I won't be drawn into this. I don't think these are the burning questions of our era or even to an understanding of what is living and dead in Marx or important to understanding capitalism. I don't even think they are interesting questions. I think they are scholastic tedium, epicycles on epicycles in a framework we don't need. The proof is less in the detailed refutation in terms of the discussion as you have framed it than in whether we can carry on the essentials of creative historical materialist analysis without this apparatus. So, feel free to think I am an idiot. I am certainly close-minded. I gave this issue years of thought and came co a conclusion, some provisional conclusions are to be reconsidered, nothing I have read about value theory suggests that its dismissal is one of them. If you can say something interesting and useful about value theory, I'll applaud you. But I'll still regard it as a fifth wheel.
--- Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Andie writes
>
> "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
=== message truncated ===
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