And he doesn't say that capitalism sprung out of Adam Smith's head. What he says is that it developed as a market parasite. That is a vein worth exploring, as is his examination of slavery as the loss of all social relations -- and what that tells us about "free labor" under capitalism, the slavery of modern man shorn of all social relations.
Joanna
----- Original Message ----- Angelus quoted me and wrote:
>> The general commodity form could conceivably survive
>> the removal of the > conditions that make the money form
>> necessary.
>
> I don't agree with this, and I don't think that Marx would either.
> Marx's entire analysis of the forms of value in Chapter One is
> aimed at Proudhonian socialists who wanted to abolish the
> money form while retaining commodity production, which Marx
> correctly regarded as an impossibility.
What I wrote says exactly the opposite of the Proudhonian socialists. I am saying that the money form cannot survive without the commodity form. The commodity form is necessary but not sufficient condition for the existence of money. Money presupposes commodity, but commodity does not necessarily entail money.
Graeber views barter as a historical anomaly. Although he makes exceptions, his main claim is that -- as a rule -- barter is not historically prior to the emergence of money. In fact, he claims, the documented cases of barter always involve some notional money and, in turn, all monetary transactions presuppose the credit form. For him, the historical sequence is credit (debt), then money, and then (occasional) barter.
> I think the confusion comes in when we regard pre-commodity
> articles of "exchange", like good being bartered, as "commodities".
> But if I have multiple copies of an out-of-print book, and my best
> friend has some rare post-punk vinyl record I want, and we trade,
> than there hasn't been an act of "commodity" exchange. We just
> traded some use-values.
Well, "traded some use values" -- just use values, non-commodities -- is a contradiction in terms. Usually, trade means exchange (and exchange mediated by money!). But I think I understand what you mean.
The real confusion comes in when people demand or expect to see systematic historical evidence of primitive acts of barter in some rather chemically pure form -- i.e. as clearly distinct from capitalist commerce and also without vestige of what Marx called "natural" or "personal" bonds among people. But that is not reasonable.
Since I'm at this, I'll ramble a little (connected or not to what you are saying).
If you believe that capitalism suddenly, out of nowhere, emerged with its sharp separation between the "economy" and the rest of social life, between civil society and the legal, political, and ethical spheres; that suddenly, out of nowhere, capitalism appeared (like Athena leaping off Zeus' head) vested with its seeming aloof impersonality in human interactions, or (like Graeber seems to believe) that such phenomena resulted from the successful ideological campaign of liberals like Adam Smith, who spread myths to establish political economy as a Newtonian scientific discipline, etc. then I disagree.
I think that what appears fully developed in capitalist forms (self-expanding *value*) was present in human interactions that predated the predominance of free labor, although the pre-existing forms were only embryonic forms, necessarily mixed up with all sorts of dominant and semi-dominant pre-capitalist and pre-commodity social bonds, which is why the notions of political economy also took a while to mature and get refined. Developed forms make it easier for people to grasp the simpler forms.
We need to clearly conceptualize each of the different social structures involved and understand their "logic": why some of them have proved so resilient, why some have been jettisoned, and why new ones have emerged. As far as I've read, Graeber offers no clear way to understand this "logic." As far as I understand him, his argument is hopelessly confused and contradictory. Perhaps it is wrong, but Marx supplied robust principles on which to base a taxonomy of social structures and he also made a clear argument on how social structures evolve.
I am tempted to reply to Nathan and Michael here, but I should leave that for a better occasion. ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk