[lbo-talk] Goldbugs/ Marx As Anal Retentive

Lew wsm_mod at yahoo.co.uk
Wed Oct 22 02:41:39 PDT 2008


andie nachgeborenen wrote:

> 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.

This is an important point. Marx described the monetary and financial institutions of his day, but he did not prescribe any particular model since according to his analysis post-capitalist society has no money economy.

"Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor". Critique of the Gotha Program <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm>

Money in Marx's day was backed by convertibility into gold on demand, so the currency was "as good as gold". In chapter 3 of Volume 1 of Capital Marx explained that if the gold standard was removed and currency was issued in excess of what was needed for economic transactions to take place, inflation would result. But this is explaining what the consequence of a particular action will be; it does not make him a goldbug.

-- Lew



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