[DEBATE] : Trosky: banks and debt and expropriation of the expropriators

[Alan Murphy]

Thank you Azwell for your considered response and your understand and
respect of my flaws, mistakes and limitations. May I take it that you would
prefer a return to a metal standard (gold and/or silver, or even another)
and if so how should the issue of the dangers to lives in mining and
guarding these treasures be addressed?

Alan


On 10/21/08, Azwell Banda <azwell at ecsecc.org> wrote:
>
> Hi, Allan Murphy!
>
> Yo, this is good: "Its one thing to mistake the map for the territory, but
> to have no maps at all means you have to be an excellent guide. I hope you
> are." Funny, I get the sense that you have lost all reason for why the map
> exists, let alone what it represents, no matter how fancy and apparently
> far
> removed from the territory it may, for the moment, appear to be!
>
> True, the real thing is the territory, the map is an abstraction (our
> mental
> imagery) of the real territory. A real native of the land needs no map, to
> get by, trust me!
>
> In your nicely convoluted arguments, you have actually moved 360 degrees,
> and found me - no matter how far removed from the real tangible economy
> (one
> in which labour is transformed into exchange values/commodities) all the
> mathematical abstractions upon this "labour"/commodity/money, unless sooner
> disciplined and converted into the logic of the circulation of "money the
> commodity" simply collapse. This is the "evaporation" you talk about. What
> "evaporates" is not the real commodity, the real money, that which
> represents labour in other forms, but the illusory, abstract, mathematical
> creation - which its creators hope will approximate the value of money the
> commodity, at some point in time, but fails to do so. Is this not very easy
> to understand? Natives easily know these things, you see, intuitively.
>
> Gold has, like all material and physical things, a value. When it is used
> to
> measure stored human labour, it too becomes money/commodity. None of the
> fantastic mythical, imaginary and highly illusory values you imbue it with
> exist outside the immanently human relations specific to a particular
> objectively existing mode of production and exchange, one in which the
> tendency to commodify is, shall we say, supreme.
>
> You ask:
>
> "If a commodity is a relationship, is that relationship subjective,
> objective, intrinsic, based on labour or have decreasing marginal returns?"
> In a sense, the relationship has all this attributes - and yet, ultimately,
> it is simply an objective fact: it is specific to a mode of production and
> exchange in which human labour is exploited for profits. Failure to
> understand and respect this fact is what leads you to, in fact
> underestimate
> the value of "alienation" under capitalism, and lead you to assume that
> what
> people really want to simply to consume more (have more money). Once you
> somehow mysteriously "decommodify" money, you take a huge fantastic leap
> into a world in which exploitation (the conversion of human labour into
> surplus value, into money, into profits) vanishes - the fundamental human
> relationship of exploitation at the heart of the creation of "money"
> vanishes.
>
> Hugs,
>
> Azwell.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: debate-bounces at debate.kabissa.org
> [mailto:debate-bounces at debate.kabissa.org] On Behalf Of Alan Murphy
> Sent: 20 October 2008 11:11 PM
> To: debate: SA discussion list
> Subject: Re: [DEBATE] : Trosky: banks and debt and expropriation of the
> expropriators
>
> Hi Azwell
>
> If all money (financial instruments) objectively exist as commodities (have
> use value) where does it go to when it evaporates in volatile markets - is
> there a real credit crunch or is it the crisis that does not exist? Or is
> it
> all the playing out of group psychology, the huge variety of expectations
> and relationships with commodities.
>
>
>
>
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