Date: Sat, 4 Oct 1997 02:44:24 -0800 From: bhandari-AT-yuma.Princeton.EDU (Rakesh Bhandari) Subject: M-I: Wall Street More from the voices of political anti-semitism: "We distinguish however between useful and harmful capital. We seek to promote the useful and restrain the harmful. Useful capital, in our opinion, is that which is put to work in agriculture and in industry, where it creates livlihoods for millions of workers. Useful capital operates in honest trade the function of which is to collect the world's goods and offer them for sale everywhere thus enabling the whole of mankind to participate in the progress of civilization. Useful capital, we think, is present in the form of savings which represent the fruit of an industrious life. Useful capital increases on modest scale only after real labor has been spent on increasing it. But harmful capital grows beyond all limits without doing real work, setting the stage for frauds and swindles that rob trusting people. Such capital may be found at the stock exchanges, and it is certainly no fault of ours that this capital is mostly in Jewish hands." Quoted in appendix one to Paul Massing's Rehearsal for Destruction. Except for the last half of the last sentence, doesn't his sound painfully familiar? Ask a sophisticated progressive today what's the problem and you are bound to get an answer such as: because of the pressures of the stock exchanges, industrial capitalists are forced to save too much and post bigger quarterly earnings through downsizing and the like, rather than invest in the long term improvement of physical and human capital. Moreover, since there has been an exhaustation of investment outlets, these savings can't any longer be used to finance an investment boom, Tugan-Baranowsky style, and so are now only wasted on the lifestyles of the rich and famous; so (the argument goes) if only these savings were redistributed to workers who have a higher marginal propensity for consumption, the economy could then reach a full employment, welfare-maximizing equilibrium. Strikes, along with progressive taxation, higher minimum wages, social welfare and public works, are thus supported to effect a redistribution of income, as if this will stabilize the economy or push it to a better equilibrium position; there is little analysis then of how strikes and the unions that lead them are preparing or not preparing workers for revolutionary actions at the point of production Common sense seems to focus nowadays on predatory capital--Wall Street and finance capital: first they have forced the posting of short term superprofits and thus the upward redistribution of income and second, this predatory, rentier capital induces stagnation through the use of higher interest rates to fight off inflation. Leftist common sense then seems to remain founded on the distinction between predatory and productive capital, as well as an underconsumptionist theory of stagnation. My questions are the following: 1)is this an accurate description of common sense progressive or leftist economic thinking? 2)Is there anything to the distinction between predatory and productive capital? Does it have resonance today both in ideology or even in real relations? How have they been or not been integrated (Grossmann, drawing on Alfred Weber, and Mattick considered it a false opposition)? What leads to the fetishization of productive capital and the demonology of money? 3)How does Doug's Marxist critique of Wall Street and the most fetishistic forms of capital teach us to counter reactionary populist or petty bourgeois ideas about the power of money? Rakesh --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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