re 4827 Paul C wrote: > > >I would say that values are not a property of the commodity >but a property of the system of production that made them. And this is where have differed from day one. I agree that "possessed" value is not a property of the commodity and that it is indeed a property of a system. Your correction here is most important, and accepted. But as I wrote to Steve K (and to quote myself again), value is only latent in the system of production alone. That is, value describes a system--the thing being measured and the measurement being made--rather than being an independent description of the thing being measured. Monetary ex-change is thus more than the passive ascertainment of a pre-existing property but is rather the production of a datum (value) though the active involvement of measurer and thing measured. In short, the transformation of quantities of various forms of concrete labor into homogeneous, abstract labor or value occurs precisely through (and not before) market exchange. Long ago, you charged that this would lead me directly to a utility or subjective theory of value. But this is not the case, for as Allin put it then, I am not here saying that the magnitude of value is determined by exchange; I am arguing that a commodity only possesses (or is a) value (one side of a binary state) if it's successfully monetarily exchanged. > >>At any rate, value is necessarily >> represented in money; and value expansion can only obtain in and >> through money. > >what is money in this context? strictly speaking, God in the religion of everyday life. Which is what I tried to suggest in my first post on money. I would add that Marx is trying to show how one commodity under the pressure the exchange of great quantities of goods ascends from earth to economic heaven to become not merely a measure of value and a standard of price, but in virtue of its functions of universal equivalent and exchange medium, Value Incarnate. Yours, Rakesh
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