Abstract

Considering the implications of the New Reading of Marx’s ‘monetary theory of value’, this chapter explores how thinkers in and influential upon this theoretical perspective have conceptualised money as constituting a materialist version of the Kantian schematism bringing all things into an abstract social relation with all other things by means of commodity exchange. First outlining the monetary theory of value as it appears in the work of Riccardo Bellofiore, the chapter departs from Christian Lotz’s contemporary account of the ‘capitalist schema’, before considering the roots of this analysis in the Frankfurt School critical theory of Max Horkheimer and Alfred Sohn-Rethel – specifically the latter’s theory of the ‘social synthesis’ established by money as means of exchange, and the conceptualisation of value as a ‘non-empirical reality’.