From: Michael Schauerte (mikeschauerte@GMAIL.COM)
Date: Fri Apr 27 2007 - 00:23:36 EDT
Hi Fred, I think that Kuruma is using the term "detour" not to describe the derivation of money, but the mechanism of the expression of value, and it is a translation of the German Umweg. The emphasis is on the indirect nature of this expression, where a commodity cannot express its own value using its own bodily form (use-value), but can do so by equating another commodity to itself and using that commodity's use-value as the material to express its own value. I think in the Penguin edition of Capital, the translator used the expression "this is a roundabout way of saying" in the part describing this mediated way that value is expressed, which seems a complete mistranslation to me. Perhaps "detour" is misleading too, if it suggests something that there might be a more direct way, because like you said the magnitudes of value must be observable in some objective and comparable form, and the only way for this to happen is through the mechanism of value-expression I just outlined, as value is not something we can see if we hold a commodity up to the light. But I don't fully understand what you mean by the "derivation of money" as a logical deduction from the first two sections. First, I don't understand how the term "derivation" is being used, and second my understanding is that Marx sets the task in Sec. 3 of unraveling the "riddle of money" (or of the money-form) by tracing his way back from the money- or price-form to the simple form of value, where he observes that mechanism of value-expression and uncovers the reason that the commodity in the equivalent form has a magical sort of power by virtue of being posited in that form, so that its bodily form seems by nature to have the power of direct exchangeability. I should note, as it might be related, that Kuruma was opposed to reading Sec. 3 or Chapter 1 as a whole as either a historical unfolding or a purely logical unfolding of categories, and instead sought to identify the particular tasks that Marx sets and solves (e.g. the unraveling of the riddle of the money form). You'll have to give me a bit more time to think about the second point you make because it is a view I haven't encountered yet. Comradely, Mike
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