After the Crash, Beyond Liquidity

A final meeting before the conference. We decided that we might meet and consider what we’ve read thus far and to facilitate this review I’ve assembled a number of short extracts. Two members suggested we begin at the beginning with Aristotle’s description of the oikos. I’ve added a doggerel fable by Bernard Mandeville that describes a hive of political animals and is considered one of the earliest defenses of “modern” market economics (so claims Friedrich Hayek). Also on offer: a short chapter from Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Marx’s description of the general formula for capital, and an extract from Ayn Rand on the “meaning of money.”

The whole should be no more than 40 pages of reading. Feel free to pick and choose, but let’s all try to read Aristotle, Marx, and Rand.

Links to the Reading:

• Aristotle Politics, Book I
• Mandeville’s “Grumbling Hive” from The Fable of the Bees
• Smith on “The origin of ambition and of the distinction of Ranks” (TMS, Part I, Section III, chapter ii)
• Marx, Capital, Chapter 4
• Rand, “On the Meaning of Money” from Atlas Shrugged

For Monday, more from the first volume of Marx’s Capital: Part I, chapter iii (”Money, or the Circulation of Commodities”). I, for one, am immediately struck by the coordinating conjunction (or is it a disjunction?), that very eighteenth-century or.

This third chapter concludes Part I. Again, you might also peek at the short chapter which begins Part II and posits M-C-M’ as “the general formula of capital,” but only if you have time and inclination and didn’t do so for our last meeting.

Chapter iii of Capital at marxists.org: link.

A reading group member in good standing and a presenter at the “Beyond Liquidity” conference (Panel #2, The Social Life of Money), Jennifer Burns, UVa History faculty, is scheduled to appear tomorrow night (10/15) on the Daily Show: http://www.thedailyshow.com/.

She’ll be discussing her new biography of Ayn Rand: Goddess of the Market.

Break a leg, Jennifer.

Dipping a toe into Karl Marx’s Capital, we are planning on reading Part I, Chapter 1 (”The Commodity”). It might help to also read Marx’s preface to the first German edition, where we find the following: “The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very simple and slight in content. Nevertheless, the human mind has sought in vain for more than 2,000 years to get to the bottom of it” (Penguin ed. pp. 89-90). The multiple volumes of Capital, David Harvey claims, are an exercise in content delivery.

There’s much more about money in Part I, and we may choose to read chapters 2 and 3 for next time. Those with some extra time and the desire to look ahead might sample Part II, Chapter 4 (”The General Formula for Capital”), in which Marx treats C-M-C and M-C-M circuits.

Capital at Marxists.org:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/cw/volume35/index.htm