From: Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM
Date: Tue Mar 22 2005 - 17:36:12 EST
Hi Andy (and Ajit and others): The tennis match that you are playing with Ajit is confusing -- to me at least. In an earlier volley, you claimed that the results about basic goods in Ajit's and Paul C's paper were "obvious" and "trivial". Now it is clear that your disagreement with Ajit is _primarily_ *ontological*. Perhaps if the both of you could focus on _either_ the formal logical consistency of the paper _or_ the ontological question (re commodity, money, value, capitalism, etc.) then you might not be talking past each other as much, imho. It also seems to me that neither one of you are going to convince the other of your position. If that is the case, then the goal of the exchange should simply be clarification. In solidarity, Jerry [Andy wrote:} > In a system of generalised commodity production we aren't much interested in the exchange value of a commodity in relation to just one other commodity! That isn't what we mean by 'purchasing power' or exchange value, nor is it the true significance of 'price'. We do not acquire money only for its own sake but because it allows us command over all the goods produced in the economy, in some or other definitie quantitities. Isn't this the key significance of money? It (money) is the general equivalent and it has a crucial quantitative dimension for us that is not captured by reference to the exchange relation with just one good! (If you disagree then here certainly lies a deep disagrement between us). We are interested in generalised purchasing power and so need to quantify it. But, absent a theory of value by which we can reduce to one dimension the manifestly diverse goods that money enables us to purchase, all we can do to quantify purchasing power of, say, a unit of money is consider the whole set or vector of goods, each of which costs one unit of money. Then one unit is 'worth' one of these vecotrs, two units is worth two and so on. But this obviously breaks down once new goods come along so to get a measure of generalised exchange value -- or purchasing power -- through time then becomes impossible without the 'third thing', value, that allows us to commensurate otherwise incommensurable diverse commodities. <
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