awkward questions about money

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Thu, 30 Jul 1998 22:43:25 -0400

Gold is a commodity which is valued in money units. Money is a commodity
which is valued in gold units. Gold is a privileged commodity in terms of
value because it is assumed to be (1) relatively indestructible, cf.
"Goldfinger" and (2) in finite and limited and known supply.

But there is obviously a great deal more money in circulation than there is
gold to back it, and no one cares, because the value of money today is
really guaranteed by the availability of good and services at known prices
in various national monetary units and their corresponding economies, made
semi-fungible by global markets and the global economy. And what was
backing the value of gold? effectively the same thing, no?

Does not money remains a commodity, whether tied to gold, or to labor
units, or to nutrition units, or not, so long as it has a market and a
price? ... in fact the price of money is itself a strange notion in
economics, being both the value of the money (in gold? in some
inter-currency unit? in goods and services?) and the cost of the money
(e.g. interest rates to be paid to get hold of some more of it without
actually selling anything).

Classically, a commodity was thought to have to be a good, and then a
"service" (which is what really foregrounds the role of labor, though the
link between goods and services and labor may be a historically specific
one, see below), but with the growing dependence of postmodern economies on
intellectual property (software, trademarks, patents and copyrights,
"content"), there seems to be no doubt that signs (e.g. texts, verbal or
musical or video or computer code) are also commodities (with the same sort
of logic of labor value applicable), and so why should not money be a
commodity as a sign, either solely, or in addition to being a commodity as
a "good" ? in this way the usual logical link to gold-as-commodity no
longer seems necessary in theory, as it obviously has long not been in
practice.

How well does a labor theory of value account for the amplification of
labor investment, not only via capital, but via certain sorts of
self-amplifying technologies? If I invest a few hours and build a robot,
and the robot can do a man's daily labor, what is the labor value of the
robot: a few hours, or many man-years? what is the labor value of an
article made by the robot? what if the robot builds a robot, and the
second-generation robot makes the article? the 100-th generation robot?
what if I design a software program that can write TV sitcoms? or that can
write programs that can write TV sitcoms? or that can write programs to
your specifications to do a wide range of tasks, equivalent to what a
specialized human programmer can do today? It seems clear to me that human
labor cannot be fundamental, just as gold cannot be fundamental, when an
economy changes historically to a basically new mode of production.

Suppose we try to count all the labor that contributed to my robot. There
were my few hours of assembling the robot kit. Then there were the hours
that went into the kit's manufacture. The hours that I studied robot-kit
assembly. The hours of the teacher who taught me robot-kit assembly. What
of the work of the people who maintain my environment at survivable levels
while I am assembling the robot? and all the other labor without which my
robot would not have got built? like the labor of the guys who destroyed
the asteroid that would otherwise have interrupted my kit assembling?

Suppose we think about the labor value of the _design_ of the robot in
these terms. Or of the manufacture of the kit. ... if I am not being
sufficiently suggestive here, the point is that, in rather Latourian of ANT
terms, the whole eco-technological universe is linked into every
technological system's creation and maintenance; there are thousands of
distant links to others' labor, without which, something will interrupt the
success of my labor. The argument here is really just like the postmodern
argument against causality in human systems: causality only applies if you
can _isolate_ the causer and the effected, if they are embedded in webs of
mutual constituency and interdependency, there is no causality because
every effect depends on the state of the entire web, which is both
macro-causer and macro-effected in one, inseparable, unfactorizable. (In
fact this may apply to all systems, junking the notion of causality
completely, though there are a few idealized kinds of systems for which we
can still pretend that there is isolability ... and many for which we do so
pretend, in dangerously misleading ways.) Likewise, one can argue in just
the same way that in economic systems all the labor of all the actants
(including bacteria and robots) is implicated in every effect of
production, at some remove.

So perhaps, logically prior to the commodification of labor is the
commodification of individuals as such, the creation of an interest-serving
cultural belief that one can assign to each product not only an individual
owner, but an individual producer, rather than the belief that all products
are products of the ecosocial system as a whole, and belong only to it as a
whole. The rest is appropriation. JAY.

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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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