Money is a representation of a given amount of value/social labour-time. It arises as a commodity separated from all other commodities as a general measure of social labour-time, by which the value of all other commodities can, thereby, be measured indirectly. It becomes the general commodity, or, as Marx puts it, it becomes exchange-value incarnate. What does that mean? If I produce a commodity such as linen above, it has a value – 10 hours of labour – but, in commodity producing economies, I do not produce linen for the purpose of consuming the linen myself. As linen, it has no use-value for me. I produce linen, because I can exchange this linen for some other commodity/ies that I do want to consume, for example wine.
In other words, I do not produce linen for its use-value to me, of which it has none, as simply linen, but for its exchange-value, its ability, as a quantity of social-labour-time/value, to be exchanged for some other commodity – wine – which does have use-value/utility to me. As set out above, the basis of this exchange, the ratio in which my linen and your wine exchange is itself determined by the value of each, the amount of labour-time they represent. (I have set out elsewhere, why, even if you do not accept the labour theory of value, this still applies). When Marx says that money represents exchange-value incarnate, what he means is this. The money itself has no use-value, other than it represents pure exchange value. The purpose of owning it, is only to be able to exchange it for some other commodity, and what makes money different from all other commodities is that it can be exchanged for any other commodity.
If I own a metre of linen, I may be able to exchange it for your wine, because you want my linen, but I may not be able to exchange it for your neighbour's wine, because they do not want linen. With money, it can always be exchanged for any other commodity, because its use-value, as money, is precisely that it alone can be exchanged for any other commodity and does so, because it is the indirect measure of value, the general commodity. But, here, is the thing. That is true of money, as money, but it is not true of the money-commodity itself, as a commodity.
In other words, if gold is the money-commodity - but we could as easily choose silver, cattle, salt etc. - as a commodity, it does have use-value, and must have to become the money-commodity in the first place. Gold has use-value when used as gold in jewellery, electronic circuits and so on. Silver has use-value, as a commodity, when used in jewellery, and so on, and cattle obviously have use-value, for food etc. It is the fact that all of these things – which have all, at times, been used as the money commodity – do have use-value, and so have value as commodities, means they could become the money commodity. If no one had ever wanted cattle, for example, i.e. they had no use-value, they would, also, have no value, no matter how much labour-time was expended in their production.
You cannot indirectly measure the value of any other commodity by using the measuring rod of a commodity, which, itself, has zero value, any more than you can measure the length of a table using a measuring stick that has no length. It would just be a useless waste of social-labour-time. So, if cattle, thereby, had no value, as commodities, they could never have become the means of indirectly measuring the value of other commodities. They could not have become the money commodity, could not have existed as money. The same is true today with Bitcoin. It has no use-value as a commodity, and so no value, no matter how many millions of labour hours are spent “mining” them. They have a speculative monopoly price, but that is different. That price has no material basis other than monopoly and speculative fervour. The price can be as easily zero as $100,000, which is why its price swings so wildly, and will, always, in the end, tend towards zero, when the speculative bubbles burst, precisely because it has no value.
Whatever the commodity is that acts as the money commodity, it must first have use-value, and, thereby, value as a commodity, but, once adopted as the money-commodity, when it acts as money, rather than as commodity, its only use-value is as money, and not as commodity. In other words, its a case of “you can't have cake and eat it”. This also, means that, clearly, not all the gold in an economy is itself money. Some of it is money, but, some of it is just the commodity gold, used for jewellery etc. It shows, also, why there is nothing intrinsic or special about gold that makes it money. Money, like capital is a social relation. As Marx points out capital, is money raised to a higher power, which, also, illustrates that money, itself, is not capital (though it is always potentially capital), and that, again, is something that Richard does not understand, which I will discuss later.
No comments:
Post a Comment