>DH:
>"Most plant and equipment investment is financed internally."
>
>mbs: Quite so. It is *financed.*
Through profits, that is, no external creditor is involved.
>mbs: Your connotation of "separate" is murky to me.
>Clearly production can take place without finance, or
>with drastically reformed finance, but finance without
>production is meaningless.
How can capitalist production take place without the involvement of money? How can you separate the large professionally managed firm as a structure from the equity markets that its (often transient) owners trade its stock on?
>mbs: We could agree that parasitic finance = the decision-making
>mechanism of capitalism = capitalism itself. My point is that it
>is constructive rhetoric because it is informative and because it
>points to potentially constructive reforms, short of junking the
>whole system.
Well, that's the charm of the separation position, isn't it? But if finance is all about the structures of ownership and control, your modest reforms are really striking at the heart of the system.
> Equating the critique of finance with bigotry is
>inaccurate and unfair; claiming that it is uninformative or
>without use is just wrong. It seems to me that "financial logic,"
>whatever its locus in industry or finance, is precisely the right
>target, both on political and policy grounds.
But once you get started, where do you stop? Let's take your position for a minute. That production should be undertaken only when there's a prospect of profit, and not when there's a human need, is one of the hideous things about capitalism. Drug companies, for example, are more interested in developing yet another anti-retroviral agent than in developing an AIDS vaccine (if anyone's going to do that, it's going to have to be publicly subsidized), or developing a new Viagra than in curing tropical diseases. So by pointing that out, are we criticizing "finance," narrowly contructed, or the entire apparatus of capitalism? By pretending that there's some easily isolable target called "finance" - virtuous industry's evil twin - you're really misleading people into thinking the political fight is easier than it really is.
Doug