Andy,
Ilyenkov's discussion of money in Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete
reveals it to be the symbolic manifestation of the ideal that governs
capitalist economics and hence permeates all aspects of the social formation
dependent of the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production: value.
As such one could speculate about the ways in which social relations
structured through the value relation provide the initial matrix of
relations that any child in such a society would have to learn to be able to
participate in other significant social relations of the system. This would
suggest that the pattern is not so much a leading from some childhood
"unreal world" to an adult "real" world, but rather learning the symbolic
systems of expressing the very social relations that were learned initially
at the level of being and later working up to those of concept (symbol).
This would be very much in line with a Vygotskean perspective and would also
account for any predisposition of children learn to manipulate the symbolic
systems of mathematics in "concrete" monetary terms before being able to
transpose them to other more abstract domains.
Paul H. Dillon
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