>1. The financial system is the medium through
>which small-C capital (plant and equipment)
>is allocated.
Most plant and equipment investment is financed internally.
>2. Capital allocation -- the withholding of
>capital to an area, region, industry, or enterprise --
>is a weapon wielded against the working class
>and other small producers, including through
>the filter of race, gender, and other prejudices.
>
>3. To swallow finance -- capital allocation --
>into "capital is a social relation" much bigger
>than finance is to retreat from politics to
>marxoid abstractions.
Not at all. It's not a Marxoid abstraction to point out that the financial markets are the institutions by which real ownership claims are developed, exercised, and traded; that the capitalist industry generates profits in money form that need to be redeployed, either through reinvestment, dividend or interest payments, or the purchase of financial assets; and that capitalist production often involves borrowing, a financial relation. It is absolutely impossible to separate production from finance in any serious way. As Henry Ford put it, he wasn't in business to make cars, but to make money.
>4. To stigmatize a critique of finance as
>anti-semitic is slander that betrays a taste
>for political marginalization.
Max, the critique of finance as parasitic has very often been associated with anti-Semitic politics. Why is that? Pure accident, or is there some psychopolitical connection?
>It also serves the interests of -- surprize!
>-- parasitic finance, the decision-making
>mechanism of Capitalism.
Are CEOs and other senior execs, who are employed by industry and earn their very considerable wages from the uncompensated labor of others, members of industry or parasitic finance?
So if "parasitic finance" is the "decision-making mechanism of capitalism" - which I agree with - does that mean it's not capitalism but the decision-making mechanism that's the problem? How do you separate production from decision-making? Are execs who do discounted cash flow analysis to decide whether to open or close a plant engaging in industrial or financial logic?
Doug