Paul writes: > ---- > I would have said that it is because interest bearing capital > is not a commodity, but a social relation, and that thus > analysis based on supply and demand misses the point. Paul might have said this, but Marx certainly didn't, as any reading of Capital, Volume III, Ch. 21 will make clear. For example: "The form of lending results from capital's characteristic here of emerging as a commodity, or in other words, it results from the fact that money as capital becomes a commodity." In speaking of supply and demand for interest capital I only paraphrased Marx's analysis in the last part of that chapter. When Marx speaks of capital as a social relation, it seems to me that he refers specifically to the circuit of industrial capital M-C-M', involving the purchase and subsumption of labor power. To say that interest-bearing capital is a social relation is not to deny that it is influenced by supply and demand considerations. Indeed, the true social relation could be obscured by the same sort of "fetishism" Marx speaks of at the end of Ch. 1 in Volume I. In other words, all exchanges are social relations, but that is not to say that demand and supply considerations do not arise. Gil Skillman
