From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Tue Jun 12 2007 - 12:53:20 EDT
Michael P and Hans, What Marx is saying is that commodities cannot be commensurated in terms of the real laboring activity objectified therein. They can only be commensurated in so far as exchange abstracts from them as sensuous concrete objects and handles them as representations of the simple abstract labor time society on average required to re-produce them. Once Marx postulates this as the substance of value, then he can demonstrate dialectically how one commodity becomes primus inter pares, i.e. how the money commodity monopolizes the direct or immediate representation of simple abstract labor. It's exactly because Ricardo, as a bourgeois individualist, could not create the concept of abstract labor that he did not understand in terms of the representation of what money derived its power, its real power to create even a general crisis. The classical economists blithely dismissed the fetishism of gold as mercantilist illusion. It's also true that the "neo Ricardians" who dismiss as metaphysical Marx's theory of the substance of value as abstract labor have never bothered to understand the connection between this theory and his understanding of money, though Marx insists on it in his critique of Ricardo. Kuruma understood the connection; Rubin actually does not say much about money! Rakesh
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