Re: Re: WB/IMF reconstructing capitalism yet again - !!??

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 21/08/01 21:41 -0700, Ian wrote:

>                        He does go into how one
> material medium's relation to time--paper--affected the bundling of
> asset streams and how computer programs for bundling, unbundling and
> rebundling in the quest for the dream of liquidity and market clearing
> is effecting a shift in the meaning of property rights that we've
> gotten from the legal realists through Berle and Means.


That was broadly how I read the article. More sophisticated electronic ways
of doing financial business highlight the fact that paper contracts are
symbols too. This leads to greater complexity about what can actually be
done in the transfer of assets, and what an asset, or a bit of property, is.

I see this article as evidence of developing knowledge by the
intelligenstia who manage and administer finance capital, while the units
of finance capital become ever larger, and ultimately more abstract in
representing vast masses of dead labour.

It is a symptom of how the capitalist system is teetering on the edge of
its breakdown when its servants no longer find it rational, and yet it is
dependent on them.

But the title of the article:

> Forget Locke? From Proprietor to Risk-Bearer in New Logics of Finance


is problematic.

Everyone in a market place bears risk, and any attempt to redefine the
right to make profits from others labour on the grounds that entrepreneurs
have a monopoly of risk, should be firmly resisted. Workers take
considerable risk, with much less certainty, in living in a certain
location and acquiring certain skills with the risk of prolonged
unemployment always over their heads.

However I do sense that risk management is the Achilles heel of capitalism.
The more they try and manage risk (for example in the important and growing
area of health management) the more they have to explore socially stable
ways of organising the economic activity, including the risks, which can
now be very expensive.

After  all capitalism started with little communistic cooperatives of
merchants and miners. The story can come round full circle but in the form
of a spiral, at a higher level of development of the means of production.

The managerial intelligentsia, including those working in finance, may have
crucial contributions to make in the social management of production and risk.

Chris Burford