On Nov 12, 2007, at 3:44 PM, double bluff wrote:
> It wasn't you that in your book Wall Street quoted a lenghty piece of
> Marx on the scheme of the Bank of England (and the consequent need to
> socialize banks in a socialist regime?). If Marx says something you
> quote it, if some conspiracy nut says the same you laugh at his
> tinfoil
> hat. That is not politically correct. :-)
That's a little off. Here's what I said on p. 237:
> Immateriality simplifies the work of apologists, as it complicates
> that of critics. Interest-bearing capital is a "godsend" to
> bourgeois economists, who yearn to represent capital as an
> independent source of value in production — which therefore earns
> its profit just as workers earn their wages. Interest, especially
> in its compounded form, "appears as a Moloch demanding the whole
> world as a sacrifice belonging to it of right, whose legitimate
> demands, arising from its very nature, are however never met and
> are always frustrated by a mysterious fate" (Marx 1971, p. 456).
> But reformers who aim to transform or abolish credit "without
> touching upon real capitalist production [are] merely attacking one
> of its consequences." Interest-bearing capital is a distillation of
> capital as a social form, not some phenomenon above or apart from
> it. Therefore, abolishing interest and interest-bearing capital,
> Marx (1971, p. 472) argued, "means the abolition of capital and of
> capitalist production itself."
And, a couple of pages later:
> But within the capitalist system itself, this expropriation takes
> the antithetical form of the appropriation of social property by a
> few; and credit gives these few ever more the character of simple
> adventurers. Since ownership now exists in the form of shares, its
> movement and transfer become simply the result of stock-exchange
> dealings, where little fishes are gobbled up by the sharks, and
> sheep by the stock-exchange wolves. In the joint-stock system,
> there is already a conflict with the old form, in which the means
> of social production appear as individual property. But the
> transformation into the form of shares still remains trapped within
> the capitalist barriers; instead of overcoming the opposition
> between the character of wealth as something social, and private
> wealth, this transformation only develops this opposition in a new
> form.... Without the factory system that arises from the capitalist
> mode of production, cooperative factories could not develop. Nor
> could they do so without the credit system that develops from the
> same mode of production. This credit system, since it forms the
> principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist
> private enterprises into capitalist joint-stock companies, presents
> in the same way the means for the gradual extension of cooperative
> enterprises on a more or less national scale. Capitalist joint-
> stock companies as much as cooperative factories should be viewed
> as transition forms from the capitalist mode of production to the
> associated one, simply that in the one case the opposition is
> abolished in a negative way, and in the other in a positive way
> (Marx 1981, pp. 571–572)
So the correct line is that the credit system is actually an advance on small-scale production and petty ownership; the loon you quoted wants to go back to the old days instead.
Marx 1971 = Theories of Surplus Value, vol. 3 (Progress) Marc 1981 = Capital, vol. 3 (Vintage)