FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
	International Communist Workers Party
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“All the illusions of the Monetary System,” wrote Marx in 1859, “arise from the failure to perceive that money, though a physical object with distinct properties, represents a social relation of production.”
Money – in its form as a physical object, a dollar or a yuan or a euro – is often in the news in ways that most of us find difficult to understand.  What does it mean for workers that the International Monetary Fund has decided to include the Chinese yuan in its “basket of currencies” along with dollar, euro, yen and pound? 
We’ll try to explain this.  We’ll also try to explain how money represents capitalist social relations of production in China and everywhere.  In this article and a second one, we’ll talk about how workers will manage a communist world without money.

Currency Wars and Imperialist Domination
The Yuan Renminbi (“People’s Currency”) was first issued by the People’s Bank of China in zones liberated by the Communist Party of China in 1949.    This was a cornerstone of China’s capitalist development. 
For brief periods Chinese communists experimented with minimizing the role of a money economy (during the 1958-59 People’s Commune movement) or replacing currency with “work-points” (during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.)   But the Monetary System always predominated.
Soviet “technical assistance” to China in the 1950s created debt obligations.  These were repaid mainly with agricultural exports.  After the Sino-Soviet split at the end of the decade, China engaged in little foreign trade until the 1970s.  Thus its currency was mainly for limited domestic use.
The Chinese rulers openly embraced market capitalism in 1982-83 and, with it, international trade. They joined organizations like GATT and WTO that are dominated by US imperialism.    Workers were increasingly subjected to capitalist management methods and super-exploited in “special economic zones.” 
Within a decade, Chinese capitalists were taking steps toward making its currency “convertible.”   When a currency is “convertible” it can be freely exchanged (bought or sold) for other currencies without government regulation.  Last spring, the head of the People’s Bank of China argued that the Renminbi traded freely enough to include in the IMF’s “Special Drawing Right” (SDR) basket. The IMF has now agreed.
The technical details of SDR are not as important as the fact that the IMF has endorsed the yuan as a reserve currency (a safe means for other governments to park their wealth).   It’s also meant to encourage Chinese rulers to let the yuan “float” against the dollar and other currencies. 
In the short run, that could devalue the yuan and strengthen the dollar.  In the long run, however, it means greater global presence of the yuan and, with it, the rise of China’s economic dominance.  China is already a net capital exporter.  That’s the classic definition of an imperialist power. 
The Chinese rulers have already suggested that the SDR basket could replace the dollar as the world’s dominant reserve currency.   It’s hard to imagine the US rulers going along with this – unless they’re defeated in World War III.

Communism:  No Money of Any Kind
The rise of the Renminbi illustrates the double role of money in capitalism:  it is a physical object (a commodity) and also a social relation of production.
“Only the conventions of our everyday life make it appear commonplace and ordinary that social relations of production should assume the shape of things,” Marx wrote.
In communism, money will have no role at all.  “In the case of socialized production,” said Marx, “the money-capital is eliminated.  Society distributes labour-power and the means of production to the different branches of production.”
By “money” we mean currency but also all forms of credit, “work-points,” “labor-banks,” Bitcoins or whatever. We won’t exchange stuff.  We’ll share it with whoever needs it, anywhere. 
“Communism… is voluntary unpaid work for the common good that does not depend on individual differences, that wipes out all memories of everyday prejudices, wipes out stagnation, tradition, differences between branches of work, etc.,” wrote Lenin in 1919. 
The second part of this article will explore this further.

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