> En passant, I remember Doug saying on this list not
too > long ago that Marx had said that "money is a
social
> relation".Actually he never said that.
Angelus Novus responded:
The first three chapters of Volume One of Capital are all about "money as a social relation". "Money as a social relation" is what distinguishes Marx's value theory from that of the classical economists:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/heinrich031106.html ***********************
Great article, btw.
IMHO,one of the BIG reasons why Marxist-Leninist party dictatorships have failed to bring about the establishment of communism has been their continued use of money to pay wages and to grease the wheels for the party determined distribution of the social product of labour by the commodity. Thus, the whole class oriented social relations of dominance and submission are replicated. Worker x gets way less money to purchase goods and services than bureaucrat y--both work the same amount of time. The way I see it, the attempt to use exchange-value and commodity production to further the cause of socialism (begun in earnest in the 1930s era of the USSR and copied more or less in other M-L national formations) does just the opposite. Far from being realistic, Marxist-Leninists are their own grave diggers as they create fertile ground for the social relation of Capital within their political-economies of "actually existing socialism".
Perhaps communists should start looking at how to abolish surplus labour time and sublate value. Perhaps they should look to the deliberate expansion of disposable time as their strategic goal. How about a system of 'necessary labour time' for the work which needs doing to feed democratically decided social needs and 'disposable time' to feed the passions and desires of individual producers?
How about, "in place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all".
Mike B)
http://www.iww.org.au/node/10 "Would you have freedom from wage-slavery.." Joe Hill http://www.iww.org/en/join
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