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Cute Russian comic. The home of the official English version is here if anyone wants to skip ahead (or support them): https://boosty.to/gabiconomics-en
Agio (from Italian aggio) is - simply put - an exchange rate... with a twist.
Historically, agio referred to a premium paid above nominal value when exchanging depreciated paper money for full-value metallic coins (such as gold or silver) of the same denomination. It reflected the difference in real value between weaker and stronger forms of currency and was especially common during periods of monetary instability or inflation.
In modern usage, agio has become a broader commercial term, referring to exchange rate differences, premiums, or discounts in financial transactions. It is used in contexts such as bond pricing and foreign currency exchange, where it denotes the difference between nominal (or face) value and market value. While the original meaning tied specifically to currency conversion has largely become historical, the term has expanded to describe value differentials more generally and is sometimes even used in place of “exchange rate” in certain contexts.
I poked a bit at the Assignats/early paper money that came up in #54 and while this certainly seems like a continuation of what that comic foreshadowed, it is hard to read it and not think the author is a gold bug.
you think maybe it's just because he's stuck in the ye olde gold standard era of Marx?
I won’t claim to be the best read, so I may be misinterpreting you, the author, Marx, or all three, but it didn’t seem like Marx believed that the commodity value of gold solely was established from the labor value of its extraction.
Actually, that is exactly what Marx believed. And he specifically used the historical example of the rapid inflation of gold coins when the Spanish brought over their hoard from conquering, colonizing and enslaving South America. One of the only times in history where gold has had that tendency.
The labor for creating gold became cheap, so more gold was available, so gold itself became cheap. So instead of being extremely wealthy like the Spanish thought they would be (which they were, just not like modern capitalist wealthy) they were forced to limit their spending. The only way for them to maintain the exchange value is through hoarding, like with diamonds. However, this creates a limit on how much exchange value they can get at any given time. The inflationary tendency is created because there is less labor value being created with any single gold piece.
For Marx, it isn't a goldbug thing, it was a demonstration that even gold currency follows the LTV. Marx would be horrified at fiat currency, as it is an abstraction on top of an abstraction. It is barely tangential to labor value.
And this certainly isn’t something I’ve read about, so I’m sure I’m misunderstanding.
This seems like it misinterprets my understanding of “labor value” in a couple ways:
Again:
So I would like to understand how I’ve misunderstood both from a “modern” interpretation and from Marx’s perspective on this.
Yes, paper money has no real value - it’s purely socially constructed to have it - but it seems the gold standard inflates the value of gold compared to other commodities when paper money is backed by it.
All labor under capitalism is subject to "wage theft" according to Marx. Idk where you got this idea that things under"wage theft" don't produce a "labor value". The "labor value" is just the socially nesscery time required to make something. A part of that socially nesscery time is the time required to acquire the resources. The 'labor value' savings that the Spanish found were two-fold, they were able to simply take a melt down existing gold jewelry and statues into bullion, and they did not care if they worked their native slaves far below the actual "labor value" required to sustain human life. Less resources = Less time = Less labor value. For the Spanish, the "labor value" in comparison to domestically mined gold was extremely low. Now, from an actual humanitarian perspective, let's call it the 'real labor value' of extracting gold does not change. Marx's point is that while supply and demand are real things that affect each other, the primary drivers of both supply and demand are, at their core, the labor value, not each other. If you reduce the your inputs of something past it's 'real labor value', you don't actually see any larger economic boons, and it, in fact, causes economic stagnation.
Basically, slavery is regressive as an institution not only because it is morally abhorrent, but because it doesn't actually stimulate national economic development, it stagnates it. This is why others of his time believed that Southern plantation slavery would eventually go away naturally. This, of course, underestimated the North's ability to innovate on the process and introduce the cotton gin which reduced the real labor value by over three times, thus breathing new life into the practice. A real life example of why we can't just wait for capitalism to wither away due to it's inability to sustain the real labor value and maintain the rate of profit. You have to have a revolution to kick the rotting structure over and set it on fire, otherwise people will just keep trying to prop it up.
In our modern case, that is with industrial robotics (something I am keenly aware of as that is usually my job, to prop up the rotting structure) and 'AI'. However these practices are hollowing out the real economy, when they produce the efficiency wanted at all, because that means that they are spending less and less money on the real labor value required to sustain the laboring community that really drives the business. As the guy who just burned that warehouse down said, "All you had to do was pay us enough to live." They might pay me well, but even if I create an overall system efficiency improvement of 3 times, they aren't going to pay me the salary of 3 employees, which means that despite creating the ability to create three times more of whatever it is, my ability to purchase what was made doesn't rise unless the exchange value of the item drops. But the exchange value of the item cannot be allowed to drop because then what was the point of increasing the efficiency? This is how you get a crisis of overproduction, where the shelves are full because no one can afford what is on them.
The issue is that all of this stuff is, on it's own, simple, but the dynamics (one could say dialectics) are what make it horrendously complex, because things that are static in isolation (like a supply demand curve) suddenly behave entirely different when seen within a whole system.
Yeah the exchange value fluctuates when gold is used instead of fiat, however the 'real labor value' remains the same, unless technology comes along to reduce that.