[lbo-talk] Primitive accumulation - Harvey on Marx

Patrick Bond pbond at mail.ngo.za
Sun Dec 10 17:03:05 PST 2006


I posted more than my limit on Sunday but here in Durban it's Monday. And Doug, sorry about sig.card - it's gone now I think.

Doug Henwood wrote:
> How can the system as a whole conjure value merely out of exchanging
> virtual titles to wealth? The profits of financiers come ultimately
> from interest and fees paid by business and consumer debtors, even if
> there are countless steps between producers & reciipents.
Yes, of course the key word is 'ultimately', but in the meantime a temporal fix - credit to permit the generation of surpluses at some future time to repay funds required to mop up overaccumulated capital today - kicks in.
> Many of the examples you cite are of stocks of capitalized income
> flows, not the flows themselves.
Doesn't matter for the purposes of the argument, which is about the financial system's delinking from reality.
> But if those are to be converted into actual cash, then the cash has
> to come from incomes derived (by capital or labor) from the production
> of goods & services. And what would all those profits mean if they
> couldn't be converted into actual consumer or investment goods?
It would mean a hyperactive M-M' circuitry, which can in turn mean a nasty bubble from time to time, you'd agree?
> There's something a little retro and moralizing about the prominence
> accorded p.a. in your & Harvey's analyses that wants to look away from
> actual production and focus instead on "gambling" and "parasitism."
Hopefully one would look at not just finance and the point-of-production but everything in capitalist society, if skills and capacity to do so were in greater supply (and while Harvey has looked carefully at production and nearly everything else, I can't say that I have even begun). But there was something a little retro about KM's moralizing about capitalism/capitalists - rentier, landed, bourgeois and otherwise - too, I hear you saying? Or consider the frontispiece to /Wall Street/ (which coincidentially I'd used a bit earlier in the same place, in /Uneven Zimbabwe/): "The credit system, which has its focal point in the allegedly national banks and the big money-lenders and usurers 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." --- Marx, Capital, vol. 3, chap. 33 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20061211/4f4d6cd0/attachment.htm>



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