A positive "assumption" in an economic model, sensible and neutral in Chuck's day when the world was on the gold standard, is very different from the goldbugs' prescriptive insistence that gold is special because it alone has real intrinsic value or something like that, maybe cause it's shiny and people want it when the economy crashes. Of course on most standard and most new nonstandard interpretations of Marx, _all_ commodities have real intrinsic value, i.e., embodied labor.
Money is a funny commodity, in Marx's system, as Marx discusses, with its own peculiarities, because it is the medium of exchange which mediates between otherwise incommensurable things of equal value, but the assumption that money is, ultimately, gold just reflect the way banks operated in those days and up until Bretton Woods, in fact; much to the outrage of populist movements. (Remember W.J. Bryan's "cross of gold" speech -- essentially a call to, in modern terms, loosen credit?)
So Marx isn't a goldbug in the sense of thinking that the gold standard is a Good Thing and gold, or money backed by gold, should be used in market systems -- the goldbug credo. He's agin market systems, remember? He thinks that they are liable to go blooey no matter what you use for money or what you back it with, and as long as the revolutionary working class (remember that idea/phenomenon?) is organized, that's a good thing too. If, as many modern defenders of value think, Marx is uninterested in a price theory, he is even less interested in advising central bankers on how to keep capitalism a going concern.
None of which is to deny that Marx wasn't a strange character -- maybe paranoid (in the common parlance, not the clinical sense) -- only a guy with a few nuts and bolts a bit loose would have taken time out to write Herr Vogt. And it's worth pointing out that an exile from two or three countries and hated by large chunks of the revolutionary left as well as of course the bourgeois intelligentsia who knew about him, is one of those paranoids with real enemies.
Anal retentive, seems less likely. Retentives people are typically neat freaks with precise, small, legible handwriting. No one who has ever seen one of Marx's manuscripts, as I have (decades ago I played briefly with the idea of doing a critical edition of the Paris Manuscripts before deciding, correctly, that it was beyond my competence, and anyway such things are best done by the the anal retentive, which I am not), and which you can in reproduction in various volumes of the MECW, could imagine that Marx was the sort of neat freak who was AR. I have commentated on the yeoman's job Engels did in turning the dog's breakfast of the notes that form the basis of Cap II & III into readable books.
So however strange he was, he wasn't gold-bug strange.
--- On Tue, 10/21/08, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Goldbugs/ Marx As Anal Retentive
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Tuesday, October 21, 2008, 5:19 PM
> 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
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
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