Mike Beggs wrote:
>There is surely some out-of-date anthropology in Marx, but I think
>he's innocent on this count. He didn't believe there was a
>pre-capitalist barter stage. In fact he criticises others about this,
>e.g.:
>http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch01.
>htm
. . . . .
>For Marx, money is a pre-condition of generalised commodity exchange, it
>didn't historically evolve out of it. But once commodity exchange is
>generalised, it tends to reproduce money and change its form and function.
Mike
Yes, money didn't evolve out of generalised commodity exchange, but I thought the question raised was whether it evolved out of a previous existence of barter. Marx regards those as two different questions. The passage you cited is quite compatible with the idea that (a) direct barter is not a system of generalised commodity exchange, (b) barter is a previous form of exchange that, as it spreads and develops further, encourages the emergence of money, (c) and money in turn facilitates the transition to generalised commodity exchange, which in turn "has a disintegrating effect on direct barter". Thus, continuing on to the sentences you quote, Marx says that the bourgeois economists are wrong in seeing only technological issues separating barter and money.
What Marx wrote just before the passage you quote is the following:
"Direct barter, the spontaneous form of exchange, signifies the beginning of the transformation of use-values into commodities rather than the transformation of commodities into money. Exchange-value does not acquire an independent form, but is still directly tied to use-value. . . . In fact, the exchange of commodities evolves originally not within primitive communities, [11] but on their margins, on their borders, the few points where they come into contact with other communities. This is where barter begins and moves thence into the interior of the community, exerting a disintegrating influence upon it. The particular use-values which, as a result of barter between different communities, become commodities, e.g., slaves, cattle, metals, usually serve also as the first money within these communities. . . . The gradual extension of barter, the growing number of exchange transactions, and the increasing variety of commodities bartered lead, therefore, to the further development of the commodity as exchange- value, stimulates the formation of money and consequently has a disintegrating effect on direct barter."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch01.htm
----------------------------------- Joseph Green mail at communistvoice.org ------------------------------------