> Well that's been kind of the point of my critique of the valorization of industry over finance, which I've repeated to the point of exhaustion. The point of the whole system is maximizing M' - it's all about the accumulation of money. The notion that finance is somehow a diversion from production seems badly misplaced.
The point of the whole system involves significant irrationality varying in degree both historically and cross culturally.
Marx has the degree of irrationality (the mature capitalist "passions"), including that dominant in "finance," eventually coincide with the kind he takes as defining mature industrial capitaiism. Even his analysis of this, however, does not attribute to it a capacity for full instrumental rationality, i.e. a capacity for rationally maximizing M'. One example is the role he assigns to a revival of the more irrational early historical form of these "passions" in what he calls a "monetary crisis."
His own analysis of capitalist irrationality is, however, inadequate.
It doesn't, for instance, provide an adequate basis for understanding the "quant" psychopathology that played such a significant role in the most recent crisis.
Ted