RE: Re: The exchange value of currencies

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Romain writes:>... Exchange value of currencies does not belong to any
Marxist theory, as Marx believed in a gold currency for ever.<

It's more accurate to say that Marx _assumed_ that gold was the
international currency, since he hadn't thought of a world dominated by a
single hegemon that could impose its fiat money on the world the way the US
did. (Contrary to myth, Marx was no seer.) Some later Marxists made the gold
standard a dogma, though.

Given the gold standard, Marx's theory did have a role for exchange rates.
Somewhere in volume III of CAPITAL, he wrote that if too much fiat money was
produced, the exchange rate between it and gold would fall (so that it would
lose value relative to gold). (This is hardly controversial, by the way.)

>Actually, exchange value of currencies depends on the sign of the
balances of trade, with a reversion of the law when the currency of world
system's metropolis has been imposed as the common currency, like today's
dollar. And  this is completely out of Marxist theories.<

to say that the dollar standard is "completely out of the Marxist theories"
is to assume that there's nothing to Marxist theory but quotes from old
books and dogma. I believe that this assumption is wrong, that the basic
concepts from Marx (which do NOT include the gold standard) can be applied
to new situations and new theories.

-- Jim Devine