From: Diego Guerrero (diego.guerrero@CPS.UCM.ES)
Date: Sun Feb 25 2007 - 04:07:58 EST
Ajit: That's good! This is the only way to proceed. Now three questions:(1) Do (wH), (pH), (mH)stand for say 100, 200, and 300 hours of labor? And if so, then do w, p, and m stand for $100, $200, and $300? _______________________________________ Diego: Yes. _______________________________________ (2) What is the difference between direct values, production values and market values and similarly with prices? _______________________________________ Everybody knows the difference between direct prices, production prices and market price. Now, I add: if we think like Marx that "price is the money-name of the labour realised in a commodity", and we realize that, as Foley puts it, "Marx constantly uses this conception to move back and forth between money and labor accounts", then I agree with Marx in that the differences between direct values, production values and market values are not but a kind of translation from the same differences in price terms, or vice versa. _______________________________________ (3)Where does euro or dollar comes from? Remember! you are in your theoretical world, where you have apparently taken a set of production equations for the production of your commodities and wages for labor etc. If you have specified a relationship of this system with euro or dollar then make it explicit. Otherwise, you have no option than to take something like gold or silver, which is produced as a commodity in your system of production, as a measure of your money variable. Your turn now! Cheers, ajit sinha _______________________________________ Well, I am afraid that the answer to this will not be easily accepted. But, first, remember that I am not using the MELT exactly: for every commodity I translate from labour to money by using "the average, social productivity of labour in terms of money", which "coincides as a practical result with the 'monetary expression of value' (Duménil and Foley, 2006) or the inverse of what Fine, Lapavitsas and Saad-Filho (2004) calls the 'labor expression of money'." As for the other point, I think you are mentioning the question of the relationship between gold money and credit money. The latter is the successor of the former and contrarily to the usual interpretation I think that it is as much a commodity as its predecessor (but this leads to the question of productive and unproductive labour and I don't think we should mix the two issues). Therefore the relationship between any commodity and money is the relationship between two commodities (included the relationship between the productivities in the production of both of them), the second being however a special case, since money functions as the general equivalent. This is why I said in a previous message that prices show the relationship between every commodity with all the others, or the comparison between individual (i.e. sectoral) productivities and the average social productivity. Cheers, Diego.
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