of the state. Marx anticipated credit money as well in chapter 3, but says it is outside the scope:

We allude here only to inconvertible paper money issued by the State and having compulsory circulation. It has its immediate origin in the metallic currency. Money based upon credit implies on the other hand conditions, which, from our standpoint of the simple circulation of commodities, are as yet totally unknown to us. But we may affirm this much, that just as true paper money takes its rise in the function of money as the circulating medium, so money based upon credit takes root spontaneously in the function of money as the means of payment.