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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.<br>
<br>
Doug Henwood wrote:
<blockquote cite="midADCA630A-CE70-400B-B066-3DC54A275FF1@panix.com"
type="cite">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.
<br>
</blockquote>
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.<br>
<blockquote cite="midADCA630A-CE70-400B-B066-3DC54A275FF1@panix.com"
type="cite">Many of the examples you cite are of stocks of capitalized
income flows, not the flows themselves. </blockquote>
Doesn't matter for the purposes of the argument, which is about the
financial system's delinking from reality.<br>
<blockquote cite="midADCA630A-CE70-400B-B066-3DC54A275FF1@panix.com"
type="cite">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?
<br>
</blockquote>
It would mean a hyperactive M-M' circuitry, which can in turn mean a
nasty bubble from time to time, you'd agree?<br>
<blockquote cite="midADCA630A-CE70-400B-B066-3DC54A275FF1@panix.com"
type="cite">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."
<br>
</blockquote>
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
<i>Wall Street</i> (which coincidentially I'd used a bit earlier in the
same place, in <i>Uneven Zimbabwe</i>): "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<br>
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