Saturday, November 04, 2006
(1:01 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Question on Gold
Reading Harvey's Limits to Capital, a question occurred to me: How does gold receive its initial value?The reductivist Marxist answer that occurred to me was that it derives from the socially necessary labor time necessary to actually dig up, purify, coin, etc., the gold. I don't think that answer is likely to be right. It seems aesthetically satisfying to claim that, in retrospect, gold was only ever a "floating" currency, but it's obviously different from US$ in that there is a finite supply of gold at any one time that can't be augmented as easily as can the supply of paper money.
If anyone has any insight, it'd be appreciated. Marxist answers are preferred, simply because that's what I'm working on, but I won't immediately shout down bourgeois apologists.
