File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9710, message 33


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





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