I wrote:
> >The worst of the "fundamentalist Marxism" occurred when the Social
> >Democrats had some power in Germany at the start of the depression
> >and endorsed deflationist policies, making matters worse.
Doug answers:
> Yup, with Hilferding as finance minister. But there's a good reason
> he/they acted this way - because of a gold-flavored "Austrian"
> prejudice against statist manipulation. Gold can be assigned a value,
> because it's produced by human labor - and fiat currencies (like
> fictitious, as opposed to 'real,' capital) can't.
this is a common mistake, i.e., that of assigning some sort of normative meaning to value or surplus-value, when these are normative only from the perspective of commodity-producing society or capitalism (respectively). The attachment of normative meaning to surplus-value occurs when people think of productive labor (i.e., labor that produces surplus-value) as a good thing aside from being good for capitalists.
JD
