On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 4:38 PM, Shane Mage <[email protected]> wrote:
> Whatever Marx noted (a citation would have been helpful), it certainly had > nothing to do with *modern* centralized finance, whose very inception dates > to a century or more after the writing of Das Kapital. When Marx used the > term *faux frais* he specifically was referring to the "necessary but > unproductive expenses" (overhead costs) of the circulation process that > count as circulating constant capital, not as a "waste" of surplus-labor > time. In any event, the hypertrophy of the FIRE and Merchandising sectors > makes it quite odd to see such a vast diversion of capital and labor from > productive to unproductive employments viewed as a reduction of "waste" > rather than as the very exemplar of modern capitalist parasitism and waste. My point is that "financialization" (let's define it as the expansion of the empirically defined FIRE sector, which is problematic, but whatever) is a contradictory process in the following sense: (1) the historical expansion of FIRE from the 1970s on entails that a greater fraction of the social surplus labor time is going through it, but (2) such expansion also means that a smaller fraction of the social surplus labor time is going through the scattered processes of "finance" that, otherwise, individual capitals would have to carry out in the absence of a developed FIRE. At first sight (and I'm not challenging this contention, though I am not yet fully convinced), (1) has overwhelmed (2) in the last 40 years or such. I believe that, from the viewpoint of working people (not from the viewpoint of capital), (1) -- as much as it creates conditions that would facilitate the socialist reorganization of the global economy -- is incredibly wasteful. However, the absence of (2) is not only similarly wasteful but it has the aggravating circumstance that it makes it much harder to reorganize the global economy under socialist lines. It's not at all clear, a priori, which one is more wasteful. Now, this question cannot be settled speculatively. It has to be settled via empirical measurement. That's why I'm not yet fully convinced one way or the other, because I haven't seen the evidence proving this beyond my reasonable doubt. I'm not making a contrarian argument as much as saying, "Hey guys, if you believe that financialization is fundamentally a process wasteful of surplus value, you have to show that (1) has offset (2). After all, global production has expanded tremendously in the last four or five decades as well. I don't have the time now to dig for the quotations in Marx's texts, but -- off the top of my head -- there are several passages in Grundrisse and Capital (above all, volumes 2 and 3) to this effect. With some googling, they are not so hard to excavate. Obviously, I don't want to impute the wrong opinions to Marx (or anybody else for that matter), but I believe I'm conveying well the gist of his point. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
