From: Paul Cockshott (wpc@DCS.GLA.AC.UK)
Date: Tue Jun 08 2004 - 17:24:44 EDT
> > There seems to me to be 2 problems with this argument > > 1. Generalised commodity production requires a universal scalar measure > of value, but this does not logically imply that that scalar must > itself be > a commodity. > One could as well argue : value is social labour time, the Pound > Sterling > measures value, thus the Pound Sterling is just another name for a > certain > quantity of social time. Claus replied -------------- This is ok as long as you acknowledge the Pound Sterling to be the name of a certain amount of a commodity, which then represents the amount of social labour time that produced it. The social labour content of the Pound is given by the social labour contained in the commodity from which it is made. But if you define the Pound as just a name independent of a material substance, how can you referr it to a certain amount of social labour? There can be no social labour in something that has not been produced by social labour. Can you? How? ---------------- Paul C replies The pound sterling is defined in labour terms by the labour services and the commodities purchased by the state. This is the real appropriation of surplus labour by the state. The number of pounds used to purchase this surplus labour defines the value of the pound. This process operates whether or not the state attempts to fix the price of gold or other commodities. It operates as a constraint on the ability of the state to fix the price of gold. Claus ------ I don't think there are hidden premises in Marx's theory of money. There may be unnoticed premises. If one goes from the market to the State or the other way round is not a matter of fact but of theoretical assumptions. It seems to me to be true that for Marx the State has its specific origin in the existence of private property, which came into existence a long time before capitalism. Thus it is no surprise that the State, as a general social fact, came prior to generalized commodity production, but this does not mean that the latter derived from the State. The historical materialist standpoint is that the State has one cause and the exchange of commodities another cause. The *bourgeois* State, on the other hand, only comes into existence after the bourgeois form of private property becomes prevalent, and this only occurs after money has long been established as part of the exchange of commodities, because without money there would not be capitalism nor a bourgeois State. ----------------- Paul Cockshott I agree with you about the bourgeois state coming after generalized commodity production and monetary exchanges in Europe. This of course was not true for Africa, where the bourgeois state came first and established the circulation of money and thus of commodities. In much of Europe it was originally the Roman Empire that established the circulation of money. This circulation collapsed substantially with the end of the empire. It was then re-established under feudal states. Thus for Europe, the question of the origins of money and of commodity sales for money has to go back to the Imperial period. From Bolin's work it is clear that the Roman currency system can not be modeled in terms of the denarius being a standardized weight of silver. > >> >> >
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