Re: Question re basics

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 12/14/03 1:12:16 PM Pacific Standard Time,
michele@xxxxxxxx writes:

>The present financial explosion which is unprecedented can't be handled in
terms of the hints in Volume III about finance. Although, they are not
unuseful, not without considerable value. The whole notion of an abbreviated
accumulation formula, M-M', without any
production element M-C, is a very fruitful way of thinking about finance,
how it is possible for M' to relate only to M without the system of
[production in the middle. But that's what's happening all the time now. If
we don't think about this, if we assume that finance is only an aspect of
the circulation of commodities, we're not going to understand a lot of what
goes on in the world today. I must say, my own feeling is that this is an
area where nobody has done really very well. . . . In economics we need a
theory which integrates finance and production, the circuits of capital of a
financial and a real productive
character much more effectively than our traditional theories do. I don't
see that anyone is actually producing it, but it's terribly complicated. And
I'm sure that I'm too old to be able to think of those things. I can get
snatches, insights here and there, but I can't put it together into a
comprehensive theoretical framework. I think it will take somebody who
starts differently and isn't so totally dominated by M-C-M', the industrial
circuit, with the financial circuits always being treated as epiphenomenal,
not part of the essential reality. I don't know if you are familiar with the
book The Faltering Economy edited by Foster and Szlajfer?....

Ralph<

Comment

This summarizes my life experience as a communist and Marxist who lacks any
theoretical depth in the mechanics of financial matters. M-M' is the essence of
my life experience or the money form of expanded value being reproduced
outside the logic of production of real commodities. Speculation and interest is
very old but always had a direct and indirect bearing on the production of
tangible assets.

As a non-economist the dialogue on productive and nonproductive labor has me
baffled in the sense that labor that doesn't directly impact the production
process is not unproductive because it is an aspect of circulation -
distribution, of the tangible. To realize a profit, a commodity must be sold and the
value returned to the owner.

Is not unproductive labor - at this juncture of history, as we live out our
current reality M-M'?

Is not M-M' the proof of a new polarity that detaches price from value? Not
simply fictitious capital - paper and bonds that in the last instance were
connected to the production of tangibles - commodities, in the past but
speculation detached from production in the absolute sense. As I understand matters -
probably incorrectly, even a derivative was derived from a tangible asset or a
mathematical equation that projected the value relationship - probability, of a
tangible.

M-M' is the abstraction of a real process that has become abstract. In the
realm of real politics is not M-M' expressed in the consolidation of a sector of
capital, currently writing the political agenda for the world total social
capital as it finds itself increasing detached from the production of
commodities? Is this detachment of this sector of capital expressed in its polar
opposite that is more than one billion people incapable of entering the cycle of
commodity production and the lowering of the wage form of the workers across the
board?

If an industrial bourgeoisie as capital, expresses its "opposite" in an
industrial proletariat, does not M-M' - expanded value outside the production
process, express itself in a proletariat outside the production process?

This juncture of the accumulation of capital strikes me as ultra abstract on
every level and creates a segment of the population absolutely outside of the
production process because capital itself - a sector, is outside the
production process.

Driving the entire process is the revolution in the mode of production - the
material power of the productive forces.

My head starts hurting as a non-economist because in a world where M-M'
arises as dominator, under conditions where money/capital is not based on species -
gold or a tangible assets whose production is a store of value or socially
necessary human laboring, the law of value itself has to start unraveling. That
is to say fiat money - money whose value is based on what I say it is worth as
backed up by force and an internal system of taxation of ones working class,
cannot be a store of value when it cannot be distinguished from the money that
is derived from the production of tangibles.

I pass from a hurting head to disorientation when considering a deficit based
on money that has no value - fiat money, and wonder why the government cannot
simply print money - which it is doing.

I read every entry on Pen-l and cannot find a coherent explanation of this
process, which means we are basically correct: the world of capital has become a
game of blind man bluff and wealth in the form of abstractions.

Then I run to Marx Capital on the credit system of bourgeois production and
fictitious capital to discover that he writes about a process and not real
capitalist because they have been destroyed as part of the technological
revolution and what remains in their place are people regarded as capitalist or what a
section of the German intellectuals called the negative dialectic. Capital or
the bourgeois property relations that govern the circuit of reproduction
without real capital and in their place emerges those regarded and treated as
capitalist in their mode of wealth accumulation.

In other words the question you posed in the above quoted passage becomes the
basis of the political equation being used as the solution.

I take my hat off to the modern progressive and revolutionary economists
charting an abstraction - which is the ultimate "unproductive laboring."


Melvin P.