| This question <56|53> overall <51|53> Bach: <382|89>. |
| Question 113: In a capitalist economy very few commodities are directly exchanged against each other: almost all transactions involve money and a commodity. Why does Marx start his investigation with the exchange relation between two commodities, instead with the much more common relation between money and a commodity? |
| [52] Bach: Money On the surface of the economy, money is exchanged for the commodity desired and it would appear that money is the object with value that has been traded. This is not the case however. The person that has exchanged money for a commodity must have traded a commodity, ie., some abstract human labor that he perfomed, to receive that money. So in reality, he is exchanging his labor for another commodity. |
| Looking more closely at the transaction reveals that it is nothing more than an exchange of two commodities, albeit at different times. Marx is looking for the simplest case of exchange and therefore begins with the exchange between one commodity and another, use value for use value with no intermediary ‘pseudo’ exchanges. |
| Moreover, money has very little value (congealed labor) and its only use value is to store use values! Therefore, to reflect the value of a commodity, which Marx is trying to do, it would be naive to use a near valueless thing like money. Marx starts by showing value through another thing that has value: another commodity. |
| Hans: Very good and clear explanation |
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