| This question <89|86> overall <83|85> Rostenbach: <735|282-11>. |
| Question 121: Why did bourgeois economics never attempt to derive the genesis of the money form? |
| [84] Rostenbach: is that the relative question? To answer a question of why bourgeois economics never attempted to derive the genesis of the money form is inevitably speculative. It seems possible to draw certain inferences about why this might be the case. Hans gives some clues in the annotations, and Marx himself reveals to some extent why he believes this to be the case in his use of language. |
| Let me begin by analyzing that language. Marx describes his task as “to trace the development of the expression of value contained in the value relation of commodities from its simplest, almost imperceptible shape to the blinding money form.” Explicit in this clause is the idea that the money form, in itself, is “blinding.” We can take this to understand that Marx believes that the dominance of the form itself is so obvious that it is taken for a given; in other words, that the money form of value is too all encompassing to be clearly perceived, a condition that capitalist economics, by its very form, is incapable of comprehending. |
| Another thought is that the historical orientation of Marx's work was not included in the motivation of Smith, Ricardo, et al. Their works tried mainly to describe the ontology of the present time. As Hans points out in the annotations “Marx's main concern was the link between money and production. But bourgeois economics was preoccupied with the properties of money in circulation.” Marx was asking a question with historical implications; the capitalist economists of the day were not. Their approach was justified. Hans' statement (echoing Marx) that the agent/structure relationship, or interaction between the surface agent and the core of the economy, “did not arrive suddenly, but is the result of a long historical development of the institution and policies guiding surface activities.” |
| In summary, bourgeois economics did not derive the genesis of the money form because it did not perceive that it was the most relevant question. Capitalist economics is pretty much just a function of the money form. If what Marx seeks to address is how a production based on abstract labor begets the institution of money, then is it not logical that other economists, who do not share Marx's conception of abstract labor, might be inclined to ask different questions? |
| Hans: Only in 2004, one year later, did I notice that this message plagiarizes Cassius's [2002fa:52]. I will not tolerate this in this class. |
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