From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@stanford.edu)
Date: Fri Sep 06 2002 - 11:44:11 EDT
Hi Jerry. You write in 7615 > >Isn't whether money took the form of a money commodity under >capitalism a matter of historical contingency? Perhaps. So the better question here is not whether money must be a commodity but whether once there is commodity money will anything other than an inherently scarce, relatively indestructible precious metal likely serve as a commodity money. The claim that is being advanced here is that not all commodities are subject to the laws of competitive price formation. Ricardo excluded those commodities which are not freely reproducible. Gold is not freely reproducible. Michele has aruged that commodities in which scarce land serves as a means of production are in particular not subject to the laws of price of production on account of the role absolute rent plays in Marx's system. I have argued that the long term needed to equilibriate the exchange value with the price of production of commodities whose supply dwarfs current output is much too long term to say that the tendency towards the price of production is really effective. > After all, the state could >have offered paper currency printed in its name as money and banned >the use of any other materials (gold and silver included) as money. Yes then we would seem to be dealing with fiat money. And then Bortkiewicz's and Sweezy's argument for the use of gold as the unit of account cannot hold. >That paper currency issued by the state was first introduced under >a monetary system where there was a money commodity and was >"backed-up" by the stock of gold and silver held by the state seems >also to be a matter of historical contingency. This topic -- the state's >role >in a capitalist monetary system -- wasn't fully developed in Volume One >-- or the rest of _Capital_ -- since the state-form was being abstracted >from at that level of exposition. This of course is a very important point. All the best, Rakesh >In solidarity, Jerry
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