Steve:
>The money-commodity approach did dominate Capital I, and it's quite
>legitimate to take that as the matire Marx. However, in Capital III,
>Marx began to apply the core of his analysis of the commodity--the
>dialectic between use-value and exchange-value--to money, and financial
>assets. He reasoned:
>
>"What, now, does the industrial capitalist pay, and what is, therefore,
>the price of the loaned capital?... What the buyer of an ordinary
>commodity, buys is its use-value; what he pays for is its value. What
>the borrower of money buys is likewise its use-value as capital; but
>what does he pay for? Surely not its price, or value, as in the case of
>ordinary commodities." (Marx 1894, p. 352.)
>
>He reached the conclusion that the price of money is set, not by its
>value, but by its use-value. This arises because, while it is a
>commodity in one sense--that it is traded, and necessary for trade--it
>is not a commodity in another--loaned money is not produced by other
>commodities, but by agreement between lender and borrower.
WPC:
This refers to a quite different matter - the rate of interest. I have argued
previously that it is an error to view this as the price of money, but
Marx was certainly not talking about the exchange value of money vis a
vis other commodities.
Paul Cockshott
wpc@cs.strath.ac.uk
http://www.cs.strath.ac.uk/CS/Biog/wpc/index.html