"And if you think I am a close-minded bigot on this subject, I don't care... In my bigotry and ignorance, I will not listen... I am going to write a book on Marx, at least one. So reconceived, it won't address all the same questions, and you won't consider it Marxism, but that's OK. I'm not a Marxist. Insofar as figuring out why commodities exchange at equivalents was was "Marx's problem," I am not that interested in Marx's problem."
What a strange reply. Quite interesting is the refusal to get right, even for the purposes of contemptuous dismissal, what I suggested was Marx's foundational problem in his critique of political economy--the mutually assuming and mutually exclusive relationship between commodities [relative form] and (the) money (commodity) [equivalent form] as the external expression of a contradiction immanent to the commodity itself .
I can understand not wanting to focus on the problem but I don't understand this disappearing of the problem by wildly mis-stating it.
Now putting aside Marxology it would also be a mistake to leave to the demagogues these puzzles
"Money puzzles the mind because its power seems to have no visible support. Why should pieces of metal and, much worse, pieces of paper, command real resources way beyond their physical weight or apparent worth? What gives money value since it is pretty useless for anything other than buying things? Why does paper acquire value if it is printed with certain words but not others? Is gold more valuable if it is minted into coin rather than in lump form?" Mehnad Desai in his book on Ezra Pound, p. 46-47
In fact Desai misses the real puzzle--why did a singular money commodity have or in virtue of the representation of what did money enjoy general exchangeability or, to reverse it, what did the possession of general exchangeability imply that money instantiates . And why can't commodities ever buy though they too embody an aliquot of universal social abstract labor time?
Or is it that money is general exchangeability, no more and no less, so that there are no deeper questions about representation and implication and instantiation. This is partially what is meant by a critique of Marx's substance theory of value, developed by Philip Mirowski and Geoff Hodgson. Formidable thinkers indeed.
But actual general exchangeability of a thing does not magically drop from the sky or result simply from fiat or outside the economy; and even if did it's not clear that would be important to the logic of Marx's argument. It may be that what appears as Marx's logico-historical derivation of money out of barter
does not sit well with the kind of modern anthropological knowledge that was not available to him. Indeed this may be why his theory is more logical or dialectical than historical. Yet there is much to recommend understanding the general equivalent more in what social anthropologists would call its synchronic relations with what has become general commodity production rather than in the diachronic terms of its long historical evolution from the plains of Mesopotamia.
Synchronically speaking, it is clear that the general equivalent answers the practical need of having to allocate to private producers related through their commodities some portion of the collective work product of what has become a social labor organism of which particular producers are reduced to organs.
In other words, what exactly is general exchangeability of a thing if not a necessary form of relating 'commodity owners' who can't directly relate to and share with each other back to the social labor time on which they are nonetheless dependent for their own and society's reproduction ?
How else can that relating back happen in a general commodity society except through the exchange value of commodities and the money which represents it? Social labor time has to be organized and people have to be related to it, and if social labor is organized through commodities, then general exchangeability will emerge.
One can't understand--it seems to me--the nature of a general equivalent disconnected from the substance of social labor organized in commodity relations, for that is the practice out of which it is, if not created, then sustained in an ongoing manner. The alternative is a story about the magical creation and chance maintenance of a general equivalent as if were not an ongoing daily requirement of the fundamental practice of social labor organized through commodity relations.
In this way, social labor exists as both a concrete organism and an abstract homogeneous totality. As an organism we look at social labor processes as concrete, specific organs; in Kantian terms the organs serve the life of the organism just as much as the organism serves the life of the organs. A reciprocal interacting unity. As an abstract homogenous totality we understand these same labor processes and claims on them in abstract, quantitative terms. Society is based on its own duality as nature is founded on its wave/particle duality. Moving from the former to the latter perspective we also move from cooperation to appropriation.
The analytical Marxists want to do away with the categories of the abstract, the concrete and substance. But I don't see how in the absence of these categories we understand the actual process and practice of social reproduction by way of social labor organized through commodity relations as an ongoing affair. That is, we understand the social organism in its uninterrupted, continuous metabolic flow with nature.
Marx's theory of the peculiar general equivalent value form is interesting not only as a social theory but also politically; the critique here is not only of Ricardo but also of Proudhon. We here remember how important to the vilest, most monstrous reactionaries of the twentieth century. was the anti Semitic dystopia of money less capitalism which fed on the real social vulnerability resulting from all commodities having in fact to beg for exchange with money the supply of which was putatively manipulated to nefarious ends--the destruction of creative Aryan industrial productive capacity for use values through non extension of credit and paucity of the circulating medium.
Taking control of the money supply to liberalize or supplant it has oft defined the essence of reactionary opposition.
Plus, there is also the question of why Marx considered the general equivalent value form more than alienated but actually deranged--wertformen sind wohl verruckt. That is, Marx is explaining the nature of the value form in an ironic mode which would have no place in a physical explanation of matter in motion. I do like Robert Paul Wolff's Mr Moneybags Must Be So Lucky.
But even I agree that the labor theory of value is an open question especially with the advance of automation and importance of intellectual property, but I don't believe that the critique of Marx's value theory can be put on empiricistic Sraffian foundations for the reasons I gave in my last post.
Yet the basic questions of Bohm Bawerk remain: e.g., that commodities which do not embody labor time have exchange values; that it may not follow that if two qualitatively distinct use values as embodiments of different kinds of concrete labor can be equalized--to use Robert Albritton's phrase-- in terms of the homogeneity of number that they must possess some thing in common and that thing must be abstract social labor; that non-reproducible commodities obviously do not exchange in terms of their embodied labor time; that products of skilled labor seem to exchange at a multiple to products of simple or average labor; and that Marx seems to contradict himself by admitting that commodities tend to exchange not in terms of their values but what he calls prices of production.
Rakesh