| This question <87|108> overall <100|101-1> Miata: <330-1|114-3>. |
| Question 77: What does Marx understand to be the riddle of money? |
| [101] Miata: Riddle of money The commodities have a value form common to all presents a marked contrast to the varied bodily form of their use values which called money form. The money-form is merely the reflection thrown upon a commodity by the relations between all other commodities. That money is a commodity is only a discovery for those who proceed from its finished shape in order to analyze it. Also, the money-form comes to be attached either to the most important article of exchange from outside, which are in fact the primitive forms of manifestation of the exchange-value of local product, or to the object of utility which forms the chief element of wealth. |
| In the last decade of the seventeenth century the analysis of money, the discovery that money is a commodity, and in discovering how and why a commodity becomes money. What appears to happen is not that a particular commodity becomes money because all other commodities express their values in it, but, that all other commodities universally express their values in a particular commodity because it is money. So, the movement through which this process has been mediated vanishes in its own result, leaving no trace behind. The commodities find own value-configuration ready to hand, in the form of a physical commodity existing outside. Also, men have often made man himself into the primitive material of money, and men are henceforth related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way. So, their own relations of production assume a material shape which is independent of their control and their conscious individual action. This situation is manifested first by the fact that the products of men's labor universally take on the form of commodities. |
| From these, the riddle of money fetish is therefore the riddle of the commodity fetish, now it becomes visibly. |
| Hans: This is an amazing collection of Marx quotes about money from chapters 1 and 2, covering a lot of ground. I am looking for much more focused contributions made with your own words, and building on the discussion that has already taken place in the class. |
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