Doubledee

I know we're going to get to money later but I'm really curious how it will work with the way money is treated now. As I understand it from this chapter money is basically just a commodity that has been agreed to be a universal equivalent, but it would seem to me that fiat currency is not, at least at first glance, able to fill that role.

Fiat doesn't take labor to produce, unlike gold or other precious metals; fiat is not a commodity in the sense we seem to be using it here, and the labor power that goes into creating money is negligible compared with the value it denotes. I'm pretty sure "commodification" is a later innovation but it seems like fiat currency would need to somehow convert people's abstract faith in human labor power into a commodity on its own or it couldn't actually be an equivalent as we are told gold is for the British pound in this chapter.

Me too, please.

So without getting too far ahead, if it takes 1 hour of abstractly difficult work to get X ore, and 1 hour of abstractly easy work to get Y corn, we can safely assume that X ore is worth > Y corn, all else equal?

I believe Marx would say that when they are compared as commodities, the point at which they are equal in value is a statement of the amount of social labor congealed into each thing. So, no, what you would have to do is compare them (X ore = Y corn) and in that comparison you would be declaring the social labor of the ore to be the exchangeable with the use value of the corn. Essentially society is unconsciously declaring unlike things to be exchangeable because they have a common property, human labor. If I understand correctly, that is.

Remember, he's trying to explain commodities, not intrinsic value or use value. Commodities are produced to be exchanged, and manifest a different kind of value to other sorts of products.

Maybe oversimplified here, but what about particularly difficult, dangerous, or unpleasant jobs? An hour in the mines is surely worth more than an hour driving trains. I can think of a lot of ways to properly value different jobs without resorting to trying to value the product, but it's odd it's not mentioned here when the next quote is.

I believe the quote that immediately follows is partially addressing this, insofar as it argues that it's most reasonable to express all labor as a modified quantity of an abstract "mean unskilled labor in a given society." Skilled and otherwise difficult labor might be "worth" a multiple of unskilled labor but you are expressing the same social reality by just referring to it in terms of the unskilled mean. My copy also has a note to remind the reader that we aren't talking about wages yet, we are trying to understand what it means to express that commodities are interchangeable in a consistent way. Eventually we will get to money and wages but I think those are all logically dependent on what Marx means here with value in commodities as a social reality.

If you emphasize the this in the phrase this value, I think we are meant to distinguish the kind of value at play from other kinds, such as the usefulness of what is produced or the material substance of it as a potentially useful thing.

Amazing work comrade! Looks like it's fixed. Thanks.

Here's what it looks like now. I see no pentagon.

Mine has stopped doing that recently. It was normal until like this week sometime. Maybe I messed something up somehow, I'm very confused.

The little colorful pentagon below comments (that's still there) would also be on the main text of the post and would load the post in the other instance where it was originally posted. That's what I would always do at least.

I like to think about the historical perspective. It's not much consolation but systems like these can't maintain themselves forever, cracks are showing and the US really is more vulnerable than people would like to admit.

Once things start changing there will likely be a lot of problems, things will probably get worse in some ways, but I think even if I don't survive to see what people come up with in the aftermath of the US I can get satisfaction from seeing it burn.

When you read history you learn humans are very resilient, humans will not end when the empire does. Maybe the failure of this place will be good for the world.

Did an update remove the ability to check how a post looks to the rest of the federated groups? I kinda liked seeing how mad people would get, just poking my snout in to see the rage for a minute.

Thanks! I'll see if that fixes it.

Anyone having trouble with the site on Firefox? For whatever reason it's taking my password, saying I logged in and then giving an incorrect_login error on my phone. I had to log in on Chrome, which I would really prefer not to do.

Apologies if this is the wrong place to ask.