John,
In the back-and-forth, the original issue (merits of the CCC, or lack
thereof) is now buried under a host of other points. Since these
points are of intrinsic interest, let me follow up on them. Readers
beware.
I said that, in regards to its connection to society's material
reproduction, money should be viewed as a layered social structure.
You seem okay with my assertion so far, but question what follows --
which is that the measure-of-value function is the one closest to its
material content. Then I alluded to the Grundrisse's intro, but
failed to give more specific information of what I had in mind.
No, I wasn't talking about the first few sentences, but to a
subsequent passage where Marx notes that the high abstraction of
"labor in general" becomes possible only under the conditions of
advanced capitalist production, when in front of us the productive
force of labor switches from one application to another. The
abstraction of value and its monetary form become clearer to us under
these conditions.
Let me take a step back now. As it often happens, when people think
they have identified a primitive notion, e.g. the atom, upon closer
examination it turns out that the damn thing is actually a complex
structure formed by the interaction of even more basic components.
That happened with money. In answer to the question of what exactly
determines the "moneyness" (the specific essence or quality) of money,
the economists wound up decomposing money into its so-called
"functions." This goes back to classical political economy.
Today's economists seem to believe that the essence of money hinges on
its function as a means of purchase, exchange, circulation, or
immediate payment (payment upon purchase). Marx was first to claim
that measure of value is an even more basic function. This is, IMO,
absolutely correct. Why?
On the surface, this is about the comparability of commodities as a
requisite to their exchange. At a deeper level, this comparability
evinces that seemingly diverse human activities are in fact all
applications of *society*'s productive power of labor. Concretely, we
are a bunch of individuals producing. But we produce in association.
This association renders our individual labor powers into a social
productive force. This is indeed the crux of the matter in the
process of reproduction -- the social formation of money, the
formation of the social structure of money. (Cf. my pdf document
where I frame the proportional allocation of the productive forces of
labor among its alternative uses at each point in time -- or its dual,
the value vector -- as a fixed point.)
Credit money issued by the state, particularly fiat money (money
without official convertibility), mystifies the link to the material
basis, the connection with the process of material reproduction. But
in another sense, it makes it more transparent, as the state acts as
the official representative of capitalist *society*. So, in a sense,
it's a step away from the fetishism of gold or stuff, although towards
the fetishism of extra-economic or political power. IMO, there's a
link that Marx did not examine properly in Capital, perhaps because
credit money was still underdeveloped. The missing link, IMO, is that
of the *bond* in the most general sense -- the generic term today's
theoretical economists use to refer to financial securities inclusive
of money.
Marx in Grundrisse and Capital promised he'd get to examine credit
money at some point, but other than fragments, such analysis is
missing in Capital and the other economic manuscripts I've read. One
can think of a bond, simply, as a legal contract (prima facie between
private parties, but ultimately between the holder of the bond and
society as a whole) whereby specific rights are conferred on the
holder by society's legal and political representative (the state)
with society's implicit or explicit commitment to devote resources
(taxed or extra-economically appropriated productive force of labor)
if necessary to enforce those rights. And clearly, the rights of the
holder ("assets" in financial-accounting jargon) are necessarily the
obligations (i.e. the "liabilities") of the rest of society.
(By the way, the concept of a bond is very general and it includes any
and all government policies or laws, as churned out by the legislative
process, adjudicated by the courts, and administered by the executive
branch. All legal contracts, explicit or not, can and should be
viewed as part of this legal/financial superstructure, insofar as all
legal contracts -- e.g. a purchase, a marriage, a federal budget, a
monetary policy decision, etc. -- entail a certain extra-economic
reallocation of the productive forces of labor in society and, hence,
the quantitative correspondence between the discounted face value of
the bonds and the stock of productive and consumptive wealth of
society.)
The general connection between the monetary denomination of the
totality of the bonds outstanding at any point in time (the so-called
"present value" of the entire financial superstructure) and the size
of society's wealth, which is to say its productive forces, is
analogous to Marx's quantitative formula re. coins and symbols of
money in Capital. (By the way, Fred Moseley has a paper where he
distilled this passage of Capital in a neat mathematical formula. You
can look it up if you're interested in it.)
And I should leave it there.
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