re 4829 >A question for Rakesh: > >> 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. <snip, JL> >> <..., JL>, 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. > >Is this the same perspective as in value-form theory (VFT), e.g. as in >Reuten (Hi Geert!)/ Williams (Hi Michael!)? Or are you saying something >else? > >In solidarity, Jerry Jerry, I am directly drawing from Paul Mattick Jr's analysis of the price-value problem and Michel deVroey's comments on the necessity of money in *The Value Controversy", ed. Ian Steedman, pp.184-185 (I had earlier pointed to this latter discussion of Marx's diachronic logic after Ajit had suggested that Marx's logic was synchronic in an apparently Levi-Straussian manner). I might be saying something similar to Geert in his piece for the *Revista di Politica Economica* on "the source vs. the measure obstacle in value theory"; for me the measure (or "collapse") is indeed the source (activator) of (otherwise latent) value, and Geert suggests the same, p.105ff, though he gives other meanings to "measure" and "source" in this piece. I am not clear as to precisely why Geert (and Marx himself) argues there is no other sensible way to express or measure a definite quantum of average social labor "other than in terms of value or money." p.110. This is sometimes expressed as "the necessity of money" thesis (which for Marx is something other than money as the institution by which the double coincidence of wants is overcome). But it seems to me a lot of work remains to be done in the specification and support of Marx's thesis. Here's a question: Does the necessity of money somehow derive from it alone allowing all commodities to be measured in terms of a ratio scale (rather than a nominal, ordinal or interval scale)? Is there some reason (thinking here of Marx's famous letter to Feuerbach) why in a private exchange economy commodities have to be measured in terms of a common (hypostatized?) divisible property so that we can infer numerical proportions among the representations of commodities that, say, one magnitude is twice or three or x times another? Does money alone allow for commodities to be measured in terms of a ratio scale; must commodities be measured in terms of such a scale if the proportioning of social labor is to be achieved in a private exchange economy? Yours, Rakesh
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