Jim.+153-196

Grundrisse: The Chapter on Money, 2nd part, pp 153-196

153 Attempts to overcome the contradictions by the issue of time-chits

Again I find myself trying to reconcile the use of the term “exchange value” with the use in Capital. In Capital there is value, exchange value and use value. Here there is exchange value, “the product” or some other stand-in for use value (eventually he says “use value”), and price. But no “value”. Exchange value is equal to hours of labor performed and it is expressed by price. Is “value” just a short-hand for “exchange-value”, or a synonym in Capital?

Prudhonists propose replacing money with time-chits. I guess this would be a way to give labor its due and eliminate capitalist funny business along the way. Marx, of course, argues that the Prudhonists miss the point. Basically he is saying that as long as it’s capitalism, workers will be exploited no matter what you do with the money.

But he goes through the hypothetical case of a time-chit bank, which would issue the time-chits. The bank would become the general buyer, seller, and producer of commodities. The market would be eliminated. This would be tantamount to the “social ownership of the means of production.” You would have to have a revolution. Under capitalists relations of production, you need a market to realize the values of commodities.

Is this something like what actually existing socialism ended up doing?

156: “The Saint-Simions made their bank into the Papacy of production.”

Once again, these kinds of sections that take on a particular author or line of argument aren’t as interesting.

156 Exchange value as mediation of private interests

156 Exchange value (money) as social bond

This is one of the more interesting sections

156: “The reciprocal and all-sided dependence of individuals who are indifferent to one another forms their social connection.”

157: “The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket.”

“In exchange value, the social connection between persons in transformed into a social relation between things;”

This is the cash nexus argument, but fleshed out a bit. In patriarchal society, in community, in a bunch of previous face to face societies, money relations are weak but social relations are strong. People are “bound together”, function together economically, through hierarchies. When the use of money becomes widespread and dominant, which the social relations implied by money become dominant, the personal relations that organize production become weak and money becomes the social relation. People become free, they become autonomous individuals acting in their own self interest. Bourgeois economists celebrate that freedom. Marx argues that this is a kind of alienation, that they are cut off from one another, don’t know each other, don’t care about each other, but are actually completely dependent on each other, are engaging in social relations. This kind of democratic interaction among formal equals has liberating potential, is the root of a better society. But the system created by all these individuals is external to them, they don’t control it, don’t understand it, are enslaved by it.

personal dependence is replaced by an alienated, impersonal dependence

There is a tension/contradiction between dependence and isolation that Marx plays with.

Marx sees the time-chit bank as a kind of contradictory capitalist-socialist hybrid. Private exchange combined with social ownership of the means of production and the product.

160: “...the authentic certificate of the amount of labor time realized in the commodity cannot serve the commodity as its price in the world of exchange values.”

Why? Markets determine exchange values? Would imply different relations of production.

“...money appears in the form of collateral which one individual must leave with another in order to obtain a commodity from him... people place in a thing (money) the faith which they do not place in each other... that thing is an objectified relation between persons... dead pledge of society...”

/He is basically talking about a complex division of labor between people who don’t know each other and don’t care to know each other.

Institutions of communication and information bridge the gap between these isolated economic individuals

161: “...but at the same time also... already at the same time...” /common phrases, trying to get at mutual causality.

162: “It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to the original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill.”

Marx likes parentheses: notes to self, examples, asides, tangents, to fill in laters

The laborer exchanges his labor for a product. What happened to the figure of the capitalist here? Surplus value? Exploitation in the production process? He also talks about commodities selling at their costs, which eliminates surplus value and goes against the argument in Capital.

“independence” under capitalism is better described as “indifference”

165: back to money

The use value of money is its material characteristics which make it good for money: durable, divisible, scarce, etc.

Roles of money: measure of value, medium of exchange

168: “Labor time cannot directly be money... labor time always exists only in the form of particular commodities...”

Labor time in commodity needs to take on a separate, objectified form before it can be exchanged.

172: “... what he has bought with his labor is not a specific and particular product, but rather a specific share of the communal production.” /again, the seeds of a new society are there

174: Gold 101: I leaned some trivial facts about gold and silver

176: scarcity doesn’t create the value, but it is necessary for a commodity to have value. Air is free.

“For something to become an object of exchange, to have exchange value, it must not be available to everyone without the mediation of exchange; it must not appear in such an elemental form as to be common property.”

It must require labor, because labor gives it it’s value.

177: “use value”.

Exchange value only on Sundays, meaning you only exchange the surplus. The rest is for subsistence.

Gold is the only naturally occurring metal

The relative values of gold and silver have fluctuated over history depending on relative scarcity.

Sometimes I think I would rather be reading Capital, because Capital is more coherent, systematic, and this is just a confusing rough draft.

188: Price is “exchange value expressed as money”.

Several times Marx says that price is equal to cost of production. What about surplus value? What about socially necessary labor time?

Not collapsing distinctions, no immediate identity between exchange value and price, between commodity and price. See preface on Marx’s dialectical method.

real money vs. accounting money

money circulates titles of ownership, transportation circulates commodities /Marx the materialist

circulation, turnover, velocity

188: “[Money] is the universal material into which [commodities] must be dipped, in which they become gilded and silver-placed, in order to win their independent existence as exchange values.”

191-192: “Error by James Mill: overlooks that their cost of production and not their quantity determines the value of the precious metals as well as the prices of commodities measured in metallic value.”

195: “heavy payments are not counted but weighed...” to save time