Jim Devine recently quoted Marx's observation that unlike pre-capitalist usury, dominant and even parasitical, the capitalist credit system was firmly subordinated to the needs of industrial K. Is this still the case? Or isn't the credit system looking a bit more bloodsucking than it once did? Not only do we have the interest share of GDP - a bit lower than the late-1980s peak, maybe, but still very high - but we also have had corporate raiders and pension-fund encroachment on managerial autonomy. Even Marx hinted at this development in this passage from K III, chap. 33: <quote> The credit system, which has its focal point in the allegedly national banks and the big money-lenders and userers that surround them, is one enormous centralization and gives this class of parasites a fabulous power not only to decimate the industrial capitalists periodically but also to interfere in actual production in the most dangerous manner -- and this crew know nothing of production and have nothing at all to do with it. <endquote> I like this so much it's going to be the epigraph to my Wall Street book. So is the credit system still subordinate to industrial K? Is the financial getting the upper hand, strangling the industrial the way the old usurers strangled feudal society? Or can the industrial and financial be so easily divided? Doug -- Doug Henwood [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Left Business Observer 250 W 85 St New York NY 10024-3217 USA +1-212-874-4020 voice +1-212-874-3137 fax
