socialismorbarbarism wrote: > "It is simply sloppy English to make "invest" and "hoard" synonymous. > > They are totally distinct." > > Well, no, not really. > > It was one of the conclusions of Keynes in the General Theory that hoarding > is actually one logical end of the investment continuum, that it can be > widely rational--for the **individual** capitalist--under certain historical > conditions. He posits the idea of "liquidity preference" to explain this. > Keynes: "The concept of Hoarding may be regarded as a first approximation to > the concept of Liquidity-preference. Indeed if we were to substitute > 'propensity to hoard' for 'hoarding,' it would come to substantially the same > thing." Of course, there is much more elaboration necessary. Above quote at: > > http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/ch13.htm > > Even if you think the General Theory is generally full of crap, a "totally > distinct" hoarding vs. investment dichotomy isn't a strong position of > challenge, IMO.
There's evidence that Keynes didn't think of "liquidity preference" as "widely rational." Though he does allow for rational hoarding, this is not, so he claims, the dominant form of hoarding in capitalism. The latter form he connects to an irrational "hoarding instinct" expressive of an irrational "love of money as a possession." Thus "“to me it seems clearer every day that the moral problem of our age is concerned with the love of money, with the habitual appeal to the money motive in nine-tenths of the activities of life, with the universal striving after individual economic security as the prime object of endeavour, with the social approbation of money as the measure of constructive success, and with the social appeal to the hoarding instinct as the foundation of the necessary provision for the family and for the future." (Essays in Persuasion, Collected Writings vol. IX, p. 269) He claims, in fact, that "the essential characteristic of capitalism," is the domination of motivation by "the instinct of avarice," by "the dependence upon an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving instincts of individuals as the main motive force of the economic machine," a "main motive force" he explicitly treats as irrational in the sense of psychopathological. (vol. IX, pp. 293 and 329-30) He makes a regressive intensification of this irrational "propensity to hoard" a key aspect of financial crises. This has much in common with Marx's treatment of capitalist motives as irrational "passions" in Hegel's sense. He, like Keynes, makes avarice ultimately anchored in auri sacra fames the dominant capitalist "passion." "Money is not just an object of the passion for enrichment, it is the object of it. This urge is essentially auri sacra fames." He has this motivation develop through time. In early capitalism it's associated with a much more overt auri sacra fames. The extreme form of this is the "hoarder," "a martyr to exchange value, a holy ascetic seated at the top of a metal column." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch02_3.htm> Though it becomes much less overt, this always remains the "inner man" of the capitalist. <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch02_3.htm#13> As in Keynes, it resurfaces in a "monetary crisis." "Under conditions of advanced bourgeois production, when the commodity-owner has long since become a capitalist, knows his Adam Smith and smiles superciliously at the superstition that only gold and silver constitute money or that money is after all the absolute commodity as distinct from other commodities -- money then suddenly appears not as the medium of circulation but once more as the only adequate form of exchange-value, as a unique form of wealth just as it is regarded by the hoarder. The fact that money is the sole incarnation of wealth manifests itself in the actual devaluation and worthlessness of all physical wealth, and not in purely imaginary devaluation as for instance in the Monetary System. This particular phase of world market crises is known as monetary crisis. The summum bonum, the sole form of wealth for which people clamour at such times, is money, hard cash, and compared with it all other commodities -- just because they are use-values -- appear to be useless, mere baubles and toys, or as our Doctor Martin Luther says, mere ornament and gluttony. This sudden transformation of the credit system into a monetary system adds theoretical dismay to the actually existing panic, and the agents of the circulation process are overawed by the impenetrable mystery surrounding their own relations." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch02_3b.htm> Ted _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
