The Bridge Between Value and Money: Does Social Links Bring the Solution?

In the present work we show that theories carried by authors such as Orlean and Aglietta (2002), that underline with great accuracy the fallacies of orthodox economics, suffer themselves from similar difficulties. Those difficulties come from the fact that economics are excluding a major operation: production. For not being seized from their very birth, products are veiled afterwards by money which is only defined by its ability to set goods in motion. Money is therefore understood as a tool, a substitute only useful to allocate wealth among agents, and not, as it should be, as a unit of measure. Consequently, the proper nature of economic magnitudes cannot be explained. The operation that catalyzes the main difficulties is payment. Through payment, one can see that monetary and ``real'' things must be hold together, they are two different aspects of an economic object: the product (Schmitt, 1984). We demonstrate that a conceptual apparatus that considers value and money as two processes generating one another, and not as instantaneous creations, is locked up into dichotomy.