[lbo-talk] advertising and marxism

[James Heartfield]

Wojtek writes: ‘Did not they try to "get around" this by expanding credit availability to the mass of wage laborers and, one may add, homeowners? And it worked for a while with fabulous results- capitalists made like bandits. Of course, there is the question of how long it will work, but as Keynes commented, in the long run we are all dead. Nothing stops the future generations from playing this musical chair game again.’

But credit is only money, if the distribution of money has no corresponding distribution of goods then extra credit means nothing. In Charles’ model the divergence between goods produced and goods consumed is not obviated by the existence of credit. If you lend people money without there being a greater availability of goods it cannot magically give you more goods.

The recent problems show that the increase in credit without a corresponding increase in output pretty quickly comes unstuck – and looked at globally, the working class continued to produce much more than it consumed, it was just that a lot of the foregoing of consumption was in the far east.