Me too.
Paul
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From: To complement the journal 'Capital and Class' (ISSN 0 309 8786) on behalf of Gerry Strange
Sent: Wed 08/10/2008 17:07
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: gold standard, marx
To whom it may concern
can you please remove me from this mailing list
Gerry Strange
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From: To complement the journal 'Capital and Class' (ISSN 0 309 8786) [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of North, Peter
Sent: 08 October 2008 16:36
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: gold standard, marx
Galbraith's comment on the left and hard money is incisive:
"Those who supported sound money and the gold standard were good men. Those that did not were not. If they knew what they were about, they were only marginally better than thieves. If they did not, they were cranks. In neither case could they be accepted into the company of reputable citizens. ... (Socialists agreed:) ...They wanted to be revolutionaries, not knaves."
On Labour Notes in the quote below, these were developed by Robert Owen in the UK and US - not Proudhon who had other, also utopian, proposals for a bank of the people.
Marx also wrote, for more positively, about alternative forms of money thus. He acknowledged labour notes, and the co-operative movement more generally
"as one of the great transforming forces of the present society based on class antagonisms. Its great merit is to practically show, that the present pauperising and despotic system of the subordination of labour to capital can be superseded by the republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal producers"
with the (admittedly pretty damning proviso:
"Restricted, however, to the dwarfish forms to which the individual wage slaves can elaborate it by their private efforts, the co-operative system will never transform society. To convert social production into one large and harmonious system of free and co-operative labour, general social changes are wanted, changes in the general conditions of society, never to be realised save by the transfer of the organised forces of society, viz. the state power, from capitalists and to the producers themselves"
There is a rich alternative left history of alternative forms of money that have emerged in previous capitalist crises, from Owen through to the US Populists in the 1890s, script in the depression, through to the recent Argentine crisis. I predict a resurgence of these alternative forms of currency when the credit crunch hits the productive economy.
If anyone wants to read more, could I apologise and then self promote my book on this: "Money and Liberation" the micropolitics of alternative currency movements"
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/N/north_money.html
Peter North
Department of Geography
University of Liverpool
'It is the one great and universal interest of the human race to be cordially united and to aid each other to the full extent of their capacities.' Robert Owen
-----Original Message-----
From: To complement the journal 'Capital and Class' (ISSN 0 309 8786) on behalf of Phoebe Moore
Sent: Wed 08/10/2008 16:06
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: gold standard, marx
In my translation (Beacon Press reprinted 2001), this reference is on page 26.
'Belief in the gold standard was the faith of the age. With some it was naïve, with some critical with others a satanistic creed implying acceptance in the flesh and rejection in the spirit. Yet the belief itself was the same namely that banknotes have value because they represent gold. Whether the gold itself has value for the reason that it embodies labour, as the socialists held, or for the reason that it is useful and scarce, as the orthodox doctrine ran, made for once no difference. The war between heaven and hell ignored the money issue, leaving capitalists and socialists miraculously united. Where Ricardo and Marx were at one, the nineteenth century knew not doubt. Bismarck and Lassalle, John Stuart Mill and Henry George, Philip Snowden and Calvin Coolidge, Mises and Trotsky equally accepted the faith. Karl Marx had gone to great pains to show up Proudhon's utopian labour notes (which were toe replace currency) as based on self-delusion, and Das Kaptal implied the commodity theory of money, in its Ricardian form. The Russian Bolshevik Sokolnikoff was the first post-war statesman to restore the value of his country's currency in terms of gold... It would be hard to find any divergence between utterances of Hoover and Lenin, Churchill and Mussolini, on this point. Indeed, the essentialiyt of the gold standard to the functioning of the international economic system of the time was the one and only tenet common to men of all nations and all classes, religious denominations, and social philosophies.'
Dr Phoebe Moore
Lecturer in International Relations
Politics and Contemporary History and
European Studies Research Institute (ESRI)
Crescent House, Salford
University of Salford,
Manchester, M54WT
T: 0161 295 6033
F: 0161 295 5077
<http://www.espach.salford.ac.uk/politics/irp.php>
Profile: http://www.espach.salford.ac.uk/politics/staff/moore.php <http://www.espach.salford.ac.uk/politics/staff/moore.php>
<http://www.cseweb.org.uk/>
________________________________
From: To complement the journal 'Capital and Class' (ISSN 0 309 8786) [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Gerry Strange
Sent: 08 October 2008 12:22
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: gold standard, marx
Im not sure precisely what your question is and dont have Great Transformation to hand. In terms of political economy, Polanyi was obviously influenced by the crisies of the interwar period. His judgement on Marx was generally somewhat unfavourable. His main influence seems to have been Adam Smith (especially The Theory of Moral Sentiments). Polanyi disliked the fgold standard because in represented the hegemnony of High Finace (an earlier version of globalisation)
Gerry
________________________________
From: To complement the journal 'Capital and Class' (ISSN 0 309 8786) [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Lindsay, John M
Sent: 07 October 2008 16:31
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: C&C: gold standard, marx
Here is rather a 1st year undergraduate question beyond my special knowledge...
Polanyi, K in Great transformation, p25 refers to marx, Lenin, Trotsky and the gold standard, and I must admit I have no memory of his sort of reading of their position.
Is there anyone on the list who is a specialist and can point me to the right three paragraphs to refute the assertion?
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