> Philip Pilkington wrote:
>
> What if, as I said, instead of this income being saved, it was driven back
>> into the financial sector to realise, well, we could say profit or we
>> could
>> say higher rates of interest, I don't think it makes a huge difference? To
>> me this conception is a very... em... expressive way of looking at the
>> dynamics of the current crisis. It tends to emphasise the fact that people
>> were receiving reduced wages so that certain members of the bourgeoisie
>> could use these appropriated quantities of wealth to, well, eventually rob
>> certain members of the working-classes of their assets, their tax dollars
>> and their dignity.
>>
>>
>
> I think if you want to emphasize that (which you should), you can do it
> more simply. Capitalism is a naturally unstable system. To make it more
> stable, rules and institutions were developed over the past century to
> repress finance and its destabilizing tendencies. But in the last decades,
> the capitalists took advantage of the political weakness of the working
> class to destroy those institutions so that the captains of finance could
> expand their domain and enrich themselves at the expense of others. The
> current crisis is the fruit of the instability that inevitably resurged, and
> now the usual suspects want the working class to pay the costs.
>
> BTW, "saving" income is conceptually identical to "driving it back into the
> financial sector," which is one thing that makes your formulation a bit
> complicated...... Incidentally, it's nice to hear that people in Ireland are
> apparently getting angry.- Show quoted text -
>
>
> SA
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
Its because people in Ireland are pissed that I'm wary of the term "saving". It connotes responsibility, restraint, foresight, you know all those things the contemporary capitalist class lack! I'm not sure of how this occurred in the US but in Ireland, perhaps due to our being small, rather tight-knit and only a recently developed economy these processes, which usually take place behind the workers back, were completely naked.
We use the terms "builder" and "developer" in the pejorative nowadays and I think its important to keep this bitterness manifest by avoiding terms like "saving" - especially when what you're "saving" is other people's money and when the concrete basis for your "savings", their Fort Knox, so to speak, at the end of the day is, once again, other people's money.