on money

[Rakesh Bhandari <rakeshb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: [OPE-L] on money

> Because the product is not produced as an
> immediate object of consumption for the producers, but only as a
> bearer of value, as a claim, so to speak, to a certain quantity
> of all materialised social labour, all products as values are
> compelled to assume a form of existence distinct from their existence
> as use values. And it is this development of the labour embodied in
> them as social labour, it is the development of their value, which
> determines the formation of money, the necessity for commodities to
> represent themselves in respect of one another as money--which
> means merely as independent forms of existence of exchange value--and
> they can only do this by setting apart one commodity from the mass of
> commodities, and all of them measuring their values in the use value
> of this excluded commodity, thereby directly transforming the labour
> embodied in this exclusive commodity into general, social
> labour.
>
> TSV III, p.144-145

Since commodities are produced in order to be claims on social labor, one commodity  comes to count in the exchange relationship not in its concrete form as a use value but as an incarnation of social labor, as itself value. Marx then specifies the peculiarities of the equivalent form.

So say on a tropical island where only fruit is exchanged and people become allergic to the fruit that they can themselves grow, then all fruit is produced for exchange. Say mangoes come to be the general equivalent. Then mangoes are valued not for their concrete characteristics but because they incarnate Fruit itself. So we are back to Marx's critique of Hegelian hypostatization as Colletti and Robert Paul Wolff see so clearly.

Of course the three fold three-fold peculiarity of the mango then is that it is the immediate incarnation of value; the concrete labor expended in the production thereof becomes the form of appearance of abstract human, fruit producing labor; and private mango farming has turned here into its opposite, to labor in immediately social form.

 In supposing that abstract labor can be such a thing, we seem to have been led to a mistaken ontological commitment. It is indeed as if the generalization fruit existed not merely in the mental act of abstracting from bananas, papayas, coconuts, etc. but was rather incarnated in, say, mangoes.

The central problem here seems  to be a category mistake. As if the confounded visitor who asks to be finally shown the university after having already been taken to the philosophy, physics, biology, etc. buildings could actually find what he is looking for in a visit to, say, the mining department alone; abstract labor which seems merely to be a general heading comes in fact to be incarnated in a single concrete kind of commodity (mango).

As a real hypostatization of fruit, mangoes paradoxically lose for all practical purposes the sensuous, concrete attributes of their fruitiness, for their use value has become exchange value, pure and simple, since mangoes serve as the embodiment of fruit as such in the circulation of commodities. Mangoes just as they come off the tree seem to be forthwith the visible incarnation, the social chrysalis state, of all fruit. The abstract-universal of fruit, which ought to be a predicate-i.e. a property of concrete or the sensate-, has become in mangoes the subject, a self-subsisting entity. The concrete sensate of the mango moreover now counts merely as the phenomenal form of the abstract universal-i.e., as the predicate of its own substantialized predicate.  The sense qualities of mangoes have been reduced to the attributes or, to use Marx's Hegelian terminology, forms of appearance of fruit in the abstract.

Routinely accepted as a means of payment, mangoes are money; however, what appears to happen is, not that the mango has become money in consequence of all other fruit commodities expressing their values in it, but, on the contrary, all other fruits express their values in mango, because it just is money.

In effect, Marx has attempted to demonstrate how mangoes  as money are qualitatively different from fruits  as fruits ; yet mangoes are born as fruits, as a fruit (commodity) itself, and only under the pressure of the exchange of great quantities of fruit does the mango ascend from earth to the economic heaven to become not merely a measure of value and a standard of price, but in virtue of its functions of universal equivalent and exchange medium, Fruit (Value) Incarnate. 

Rakesh