sorry to ignore what other people said in this thread, but here are my two cents (as it were).
On 8/12/06, Jayson Funke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Sorry if this query is a bit simplistic (or the suppositions just ignorant) to many on this list, but I would appreciate a refresher - any comments and literature suggestions (I know Marx deals with money in Cap #1 and I need to reread it) would be great. How can money be a "universal" store of value and unit of exchange?
My feeling is that Marx was using the word "universal" in a different way than most of us would. (A lot of what he said in his early-volume I stuff on money is banal, IMHO.) Money is a replacement for direct commodity-for-commodity exchange (barter) and so is "universal," standing in for all other commodities and indirectly for social labor. If there's a Marxian text expert (textpert?) in the house, please feel free to correct me.
I am asking this because I am trying to determine if the globalization of the US dollar can be argued to also be a process of social and cultural homogenization - (but not in the most commonly cited way through the cultural McDonaldsization of the world), but rather more subtly as the imposition of the value system underlying the dollar on the rest of the world?
If by "value system," you mean "moral values" or ethos, I'd say no. Most kinds of money you use involves the ethical value of facilitating exchange and nothing else. Exceptions would be explicitly community-based moneys or near-moneys such as Ithaca HOURS.
If, as I suspect, money in its various guises, developed at local (perhaps regional) levels among people with shared common values, then money is only capable of acting as a true store of value and unit of exchange among people with the same social values (or else, how does money reflect the differences in values of different societies?). In other words, does money necessitate that those who use it must necessarily share the same social measures of value?
The universalization (or rather globalization) of US dollars simply broadens the scope of one kind of money, one that doesn't have the same kind of community-based flavor as HOURS. Gold doesn't have that kind of flavor, either. In the current non-gold-standard era, we rely on fiat money (which is non-convertible into specie money). To Marx, the purchasing power of fiat money depended on its "forced circulation" within national boundaries, its insulation from the gold standard by state power (where gold was the universal money of his day). I extend the idea of "forced circulation" to see today's fiat money as totally based on the extent of state power. If a state falls apart, no longer being able to collect taxes or cut expenditures (as can happen after losing a war), the money becomes worthless; there is hyperinflation. So, I see the dollarization of the world as reflecting the imperial reach of the US, its political, military, economic, and financial power. With the possible rise in political/miliary power of Euroland, we might see the Euro joining the USD to form a duopoly of ducats, dueling dolares. Of course, back in the 1980s, people used to talk about the rising power of the Yen, and that didn't happen. -- Jim Devine / "It is however always important to remember that the ability to see things in their correct perspective may be, and often is, divorced from the ability to reason correctly and vice versa. That is why an economist may be a very good theorist and yet talk absolute nonsense...." -- Joseph Schumpeter [edited]
