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Re: on money

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--- Rakesh Bhandari <rakeshb@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: 
 >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

____________________
The meaning of this passage is not very clear but if
it is saying, which it apparently is saying,  that the
value of any commodity is determined by first
determining how much of money commodity it exchanges
with and then multiplying that number with the
concrete labor time embodied in the money commodity,
then it is theoretically simply wrong.


No it is trying to explain why commodities have to make that
dangerous leap (salto mortale, the Latin Marx uses in Capital I, I
think) into money and why money comes to have peculiar properties,
e.g. monopoly over direct exchangeability, and what must have been
assumed about money to have those properties.

And value never results from adding up concrete labors.



 Unless money
commodity is something like silver littered on a
beach, which can be simply picked up by bare hands,
all money commodities are produced goods requiring all
kinds of constant capital items. Thus to determine how
much of labor time is embodied in a money commodity
one has to be able to first figure out how much of
labor time is embodied in those constant capital
items, and that cannot be done unless you add various
concrete labors.


Adding concrete labor labors never yields value.



 Thus the statement above gets into
vicious circle.



But it's not what this statement is about.

Yours, Rakesh

Cheers, ajit sinha






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