[OPE-L:4680] Re: use-value of money

Paul Cockshot (wpc@cs.strath.ac.uk)
Wed, 9 Apr 1997 01:15:56 -0700 (PDT)

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> As I argue in my paper, to be socially or privately 'useful' (as Money
is)
> does not exhaust the import of the category 'use-value'. Use-value is one
> moment of Commodity, in contradictory unity with Value. Money has no
Value
> and no use-value, rather it is the sole autonomous existence of Value as
> form.
> Is this just some kind of philosophical obscurantism (of the kind of
which
> Marx stands accused in 'making a fuss' about abstract labour, and not
> seeing that we don't need a complex social system, proximately market
> mechanisms, in order to commensurate concrete labours as Abstract Labour,
> because a stop-watch will perform the abstraction for us ... Allin?
Andrew
> K? )?

A stop watch provides the abstraction but it does not test social
necessity.
Value creating labour is that portion of labour time socially necessary,
and as
such it depends on average productivities. Measuring necessity would
require a large
set of stopwatch timings accross the range of different producers of the
product.