From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@STANFORD.EDU)
Date: Thu Jun 03 2004 - 10:46:13 EDT
At 2:02 PM +0000 6/3/04, Costas Lapavitsas wrote: >Not really, Andy, we don't have to know in advance what something is >in order to know how it emerges. I agree with Mike on this one. On >money and value, it is important to be clear on the question we are >trying to answer. For me, the most difficult question is, given a >commodity set, what makes a money commodity unique? This could be >answered in many ways, I suppose, but I think that the key is >money's property to buy all else, which creates a fundamental >asymmetry with other commodities. You can't say money's uniqueness is rather in its having come to specialize in the function of expressing the value of all the other commodities, as universal equivalent. And you can't say this because money in its origin did not serve the function of measuring value, though it did monopolize direct exchangeability (for money to have served the function of measuring value, other conditions of possibility had to be in place--I understand you to be arguing). But perhaps Marx is not interested in history or the analytics of money's emergence per se but rather only in the logico-historical of how one commodity did in fact come to specialize in said function. That is, Marx's history only follows after, and is strictly delimited by, his structural analysis of the functional specialization money achieves in the bourgeois mode of production (if Godelier is right). This is why his account is an ideal genesis of the money form rather than an actual history and analysis of money's emergence and varied roles and functions. It may also be why chartalist concerns do not impinge on Marx's project of an "ideal genesis of the money form". I return again to this phrase because I think our understanding of Marx rides on it. But I am well be wrong! I look forward to reading your new book from Routledge. Yours, rakesh
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