This is relevant to the exchange between Sabri and Max. Sabri asked: > Is this financial system exogenous or endogenous to the > broader system in which we are pursuing "the sort of > growth we were pursuing"?
This is my understanding. If the "broader system" is capitalism (a society dominated by capitalist production, where capitalist production means a predominantly market economy, with sufficient inequality to have functioning labor markets and the control of production by the owners), then *some* "financial system" is intrinsic. What we call the "financial system" (or, if one prefers, its ultimate foundation) is -- simply said -- the legal structure (or superstructure) of ownership. It's the way the ownership of capital -- or, more broadly, the ownership of wealth -- is legally structured. Or, to put it in more classical terms, it's the legal structure that regulates the way in which the value and surplus value produced in a society is supposed to be distributed. It is intrinsic to the broader system, because the broader system is made up by social structures that we call markets, which are premised on ownership, on some structure of ownership over what is traded (wealth). IMO, what Max (not Marx, but Max) means is that there are different possible configurations of this "financial system." Some of them could, in principle, reduce substantially the turbulence. Until Keynes and for the most part, the "financial system" in Western capitalist societies simply evolved historically, resulted from small-picture driven actions by a bunch of players. Keynes' work was aimed to deliberately designing the "financial system" at least at a national level (and during the Bretton Woods conference, at the international capitalist level) in such a manner that the turbulence is reduced to a modicum without completely doing away with some "financial system" -- i.e. with private ownership, markets, capitalism. Back to work. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
