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Thank you for this, and I for
one do care what your impressions are. I would like to know whether anyone has
written anything which documents your impression no. 1 regarding lacunae,
citing where modern leftwing thought fails in this respect; or whether you would
care to elaborate. I include as well what you said in your preceding message:
One problem though I have is
that many leftwingers nowadays use a language and conceptual apparatus from
previous generations of radicals, which already assumes a stock of
answers - but this I feel often prevents questions from being
asked we ought to be asking, in my opinion. And so when various concepts
and slogans are thrown about I often find myself thinking more deeply about
them, because they seem less self-evident to me than they do to others. It's not
that I want to reinvent the wheel or lecture anybody, but that I'm not satisfied
with many received interpretations from the past.
If you want to to deal with it in more detail, in what
manner do you think that left apparatuses of analysis prevent questions from
being asked that we ought to be asking?
For instance, you have in the past on this list said
some things about fictitious capital, bank credit, stocks, bonds, currency
speculation and futures markets, seigniorage, financial derivatives. Robert Biel
mentions the speculative value of human capital. There's also the value of the
unpaid labor of, most egregiously, the 3 billion women in the world - household
and child care, in addition to at least two incomes now being necessary to
support a family - an issue almost unmentioned in the work of Marx and Engels;
and some months ago you responded to a question I raised about Paul Sweezy's
interview with E. Ahmet Tonak, in which he questioned how the explosion of
finance capital, superficially maybe represented by M - M, could be related to
the schema M - C - M' and to the generation of surplus by human labor. One
response was that it is fictitious in the sense that it is a claim on but
operating outside of the circuits of productive
capital encompassing surplus value, or rather sits astride those
circuits, and that one reason it is viewed as a house of cards is that it
will eventually be reduced to the level of productive capital, when the
speculative, and fictitious, nature of its existence can no longer be
sustained. Is this explanation adequate in your view, or what needs to be added?
You also mentioned tax law that skews income towards capital, and how the
devaluation or hypervaluation of a nation's currency affects international
trade, helping or hurting one player (at the expense of or to the benefit
of the rest) - all, I suppose, equally in the realm of fictitious realization of
profit on capital invested or risked.
This all may be something of an oversimplification,
but where do you join or differ with or elaborate on that train of thought, and
would you say that these phenomena cannot be handled within or treated as a
consistent extension of the schematics that Marx wrote about? There may well be
a lot in the literature concerning all this, online even, that I haven't been
aware of and haven't yet found. I would appreciate being referred to that if it
is available. But returning to your question as
to how capitalist behavior in Marx's time differs from contemporary
capitalist behavior, where else do you find leftwing thought on business and
financial matters coming up short? I have recently finished reading Harry
Shutt's The Trouble with Capitalism, and I have read all but the last
chapter in Robert Biel's The New Imperialism. Whether or not they are
representative of leftwing thought, they are certainly writing in a
leftwing vein, most competently in my opinion, and they appear to me to be
dealing with a whole lot of skill with issues germane to modern conduct of
business and finance, or of relations of capital. Also, Brenner, Hudson and
Henry CK Liu? And Krugman?
Ralph
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- Re: [PEN-L] Reply to Ralph (was the mind of Paul Krugman) Ralph Johansen
- Re: [PEN-L] Reply to Ralph (was the mind of Paul Kru... Jurriaan Bendien
- Re: [PEN-L] Reply to Ralph (was the mind of Paul Kru... Kenneth Campbell
