[Marxism] Re The Meaning of Surplus Capital

[Ilyenkova@xxxxxxx]

Jurriaan writes concluding an analysis of the shift out of productive capital 
into forms of speculative credit:

>In reality, there is no real "economic crisis", only a misallocation of 
capital, from an economic perspective. The only "crisis" there is, is the 
crisis 
affecting the poor. The central question of bourgeois ideology is no longer one 
of "how to expand outputs", but "who 
deserves credit". There you have the material basis, of the shift from 
modernism to post-modernism.<

I'm not sure what you are saying here. Do you agree with those in the U.S. 
and Europe like Alan Greenspan who represent the interests of finance capital 
that this dramatic and escalating shift in flows of capital can continue 
indefinitely (as long as enough surplus value can be squeezed out of a 
shrinking 
working class)?

This dispute has now broken out in the open in the pages of the Financial 
Times. In a series of articles, most recently 1/11/04, US economists Obstfeld 
and 
Rogoff argue that the spiralling process of using European and Asian 
surpluses to 'force balance in international payments' raises the spectre of 
depression. What they are saying in plain terms is that  foreign central banks 
can't 
keep propping up the US dollar. The resultant financial imbalances are just too 
costly. (Unfortunately, the Financial Times does not make its archives 
available free on-line, so one has to trek to the Library to follow this).

(i.e.) In 2002 foreign central banks bought $352 billion; in 2003 the total 
increased to $617 billion. Asian reserves of dollar denominated assets 
increased by more than $350 billion from March '03 to March '04. Of course, 
should the 
dollar keep dropping in value these ratios will expand exponentially. The 
opinion that there's no serious structural economic problem, represented by 
Alan 
Greenspan, holds that the US market is deep enough to absorb a volume of 
creditor nation imports to finance the imbalances, as I understand it (because 
the 
Greenspan position make little sense to me).

In Kapital V.3 Ch. 25 Marx dealt in a cursory way with the question of 
'Fictitious Capital' which he defined as a mass of speculative capital 
representing 
paper claims to a share of the total surplus labor. He stressed that 
Fictitious Capital was an essential feature of the process of capital 
accumulation, but 
also that as the ratio of fictitious claims to surplus labor embodied in 
circulating use values rose,  the fictitous house of cards had to come crashing 
down eventually.

Marx was writing about national economies and in the context of  boom-bust 
cycles and conjunctural crises. In the globalized economy of today, with all 
its 
internal contradictions, it seems that the question of Fictitous Capital 
becomes a central one, as economic crises assume increasingly the form of 
credit-monetary crisis. As you say, it becomes a matter of "who deserves 
credit?" But 
who decides this question? And when did a magic wand appear that allows one 
national capital (in today's case the U.S.) to declare to the others, like Dr. 
Pangloss that all will be for the best in the world of free floating 
post-modern fictitious capital.
Ilyenkova
I





_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism