Going only on the portion of the exchange Lou quoted, there is nothing in
what Keen said that I couldn't agree with, from what I would term a
"Postonian Marxian" position, namely that the LTV and Marx's analysis of
the commodity in capitalism form the basis of an immanent critique of
bourgeois political economy and not the foundation of some alternative,
transhistorical "science". The limitation of a commodity theory of money
IS precisely that it cannot envision going beyond capitalism.
Louis Proyect quoted Steve Keen:
". . . there has been *no* analytic discussion on this list of how this
crisis came about. This is because understanding this crisis involves an
appreciation of the role of credit money and debt, and this requires a
non-commodity theory of money which is antithetic to the commodity approach
to money derived from a labour theory of value. So in that sense, following
on from your post which inspired my somewhat flippant comment, forthcoming
events may well leave this list as "kind of Marxist equivalent to Nero's
playing the fiddle while Rome was burning"."
Tom Walker
(604) 947-2213
