[lbo-talk] the Grundrisse and credit.

[nathan tankus]

"It is clear from everything said above that circulation appears as an
essential process of capital. The production process cannot be begun
anew before the transformation of the commodity into money. The
constant continuity of the process, the unobstructed and fluid
transition of value from one form into the other, or from one phase of
the process into the next, appears as a fundamental condition for
production based on capital to a much greater degree than for all
earlier forms of production. On another side, while the necessity of
this continuity is given, its phases are separate in time and space,
and appear as particular, mutually indifferent processes. It thus
appears as a matter of chance for production based on capital whether
or not its essential condition, the continuity of the different
processes which constitute its process as a whole, is actually brought
about. The suspension of this chance element by capital itself is
credit. (It has other aspects as well; but this aspect arises out of
the direct nature of the production process and is hence the
foundation of the necessity of credit.) Which is why credit in any
developed form appears in no earlier mode of production. There was
borrowing and lending in earlier situations as well, and usury is even
the oldest of the antediluvian forms of capital. But borrowing and
lending no more constitute credit than working constitutes industrial
labour or free wage labour. And credit as an essential, developed
relation of production appears historically only in circulation based
on capital or on wage labour. (Money itself is a form for suspending
the unevenness of the times required in different branches of
production, to the extent that this obstructs exchange.) Although
usury is itself a form of credit in its bourgeoisified form, the form
adapted to capital, in its pre-bourgeois form it is rather the
expression of lack of credit."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch10.htm

is this element what people (eg Doug and Julio) think is missing from
Graeber's work and analysis?
-- 
-Nathan Tankus
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