Re: on money

[Paul Zarembka <zarembka@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 25 May 2004, Howard Engelskirchen wrote:

> Yes and no.  We can give an independent verbal account of the social form
> that constitutes the commodity as Marx does at the beginning of Capital, and
> this does not require an account of the buying and selling of labor power.

Howard,

The first use of the word Value in Volume 1 comes right after describing
labor in the abstract.  So where do you find in Marx that Value goes
beyond a context of labor in the abstract (is indepedent of the
commoditization of labor power, thus buying and selling of labor power
which he will discuss a bit later)?  How can you justify Value within a
C-M-C context within Marx (of course you may not explicitly find it and
still interpret Marx as such or even offer an independent interpretation
of the capitalist mode of production)?

Recall that, before he had developed the concept of labor power, Marx
wrote Engels in 1858:

Value. This is reduced entirely to the quantity of labor; time as a
measure of value.... Value as such has no other 'material' than labor
itself. This definition of value ... is only the most abstract form of
bourgeois wealth. It already presupposes 1. the destruction of natural
communism (in India etc.); 2. the destruction of all undeveloped,
pre-bourgeois modes of production which are not governed in their totality
by exchange. Although it is an abstraction, it is an abstraction which can
only be assumed on the basis of a particular economic development of
society.... (Marx and Engels, 1948, p. 58).

N.B.: "it is an abstraction which can only be assumed on the basis of a
particular economic development of society", in this case, complete
destruction of pre-bourgeois modes of production.

Paul