[lbo-talk] Goldbugs/ Marx As Anal Retentive

[Cseniornyc at aol.com]

Interesting but whenever I drop by to check the list Doug Henwood is  posting 
interesting lines about Marx and money .A couple of weeks ago he made  the 
interesting observation that:
" Goldbugs tend to be very strange people - paranoid anal retentive.  Go to a 
gold bug conference and you'll want to take a shower soon after. "
Major problem with this statement is that Marx is a self-confessed gold bug  
and therefore a major "anal retentive". Marx makes it clear right at the  
beginning of Chapter 3 -Section 1 of Volume 1 as he states unequivocally:  
"Throughout this work I assume ...gold as the money commodity.The first chief  
function of money is to supply commodities with material for the expression of  
their values....It thus serves as a universal measure of value"
Later on in a  reply to a poster,Doug Henwood says that this is "only the 
Marx of Das Kapital"  .However, this work is considered by everyone Marx's Magna 
Opus..In any event ,I  don't think Marx ever changed his mind in his view of 
gold as money because then  he'd wreck his universal equivalent proposition..He 
did offer brief expansions  of his view of money as in a couple of paragraphs 
in Grundiesse, but it was not  a rejection of gold as money.
What is interesting is that although Marx never said that money is a social  
relation it .has become the official definition of money for a majority of  
sociologists ,historians, anthropologists and even economists.
This view is based on the historical fact that for centuries now,ever since  
the Italian city-states,promises to pay became accepted means of payment which 

 produced a structural change in the form of the depersonalization and  
transferability of debt. And it continued to develop along this line  achieving 
quickly complete e via the endogenous creation of  demand  deposits as loans are 
granted by the banking system for  which money  are just electronic entries in 
a virtual bookkeeping ledger.The whole dynamics  is of course based on the 
trust that these obligations will be redeemable at  will. Otherwise, trust 
disappears ruining the whole monetary edifice. This what  is at the center of the 
present financial crisis.
It is too bad the Marx's stubborn adherence to gold established a severe  
limitation regarding money and finance in Marxism ,which explains why very few  
"marxists" have much to say about the sources of the present financial   
meltdown.
Finally ,kudos to Doug Henwood for being such a brave defender of the  
moribund faith of Freudianism which has now dwindled to about a dozen led by  Zizeck.
Actually Jung would be more appropriate as he diagnosed gold bugs as  
suffering from "penis envy".
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