From: cmgermer@UFPR.BR
Date: Fri Jun 11 2004 - 23:59:07 EDT
I'm sorry for the delayed answer. I`m out of town with little chance to connect to internet. Ill try to answer the posts sent in response to my posts. Paul C. wrote: > It is worse than that Gerry. If we take Clauses argument seriously > money no longer exists. Claus: I don't think this can be deduced from what I said. What I said is that money and credit money are different realities and different concepts. If our analysis is based on Marx's theory, then money, which is the general equivalent of value, must be a commodity, which came to be gold. The standard of prices or unit of account is a definite amount of the money commodity. Credit money arises as a derivation from certificates of debt in terms of the money commodity. Now, the widespread view today is that money is no more a commodity, because gold not only does not circulate, as is also not used officially to define the standard of prices. In my opinion this conclusion has two problems: 1) it does not account for the role played by gold in the monetary system of our days. This account seems to me to be necessary, since gold is present in very expressive amount as an official international monetary reserve and in even greater amount as private reserves; 2) if one abandons the definition of money as a commodity, in Marx, one is left without a theoretically consistent concept of money. The so called hard 'currencies' are nothing more than national standards of prices, all of them originally expressed in terms of the money commodity, gold. At present each of them is expressed in terms of the basket of the others, but doesn't have an independent definition. Thus, the substance of money is unexplained. In Marx's theory money is the general equivalent of value because it is also a commodity. Thus, the value of the standard of prices is given by the amount of social labor necessary to produce it. If an abstrat standard of prices is conceived as being an equivalent of value, what is its value? How much social labor does it represent? Do yo think these are relevant problems? If they are, what explanations can be given to them? comradely, Claus
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