Good post, Hugh (except for the gratuitous slash at Doug - whom I do not
defend personally, as I clearly don't need to, but who, it always seems to
me, comes in for attacks that are (a) not commensurate with the things I
read from him and (b) often uselessly irrelevant to what we're talking about
at the time).
When I wrote:
>>Anyway, credit ain't tied to anything because capital can't afford it to
be.
I had already written that 'money of the mind' must eventually collide with
matter. I was talking about bourgeois discourse here - and how it militates
against its own interests because it validates leaving the credit system
unchecked. So we agree here.
And when I wrote:
>> Capitalism's problem is that it consequently relies wholly on confidence
in the future.
I was not explaining the success of capitalism per se. It was meant as a
specific comment about the here and now. Capitalism *today* does depend on,
inter alia, sufficient confidence to keep contracts rolling over in a system
always prone to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall but currently
decisively indebted to a future likely to feel that tendency even more.
So I agree with this (I'd hoped the rest of my post might have made this
apparent):
>This is the vulgar myth. If capitalism was based on something as intangible
>as this, it would never have developed or flourished or endured the way it
>has. Now if Rob and others would trouble to look for the real basis of the
>system, they might get somewhere.
Hans's stuff is, as always, terrific. I hope to find time to study it,
along with your comments, tomorrow, as they have already excited some
yet-to-be-shaped half-baked notions re the here and now. Which is fun, if
nothing else.
Cheers,
Rob.
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