The activity of finance can never be productive since it is only ever concerned with the book keeping of who has a title to social wealth, not to the production of that wealth itself. It only appears necessary to the extent that any means of production used by a firm in the production process must, according to existing property relations, belong to somebody and thus 'finance' must be provided for them. But that finance is not a real resource, it is just a toll keepers charge levied by private interests on a socially produced product, and its provision is no more productive than the sale of a ticket on a toll highway. ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Hinrich Kuhls [[email protected]] Sent: Monday, April 18, 2011 10:58 AM To: Progressive Economics Subject: Re: [Pen-l] productive unproductive
At 22:46 17.04.2011, Lakshmi Rhone wrote: >I find myself a bit confused by Foley's paper. In Understanding >Capital Foley himself speaks of finance and sales lags, so if >financial firms, broadly conceived, reduce the time that it takes >for industrial capital to secure financing to commence or recommence >production or to book sales (think here of the bill of exchange) and >if commercial firms also reduce the time it takes to realize the >final product, then turnover times are reduced and the annual >production of surplus value is thereby increased. It seems wholly >possible that whatever surplus value is drained by financial and >commercial firms is more than made up by the greater surplus value >that they allow industrial firms to make over the course of, say, a >year. I don't see why financial and commercial capital are >necessarily unproductive from the perspective of the turnover of >capital and the production of surplus value. It's easier for me to >see how the hiring of a domestic servant is an expenditure of >revenue, which basically leaks out of the system. >Lakshmi From another perspective: "For the capitalist who has others working for him, selling and buying become primary functions. Seeing that he appropriates the products of many on a large social scale, he must sell on the same scale and then reconvert the money into elements of production. But still neither the sale nor the purchase create any values. An illusion is here created by the function of merchant's capital. But without entering at this point into a detailed discussion of this fact, we can plainly see this much: If a function, which is unproductive in itself, although a necessary link in reproduction, is transformed by a division of labor from an incidental occupation of many into an exclusive occupation of a few, the character of this function is not changed thereby. One merchant, as an agent promoting the transformation of commodities by assuming the role of a mere buyer and seller, may abbreviate by his operations the time of sale and purchase for many producers. To that extent he may be regarded as a machine which reduces a useless expenditure of energy or helps to set free some time of production." <http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Marx/mrxCpB6.html#Part%20I,%20Chapter%206> hk _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l The University of Glasgow, charity number SC004401 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
