The Value of MoneyAnderson, Benjamin M. (Benjamin McAlester)
General
The Value of Money
Anderson, Benjamin M. (Benjamin McAlester)
Money
labor, it is clear that average labor can be no explanation of value.
This is not the only flaw in the labor-time theory, but it illustrates a
vice which it has in common with all those theories which start with
individual elements, and seek to combine them into a social quantity.
The whole method of approach is wrong. It makes two abstractions,
neither of which is legitimate: first, it abstracts the individual from
his vital and organic connections with his fellows, and then, second, it
takes from the individual, thus abstracted, only a small part, that part
immediately concerned with the consumption or production of wealth. In
this process of abstraction, very much of the explanation of value is
left out. The _whole_ man, in his _social_ relations, must be taken into
account before we can get an adequate theory of value. We turn, then, to
a brief discussion of society and the individual, and to a discussion of
those individual activities and social relations which are most
significant in the explanation of economic value.
* * * * *
All mental processes are in the minds of individual men. There is no
social "oversoul" which transcends individual minds, and there is no
social "consciousness" which stands outside of and above the
consciousnesses of individuals. So much by way of emphatic concurrence
with those critics of the social value theory[20] who persist in
foisting upon the theory the notion that there is a social oversoul, or
that the "social organism" is some so far unclassified biological
specimen. To say that economic value is a social value, the product of
many minds in organic interplay, is not to say that economic value is
independent of processes in the minds of individual men, or that it
results from any mysterious behavior of a social oversoul.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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