>> And isn't the charge
>> of parasitism the real point of value theory, not in a
>> moralistic sense, although also) in an ethical one --
>> that, as a matter of scientific fact, capitalists qua
>> capitalists contribute nothing essential to the
>> economy, and thus are parasites?And hence they have no
>> claim of right to any property rights to capital or
>> from income deriving from its use?
>
> Yup, which is why I object to the moralizing tone of Patrick's (and
> David Harvey's) comments on finance - it starts to sound populist/
> Veblenesque in opposing virtuous industry to evil finance, when the
> whole point of the capitalist set up is to suck value out of
> workers, either very directly (e.g. a NYC cab driver, who starts
> his day about $100 in the hole and has to work for 8 hours just to
> break even), or very indirectly (a portfolio manager cashing a $2m
> bonus check).
The psychopathology of the role played by "money" in the motivation dominant in capitalism can vary in degree. If it's greater in the motivation of those whose behaviour dominates the "credit system" than of those who dominate "production," then the former can have the power "not only to decimate the industrial capitalists periodically [through what Marx calls "monetary crises"] but also to interfere in actual production in the most dangerous manner." It's on this basis that Keynes reaches the same conclusions about this as Marx, i.e. Keynes assumes that
"the vast majority of those who are concerned with the buying and selling of securities know almost nothing whatever about what they are doing. They do not possess even the rudiments of what is required for a valid judgment, and are the prey of hopes and fears easily aroused by transient events and as easily dispelled. This is one of the odd characteristics of the capitalist system under which we live, which, when we are dealing with the real world, is not to be overlooked." (Collected Writings, vol. VI, p. 323)
As does Marx, he claims the degree of irrationality embodied in the capitalist "passions" also varies historically and cross-culturally.
"The history of India at all times has provided an example of a country impoverished by a preference for liquidity amounting to so strong a passion that even an enormous and chronic influx of the precious metals has been insufficient to bring down the rate of interest to a level which was compatible with the growth of real wealth." (Collected Writing, vol. VII, p. 337)
"The less advanced is the production of commodities, the more important is hoarding -- the first form in which exchange-value assumes an independent existence as money -- and it therefore plays an important role among ancient nations, in Asia up to now, and among contemporary agrarian nations, where exchange-value has not yet penetrated all relations of production." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ ch02_3.htm#hoard
Both treat the form the motives take in "production" as "passions" in Hegel's sense, i.e they treat them as unintentionally leading to results "shared in by the community at large." Those dominated by them, however, are also "self-estranged" so there is nothing ultimately to envy about their situation (a point made by Adam Smith as well as by Marx and Keynes). The creation of a "true realm of freedom" is in their "self-interest" as well as the "proletariat's."
"The functions fulfilled by the capitalist are no more than the functions of capital - viz. the valorization of value by absorbing living labour - executed consciously and willingly. The capitalist functions only as personified capital, capital as a person, just as the worker is no more than labour personified. That labour is for him just effort and torment, [989] whereas it belongs to the capitalist as a substance that creates and increases wealth, and in fact it is an element of capital, incorporated into it in the production process as its living, variable component. Hence the rule of the capitalist over the worker is the rule of things over man, of dead labour over the living, of the product over the producer. For the commodities that become the instruments of rule over the workers (merely as the instruments of the rule of capital itself) are mere consequences of the process of production; they are its products. Thus at the level of material production, of the life-process in the realm of the social - for that is what the process of production is - we find the same situation that we find in religion at the ideological level, namely the inversion of subject into object and vice versa. Viewed historically this inversion is the indispensable transition without which wealth as such, i.e. the relentless productive forces of social labour, which alone can form the material base of a free human society, could not possibly be created by force at the expense of the majority. This antagonistic stage cannot be avoided, any more than it is possible for man to avoid the stage in which his spiritual energies are given a religious definition as powers independent of himself. What we are confronted by here is the alienation [Entfremdung] of man from his own labour. To that extent the worker stands on a higher plane than the capitalist from the outset, since the latter has his roots in the process of alienation and finds absolute satisfaction in it whereas right from the start the worker is a victim who confronts it as a rebel and experiences it as a process of enslavement. At the same time the process of production is a real labour process and to the extent to which that is the case and the capitalist has a definite function to perform within it as supervisor and director, his activity acquires a specific, many-sided content. But the labour process itself is no more than the instrument of the valorization process, just as the use- value of the product is nothing but a repository of exchange-value. The self-valorization of capital - the creation of surplus-value - is therefore the determining, dominating and overriding purpose of the capitalist; it is the absolute motive and content of his activity. And in fact it is no more than the rationalized motive and aim of the hoarder - a highly impoverished and abstract content which makes it plain that the capitalist is just as enslaved by the relationships of capitalism as is his opposite pole, the worker, albeit in a quite different manner." ("Results of the Immediate Process of Production" 1863-1866, Capital vol. 1 [Penguin ed.], pp. 989-90)
The "real point of value theory" is the role Marx gives it in the development of a subject with the capabilities required to transform capitalism into a system from which all barriers to the full development of the capabilities required for creating and living in a "true realm of freedom" have been eliminated.
Ted