Money as social control, (CG)
In a sense what you're talking about in this paragraph that I quoted sounds rather like what Harry Cleaver's description of the subversion of money as command... `At the same time, the imposition of money --like all the other mechanisms of domination-- involved a constant risk: namely that the working class might make use of it for its own purposes.' (Peter van Heusden)
Not quite -- the main use of money is exchange, this isn't necessarily tied to social control or domination as such. Issue lots of money to the broad masses and you'd get a consumption boom, not a bad thing in itself, but certainly not a revolution. Capitalism is about turning money -- the vehicle of exchange -- into credit -- the vehicle of accumulation, resulting in ceaseless dynamism, speculations, the creation of new goods and needs, and spectacular crashes and human misery, too. Much more complicated than the merely symbolic. (Dennis Redmond)
I seriously doubt that AG ever gets to "social reproduction," a moonshot-sized conceptual leap from "equilibrium"-- a concept or value he has only gotten only incidentally anyway. (Christian Gregory)
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See, I should know better than to use a word like Money loosely in front of several hundred economists. It's like saying Cell in front of biologists, or Function in front of mathematicians. Big mistake.
>From my point of view, wages are nothing more than controlling crap to
keep my aging ass on an endless and joyless treadmill. I noticed in
the past, that every time I got some mild relief in the form of
slightly higher wages, Allen G would go ballistic over fighting
inflation. That's why he came to mind---it was uncanny, and got to be
a personal thing. He never seemed to mind if vast quantities were just
tossed into the incinerator of speculation, but a few nickels more in
a paycheck and he would flip out, oh my gawd, oh, dear, shit, what to
do...
Chuck Grimes