Read Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism for Free Online Page A

in housing but throughout the whole financial and economic system. It did not, presumably, have to evolve that way (or did it? – this is a crucial question we must ultimately answer). But that it did evolve that way in the United States and in Ireland, Spain and to some degree Britain, as well as in various other parts of the world, after 2000 or so to produce the macroeconomic crisis of 2008 (a crisis not yet resolved) is unquestionable. And that it was a crisis in the exchange value side that denied more and more people adequate use values in housing in addition to a decent standard of life is also undeniable.
    The same thing happens to health care and education (higher education in particular) as exchange value considerations increasingly dominate the use value aspects of social life. The story we hear everywhere repeated, from our classrooms to throughout virtually all the media, is that the cheapest, best and most efficient way to procure use values is through unleashing the animal spiritsof the entrepreneur hungry for profit to participate in the market system. For this reason, many categories of use values that were hitherto supplied free of charge by the state have been privatised and commodified – housing, education, health care and public utilities have all gone in this direction in many parts of the world. The World Bank insists that this should be the global norm. But it is a system that works for the entrepreneurs, who by and large make hefty profits, and for the affluent, but it penalises almost everyone else to the point of somewhere between 4 and 6 million foreclosures in the case of housing in the USA (and countless more in Spain and many other countries). The political choice is between a commodified system that serves the rich well enough and a system that focuses on the production and democratic provision of use values for all without any mediations of the market.
    So let us reflect, then, in a more abstract theoretical way on the nature of this contradiction. Exchange of use values between individuals, organisations (such as businesses and corporations) and social groups is plainly important in any complex social order characterised by intricate divisions of labour and extensive trade networks. Barter in such situations has limited utility because of the problem of the ‘double coincidence of wants and needs’. You have to have a commodity I want and I have to have a commodity you want in order for simple barter to take place. Barter chains can be constructed but they are limited and cumbersome. Therefore some independent measure of the value of all commodities on the market – a single metric of value – becomes not only advantageous but necessary. I can then sell my commodity for some general equivalent of value and use that general equivalent to buy whatever I want or need from elsewhere. The general equivalent is, of course, money. But this takes us on to the field of the second contradiction of capital. What is money?

Contradiction 2
The Social Value of Labour and Its Representation by Money
    Exchange value requires a measure of ‘how much’ commodities are worth relative to each other. This measure is called money. So what is this ‘money’ that we so unthinkingly use and reuse on a daily basis? We worry when we do not have enough of it, plot ways (sometimes devious or illegal) to get more of it, even as we find ourselves often struggling to organise our lives to live within the parameters defined by how much of it we possess. It sometimes seems as if money is the supreme God of the commodity world and that we must all bow down before it, submit to its dictates and worship before the altar of its power.
    We know very well what the basic technical functions of the capitalist form of money are. It is a means or medium of circulation (facilitating exchanges in a way that solves the problem of the ‘non-coincidence of interests’ that so limits direct barter). It provides a single