Bob Malecki wrote:
Doug writes:
For goldbugs, the beauty of the metal is that it's a nonstate form of money
and its supply rises about 2% a year (and not even Hans Tietmeyer could run
a monetary policy that tight). For Marxist goldbugs, the beauty of the
metal is pretty similar - they just can't believe that an entirely
state-regulated monetary system can survive. But it has.
Doug
Has it Doug? Are'nt we being a little hasty here? I mean even you say that
this stuff is only 25 years old and if we look at the last 25 years it was
based only on post WW2 development of the long boom after the war.
Actually the floating system came with the end of the Golden Age; it was
the gold-dollar standard of Bretton Woods that governed the boom period.
The recent revamping of the Swedish, and now the Japanese, Indo-chinese
economies shows that a mercedes and a nice house ain't woth the pot to
piss in these days.
What ever are you talking about? The weakening of the Swedish welfare state
(and the Japanese private corporate welfare state, such as it was) looks to
me like symptoms of bourgeois political strength, not the imminence of
revolution.
Seems to mean that our "Marxists" are getting lost in all kinds of
confusion over the old "gold" standard and the new credit standard based
on the strength of a given piece of paper without understanding that the
system is on a self destruct mode which leads to wars and the
possibilities of revolution to get rid of it.
Optimist.
What difference does it make between "gold and credit" if the system
itself no longer can turn a buck. So we are back to the old question of
war being the for longed arm of economic policy.
What do you mean it can't turn a buck? U.S. profit rates made a strong
recovery starting in the early 1980s. They peaked in 1996 and have since
fallen off a bit, but they're well above the crisis levels of the 1970s.
European profit rates, while not as high as the U.S., are still quite high
- in fact a recent paper from the Bank for International Settlements
wondered why they're as high as they are. Japan is in the tank, yes, but I
suspect they're bottoming out just as the U.S. is topping out.
That's because Doug and others would like to be at those future Keynesian
conferences to reform this society and attempt to turn the clock back to a
period in history which is excepptional and hardly the rule!
You're truly extraordinary, Bob. You must have missed this passage from
Wall Street that I quoted in my response to you and WV:
quote
But the real problems with Keynes lie ultimately in the naivete and
conservatism lurking behind his sophisticated and iconoclastic style.
Having (re)discovered that 'entrepreneurs' (a word he and post-Keynesians
like Davidson prefer to the more loaded 'capitalists') are in business to
make money, and nothing else, he somehow concluded that rentiers will
consent to their euthanasia. Compare this vain wish to a 150-year-old
observation: 'In England there takes place a steady accumulation of
additional wealth, which has a tendency ultimately to assume the form of
money' (quoted in Marx 1981, p. 543). A tendency indeed: money, whatever
its economic role, is most definitely not neutral in its social role; the
accumulation of money is the fondest desire of every good capitalist
citizen. Keynes realized this with one half of his mind, and then with the
other half thought you could tweak this fundamental tendency out of
existence almost unnoticed. Having laid bare some real contradictions, he
spuriously proposed to resolve them.
And further, having discovered in two ways, those of the Treatise and
the General Theory, that capitalism does not tend of its own accord to full
employment and stability, Keynes (1936, p. 379) then declared at the end of
the General Theory that his goal was not to overturn the 'Manchester
system,' but merely to liberate its full potential:
blockquote
The complaint against the present system is not that these 9,000,000
men ought to be employed on different tasks, but that tasks should be
available for the remaining 1,000,000 men. It is in determining the volume,
not the direction, of actual investment that the existing system has broken
down. Thus I agree with Gesell that the result of filling the gaps in the
classical theory is not to dispose of the "Manchester System," but to
indicate the nature of the environment which the free play of economic
forces requires if it is to realize the full potentialities of production.
/blockquote
The problem of capitalism lies not in the exploitation of labor, the
creation of poverty amidst plenty, the abuse of nature, the atomization of
society, nor the trivialization of culture, but simply in its
incompleteness - that one in ten are denied its full delights. But given
full license, Keynes and his epigones could solve that problem. Too bad the
capitalists haven't let them do it yet.
But they did, in a sense - not the sense in which Keynes meant it, and
