On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 12:18 PM, John Vertegaal <[email protected]> wrote:
> It seems to me that Julio takes it for granted that economics can be done > without invoking a unit of account, (i.e.) in the classical sense of money > being just a veil. His entire argument doesn't hold if the mapping of "→" > between the two states of y occurs in terms of a unit of account and not in > terms of physicalities. For now the principles involved concern not > mathematical but bookkeeping ones; during which time the physicality of the > product could be said to have entered a state of suspended animation and > "dead" to the world that matters. None of this of course follows from the > opening line of Marx's Grundrisse, rendering strictly a supply-side > argument. No. Money is not a veil. It is an objective social form: a bond. But its material content is, indeed, a "physicality." If you are trying to pin down this material content, then indeed it all boils down to "physicalities." In the f: y \rightarrow y framework, money as a social form is captured by y and its changes over time and space by f. I don't see the point of counter-posing math and bookkeeping. And I disagree strongly with the idea that when money mediates "the physicality of the product could be said to have entered a state of suspended animation and "dead" to the world that matters." That's like saying that when people learn something, the physicality of the brain "could be said to have entered a state of suspended animation and "dead" to the world that matters," namely the psychological experience of learning. I don't think so. The brain (actually the whole body) physically changes when we "learn" something, and we experience these physical changes as a psychological phenomenon called "learning." The physical proportions (use values) are not slushing around in a world separate from the movement of social forms (values). They constitute one and the same flow of real social life. It just happens that this flow has different aspects that you can isolate by abstraction. If you believe that value notions stand on their own, separate and apart, rather than -- as I argue -- being social forms "overlaid" on a material content (ultimately, the productive forces of labor), then how come the social forms of value and surplus value dictate the priorities of production, of physical supplies, in a capitalist society? This is not different from the argument against Cartesian dualism. If our minds stand apart from our physical bodies (rather than being the psychological forms through which we experience our bodies and the world around them), then how come our goals drive our actions? And how come sensory experience and reflection on it changes our bodies and minds? If the body can't touch the mind, then how can the mind touch the body? _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
