From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Mon Apr 11 2005 - 00:30:15 EDT
At 3:37 AM +0200 4/11/05, Michael Heinrich wrote:
>
>This difference is not only one in the aims, to serve capital or to
>serve the working class, it is a difference in the way of conceiving
>capitalism. The left Ricardians also wanted to serve the working class,
>but their conceptional means of conceiving didn't leave the conceptional
>framework of political economy. Marx criticized fundamental terms of
>political economy, he offered not only different answers, above all, he
>put at a very fundamental level different questions (I quoted one of
>these different questions in my last mail).
Which I think is this quote:
("Political economy has indeed analysed value and its magnitude, however
incompletely, and has uncovered the content concealed within these
forms. But it has never once asked the question why this content has
assumed that particular form..."),
The form of money, that is a single commodity in which value is
expressed in fetishistic form, i.e. as a physical quantity of that
one thing.
I think one important question (which has come up in offlist
discussion with Geoff Hodgson) is whether in having a monopoly over
direct exchangeability, money must alone represent abstract social
labor time. That is, does its representative power give it that
monopoly? Must money represent anything in order to have that
singular power even if money then does shape what is representing in
its own image?
How are we to understand the difference between Marx's and Menger's
theories of money?
Michael, I am doubtless too orthodox in your estimate, I am sure, but
I do agree with what you have been saying here.
Rakesh
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