>J.WALKER, ILL wrote:
>
>>How can money - as the universal measure of value - function if it
>>does not itself have any value? If value is determined by the labour
>>time necessary for its production.
And Deli Doug tells us:
>It's valorized by the goods and services it can buy, including labor power.
In other words, commodities are valorized by themselves. Tableau. It's a
vicious circle of course, and Marx deals with this tautologous crap in
Chapter I.
>Many of the world's central banks are selling their gold stocks, and
>there's substantial pressure on the IMF to do the same. In other words, the
>central banks don't pay that much attention to gold anymore.
Well, the central banks are the people who know what it's all about, eh?
However, the central banks probably know less about economic fundamentals
today than did their predecessors in the mid-19th century, and Marx had a
field day with them in the big section (dubbed the "confusion") in Capital
III about official explanations and measures in relation to the great
economic crises of the end of the 1840s and the end of the 1850s.
I think Doug's telling us here that value is not imparted as a blessing
from commodity to commodity, as he first claimed, but is rather wished upon
a piece of paper by a state authority. This is the political desire theory
of value. Bit like transsubstantiation, where wafer and wine are
transformed into the body and blood of Christ by the wave of a priest's
hand. But it's a nice fairy tale to think that the social clout of the
dollar and the D-mark are owed to the handwavings of a Ronald Reagan or a
Helmut Kohl. I'll sleep the better for it tonight.
Cheers,
Hugh
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