So my big takeaways from Chapter 2 are:

• A commodity only acquires its exhange value because it has no use value to the seller.
• Money is just a special commodity in its "universalness" for exchange. Precious metals are good for money because they require labor, are easy to divide, transport, and combine. It's unique because it always has exchange value, compared to say 20 yards of linen or Aristotle's sandals.

Neat. Just to clarify since the header isn't instantly clear. This thread is for discussion of Week 1's reading correct?

Busy for a few days

Found a neat quote about money from Marx's doctoral dissertation (in MECW vol1 p104) (Marx's italics):

In this sense [that people believe in them] all gods, the Pagan as well as the Christian ones, have possessed a real existence. Did not the ancient Moloch reign? Was not the Delphic Apollo a real power in the life of the Greeks?...

If somebody imagines he has a hundred talers, if this concept is not for him an arbitrary, subjective one, if he believes in it, than these hundres talers have for him the same value as a hundred real ones. For instance, he will incur debts on the strength of his imagination, his imagination will *work, in the same way as all humanity has incurred debts on its gods...

Real talers have the same existence that the imagined gods have...Bring paper money into a country where that use of paper is unknown, and everyone will laugh at your subjective imagination. Come with your gods into a country where other gods are worshipped, and you will be shown to suffer from fantasies and abstractions. And justly so. He who would have brought a Wendic god to the Ancient Greeks would have found proof of this god's non-existence. Indeed, for the Greeks he did not exist.

I was napping and like Marx entered my thoughts. I haven't read chapter 3 yet but im gonna to today. I wanted to yesterday but I was really sleepy.

anyways im like side tracking. but going to cryptocurrency, I generally know a lot of it is bs? but like is one of the reasons crypto doesn't work is because like. it doesn't really have a use-value? im not sure what use-value crypto has? or maybe it does somehow? but also it doesn't really work at like giving value to the abstract value of labor? or where like that abstract value of labor from one commodity can be equal to that to other forms of abstract labor in crypto? and it also doesn't work because like money like the dollar already does that better and is like social agreed, I think? I dunno I'm confused thinking about it. also does crypto even have much labor behind it at all besides just running machines on their own and letting machines do the work, ignoring electricity? there doesn't really seem to be much labor behind crypto at all? and if its a commodity, there should be some form of labor behind it right?

I don't know why I thought about crypto when napping, but I was just wondering about why it doesn't work, from like thinking about stuff like commodities and labor and stuff.

I was too busy and forgot this!

So Graeber would say that all of Marx’s assumptions about gold are horseshit, right?

good chapter. I didn't get any of my older questions answered but it was good to get started on c-m m-c

Still not sure I really get why the "shallow utopianism" of labour-tokens is bad. It seems better than nothing.

Marx's argument against labour-tokens as payment is (am I right?) as follows: money is a commodity; it's a particular commodity (usually gold) that serves as the measuring-stick of all commodities' values. And labour-tokens can't be this because they're not a commodity. Am I misunderstanding? I'll read over a bit more.

I'm not totally convinced by these arguments, because I don't feel it shows negative consequences from labour-tokens – it shows that labour-tokens don't fit what the theory says money "should" be, not that it will harm the workers.

I'll keep trying to understand.

Sooooooo.... how's everyone doing? Where is everyone at in their reading? Any snags or difficulty getting through it? Chapter 3 is notoriously hard, so do not worry if you are averaging 0.1 pages per minute. At least, it takes me a long time. It feels like one of those chapters that you should take care to read each word, but also don't think too hard, because a lot of the stuff is more intuitive than chapter 1, because it is more relatable to our experience in modern capitalism in which we use money to pay for things.

I am currently just a handful of pages into chapter 3. One question in particular sticks out to me that hasn't in the past: why Marx considered money necessary, as opposed to convenient but dispensable. I will wait until I have finished this week's reading to post my thoughts on that when they have had a chance to ferment.

The money-form comes to be attached either to the most important articles of exchange from outside, which are in fact the primitive and spontaneous forms of manifestation of the exchange-value of local products, or to the object of utility which forms the chief element of indigenous alienable wealth, for example cattle. Nomadic peoples are the first to develop the money-form, because all their worldly possessions are in a movable and therefore directly alienable form, and because their mode of life, by continually bringing them into contact with foreign communities, encourages the exchange of products. Men have often made man himself into the primitive material of money, in the shape of the slave, but they have never done this with the land and soil. Such an idea could only arise in a bourgeois society, and one which was already well developed. It dates from the last third of the seventeenth century, and the first attempt to implement the idea on a national scale was made a century later, during the French bourgeois revolution.

Any thoughts on this? When he says "Such an idea could only arise in a bourgeois society", is the idea he is talking about buying and selling land? Is he saying that land only changes hands for money when money has spread quite far? (And before that land ownership is traditional, owner by tribes, kings, churches)

On the other hand, both sides of this opposition are commodities, hence themselves unities of use-value and value. But this unity of differences is expressed at two opposite poles, and at each pole in an opposite way. This is the alternating relation between the two poles: the commodity is in reality a use-value; its existence as a value appears only ideally, in its price, through which it is related to the real embodiment of its value, the gold which confronts it as its opposite. Inversely, the material of gold ranks only as the materialization of value, as money. It is therefore in reality exchange-value. Its use-value appears only ideally in the series of expressions of relative value within which it confronts all the other commodities as the totality of real embodiments of its utility. These antagonistic forms of the commodities are the real forms of motion of the process of exchange.

Some of you might be having trouble understanding this but it's basically:

A piano is exchanged for gold.

The two commodities (the piano and the gold) each have two values (exchange- and use-).

The piano expresses its imaginary exchange-value in terms of the physical form of gold; the physical form of gold isn't useful here except in being this measuring-stick.

"the commodity [piano] is in reality a use-value; .... It [gold] is therefore in reality exchange-value"

One of them uses its body to express use-value, the other uses its body to express exchange-value.