On Oct 21, 2008, at 5:55 PM, Cseniornyc at aol.com wrote:
> " 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..
I can't find the original post you're referring to, but I'm almost certain that I said - and if I didn't I should have - that that's Marx's view in vol. 1 of Capital. Vol. 3 moves way beyond gold into the world of credit money. It's true that in Marx's vol. 3 model of crises that credit collapses and the system falls back onto gold - but the credit system is clearly a way for capital to overcome its limits and reach new heights of expansion during the boom phase. In our modern, post-gold world, T-bills are the new gold, which is why they're yielding 0.06% now.
Doug