In the medieval church there were 12 hours of darkness and 12 hours of daylight, the year around. Hence in winter the hour was shorter than 60 minues in the day and longer than 60 minutes at night. Vice versa in the summer. Only in the two solstices was the hour the same as our hour. They began to use uniform hours in Venice in certain workshops -- to mesure the length of labor. Time units of labor had never been measured before, anyplace.
It is really worthwhile to read Postone (and as Angelus says, as Marxology, not as political theory. He doesn't have much to say on that and what he says is if I remember correctly probably wrong. But he makes Marx's Critique live.
Carrol
Angelus Novus wrote:
>
> Charles:
>
> > Marx's discussion of universal equivalent and pre-money forms of
> value in
> > early _Capital_ I is a discussion of the "barter" systems or "simple
> > commodity production" that Engels refers to.
>
> Incorrect. There **is no** discussion of pre-money forms of value in
> Chapter One of _Capital_, because as Marx himself states, there is no
> value without reference to money. I already quoted this passage from
> the _Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy_ for Shane, but
> I will do it again for you:
>
> "Since labour-time is the intrinsic measure of value, why use another
> extraneous standard as well? Why is exchange-value transformed into
> price? Why is the value of all commodities computed in terms of an
> exclusive commodity, which thus becomes the adequate expression of
> exchange-value, i.e., money? This was the problem which Gray had to
> solve. But instead of solving it, he assumed that commodities could be
> directly compared with one another as products of social labour. But
> they are only comparable as the things they are. Commodities are the
> direct products of isolated independent individual kinds of labour,
> and through their alienation in the course of individual exchange they
> must prove that they are general social labour, in other words, on the
> basis of commodity production, labour becomes social labour only as a
> result of the universal alienation of individual kinds of labour. But
> as Gray presupposes that the labour-time contained in commodities is
> immediately social labour-time, he presupposes that it is communal
> labour-time or labour-time of directly associated individuals. In that
> case, it would indeed be impossible for a specific commodity, such as
> gold or silver, to confront other commodities as the incarnation of
> universal labour and exchange-value would not be turned into price;
> but neither would use-value be turned into exchange-value and the
> product into a commodity, and thus the very basis of bourgeois
> production would be abolished."
>
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch02b.htm
>
> Charles, the fact that you defend this notion of a pre-monetary
> commodity is kind of ironic, given that this was actually the basis of
> Marx's critique of Proudhon.
>
> The value-form analysis of Chapter One is not a historical account of
> the emergence of money, but a logic analysis of the commodity form.
> Even a toolbox like Julio Huato grasps this.
>
>
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