[PEN-L:4801] credit & capital

[dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx (Doug Henwood)]

Jim Devine recently quoted Marx's observation that unlike pre-capitalist
usury, dominant and even parasitical, the capitalist credit system was
firmly subordinated to the needs of industrial K.

Is this still the case? Or isn't the credit system looking a bit more
bloodsucking than it once did? Not only do we have the interest share of
GDP - a bit lower than the late-1980s peak, maybe, but still very high -
but we also have had corporate raiders and pension-fund encroachment on
managerial autonomy. Even Marx hinted at this development in this passage
from K III, chap. 33:

<quote>
The credit system, which has its focal point in the allegedly national
banks and the big money-lenders and userers that surround them, is one
enormous centralization and gives this class of parasites a fabulous power
not only to decimate the industrial capitalists periodically but also to
interfere in actual production in the most dangerous manner -- and this
crew know nothing of production and have nothing at all to do with it.
<endquote>

I like this so much it's going to be the epigraph to my Wall Street book.

So is the credit system still subordinate to industrial K? Is the financial
getting the upper hand, strangling the industrial the way the old usurers
strangled feudal society? Or can the industrial and financial be so easily
divided?

Doug

--

Doug Henwood
[dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx]
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