Paul's distinction:
|The passage that Steve cites from vol 3 with
|respect to money is refering to money borrowed
|as capital. What Allin seemed to be talking about
|was money in its quotidien sense as a means of
|payment
could be valid, but then it would imply that money has *TWO*
values, one when we are rferring to pieces of paper, the other
when we are referring to credit; this is hardly a satisfactory
state of affairs. However, the excerpt I cited is not Marx's
only comment on this. e continues
"The value of money or of commodities employed as capital
does not depend on their value as money or as commodities, but on
the quantity of surplus-value they produce for their owner."(Capital
III p. 355.) Seeing the surplus-value that borrowed money can generate
as its use-value, this implies that Marx's analysis of credit (which
was the subject of my previous cite) also applies to money as means
of payment.
There is a very natural expression for this, too. In the citation on
the "price" of credit, Marx effectively argues that the exchange-value
of credit and assets are set by their use-values ("the possible
use-value and hence the prospective exchange-value"). For money as
a means of payment, its exchange-value is likewise set by its
use-value. What is the use-value of a dollar coin? The fact that it
can be used to buy a dollar's worth of commodities. What is the
exchange-value of a dollar? A dollar, of course.
Paul's initial reaction is that, maybe the section I cited
from Marx was limited to the exchange-value of money in its role as
credit, but when we consider money as means of payment, its exchange-
value is set in the same fashion as all other commodities--which ties
Marx to the notion of commodity money (gold). However, money as means
of payment is in fact a very natural point at which to say that it is
one of a set of peculiar commodities/non-commodities whose exchange-
value is set by their use-value.
Cheers,
Steve Keen