| This question <70|70> overall <75|77> Hans: <73|77>. |
| Question 158: Marx describes the selection of General Equivalent as an exclusion. What is the General Equivalent excluded from? |
| [76] Hans: The Use Value of Money Betty argues in [70] that |
| the General Equivalent is excluded from ever having its own use value. |
| One of her pieces of evidence is a Marx quote from 158:4;V158:4: |
| Through its equation with linen [the general equivalent], the value of every commodity is now not only differentiated from its own use value, but from all other use values, and is, by that very fact, expressed as that which is common to all commodities. |
| This indeed implies that linen does not have a use value any more, because the other commodities, by equating themselves with linen, differentiate themselves from all use value. |
| This is an interesting quote. In the Simple and also the Expanded form of value, Marx emphasizes that the commodities express their values in the use value of the Equivalent commodities. But with the General form of value it is different. Once one commodity has been singled out as the general equivalent, it is no longer its use value that matters, but its direct exchangeability, i.e., the fact that this commodity can be used to buy all other commodities. This is what each commodity producer wishes his or her own commodity to do, but this wish can only be made reality by first turning the commodity into the General equivalent. |
| There is just one word in Betty's above sentence which I disagree with. According to Marx's argument, it is not true that the General equivalent can never have its own use value. Marx lived under the gold standard, when gold was money. Gold contains labor and has some very real non-monetary use values. But this non-monetary use value pales before the power of money to buy everything, and this is why it is possible that nowadays something without use value and therefore without intrinsic value can serve as money. |
| Just one more remark. Later Betty says: |
| Linen would ... represent the use values of all other commodities. |
| This is the point of view of the money owner who is contemplating how to spend the money. But society does not accept his money because he wishes to have these use values; society accepts his money because it represents the value of the commodity he has sold, in its pure form, unencumbered by any use values. |
|
|
|||||