Jayson Funke wrote: > are we not essentially in a situation in which global > currencies are valued around the US dollar, and the value of the US dollar, > de-linked from gold, is valued on financial market perceptions of the > ability of the US to meet its debt obligations (ie. the ability of the state > to tax its productive asset base)?
This sounds right to me. In the last analysis. > A major component of the coming financial meltdown seems to stem from the > fact that the value-basis of the global economy (currencies - especially the > US dollar) has shifted to an even more precarious value-basis. I'm not sure that the USD has necessarily been "more precarious" as world money than gold would have been. It's hard to tell. The value of gold is subject to demand and supply vagaries, including out of the blue technological shocks. > Where once > currency values hinged around market perceptions of gold, they now appear to > hinge around market perceptions of the market itself. I don't think this is because currently world money is predominantly U.S. fiat money. Again, in the big picture, the value of gold is just as endogenous (chicken-and-egg) as the financial standing of the U.S. Treasury. > Every injection of > liquidity or increase in the supply of money through monetary manipulations > appears to put more distance between the underlying value of assets produced > in the real economy and the exponentially increasing amount of money in > circulation. If we think of the injection of liquidity only in terms of the first order effect, that's a mere quantitative change. IMO, what separates the real economy from the financial superstructure qualitatively has to do with further-order effects or even phenomena that do not necessarily require more liquidity (these phenomena may arise from "innovation"). Among the further effects one can think of credit expansion, added layers of leverage. Among innovations one can think of the buildup of new and more complex layers of contingent claims (derivatives), the discovery, invention, or utilization of increasingly abstract underlying notions, etc. IMO, there's a rational kernel in the qualitative development of the financial superstructure of modern capitalism. I can see how those forms (with a completely different content) are of tremendous potential use in communist planning. To get that, we need to theorize the concept of ownership, which among Marxists has been taken as a mere descriptor. I'm not familiar with what Marxists may have written lately about this, but to my knowledge the only Marxist work that made a bit of an effort to open the conceptual black box of ownership was Gerald Cohen's _Marx's Theory of History_. To avoid misunderstanding, the notion of ownership has probably a richer content in the mind of Marxists than it ever had in Marx's mind. That's because we have the benefit of hindsight: the experience of post-Marx capitalism. But this is only a descriptive advance. IMO, the inside mechanism (so to speak) of the concept of ownership is closely tied to uncertainty. And, obviously, there are today much better conceptual tools to grapple with uncertainty than during Marx's times. Some of these conceptual tools have been developed by mathematicians and some by the economists, especially those who've worked in the modern theory of finance. These tools need critical appropriation to make them useful to us. That's the easy way. The hard way is to reinvent them from scratch. In any case, we need to build up our capacities as cooperative producers. I'll say more. It's naive to suppose that communist planning will make social uncertainty go away or tame it by decree. I'm not talking about uncertainty in our interaction with nature. I'm talking about the uncertainty that results from our mutual interdependence. After all, communist production is going to be more socialized than under capitalism. To place socialized production under social control doesn't mean to dismantle the interdependence, which -- with richer, more universally developed people -- can only grow. It means to manage it differently, for our own individual and collective self-development. And here I stop.
