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
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