[p2p-research] Fwd: [ox-en] No more money trickery propagandaplease

Wed May 13 13:16:19 CEST 2009

Hi Christian,

Thanks for the precision Christian, I'm  very aware of the difference you
are pointing to.

If Stefan were saying what you're saying, it would been okay, but he was
denying the empirical facts. I invite you to reread his phrasing.

But there is a difference between your analogy of the sun. The sun is not
turning around the earth, it's a visual illusion. However, the mechanisms of
rent extraction through interest manipulation and use are very real, even if
they can be explained on a more abstract level by the Marxist surplus value
theory.  What Marx explains on a abstract level, needs real mechanisms to
become operational. Especially under financial capitalism, much more rent is
extracted through purely financial mechanisms, than by any direct mechanism
in production itself. There is in fact relatively  little money to be made
in production itself, because most the value is extracted through different
mechanisms, for example in the field of consumption through the mortgage
scams, near usury levels of credit card repayments, etc..

Credit card companies, central banks,  hedge funds do real operations based
and informed on interest and other differentials.

This means that the financial and monetary systems have a real relative
autonomy and a real influence on behaviour and choices. If this is true then
financial and monetary regulations and design make a difference, both in
observable reality and in the unseen structural rules.

It boils down to, if you want to transform the economy, and you do not have
full power to transform the system as such, what do you do. A sensible way
of action is to work on the regulations and design, so that they become less
negative for the mass of the population and working people. You can do that
on the macro level, but that requires massive social power that may not be
available today; or you can work on the micro level, by peer producing such
changes on the more local, or internet-based affinity level. The idea here
is to start locally, then network the various systems in a
counter-infrastructure that may lead to being the seed form for a new
exchange system. That is the key of the debate, whether those who favour
peer production leave the exchange system untouched, or choose for an
integrated strategy that aims to transforms all modes, i.e. the totality of
the environment in which peer production occurs.

This is what these social movements are proposing and doing. It is precisely
because we have been getting more and more insight into the hidden logic of
money, that currency reform movements have arisen. In this context, the
observations of Gesell and others, that interest-bearing money encourages
and facilitates more accumulation, and that a circulation charge acts as a
break to such processes, is something to take very seriously.

It is one thing to say that such strategies are insufficient, perhaps even
misguided (though I would disagree), but it is more hard to explain
fanatical opposition and relating them to racial movements.

There is a second issue which is important and concerns alliances. The great
majority of the people in the world, including poor people, do not trust
unproven radical alternatives, and still confer legitimacy to the main
aspects of the current world order, even as they may be critical and opposed
to certain aspects. There are many people, including in the business class
of small enterpreneurs that are in favour of enterprise, of the freedom of
doing business. In our own community think of people like Sam Rose, or Kevin
Carson, the first a pragmatic supporter of small business networks, the
latter a activist and theorists for non-oligarchic markets. Such people are
not our enemies, but friends. For these people, the distinction between
speculative financial markets and their hyper-exploitation through monetary
and financial mechanisms, and on the other legitimate business entrerprise
creating real value, are very important. Even if today, market mechanisms
are embedded in the larger economy of financial capitalism, historically
markets have existed separate from it. You will not in my opinion effect any
substantial social change, without convincing such people that they will
retain freedom to do business, and with a congruent interest in diminishing
the very mechanisms which make enterpreneurship so difficult.

I can understand a position like  yours, which says, if I understand it
correctly, that it is wasted effort. What I cannot understand is what makes
the topic a taboo for discussion, and why it would create heavy emotional
and irrational reactions that lead to flat denials of observable realities,
a willfull ignorance of historical facts, that feels the need to constantly
demean those with a different opinion, to call any rational debate on the
subject 'propaganda' and 'esotericism' etc ..

That to me is problematic.

On your keimform blog, you seem to be able to make intelligent remarks on
the topic, without become catatonic, and I'm not aware that you have
constantly used epithets to demean your comrades who differ on that issue. I
think that is the normal behaviour we should expect from others in the
movement.

Michel

On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 5:21 PM, Christian Siefkes <christian at siefkes.net>wrote:

> Hi Michel, all,
>
> Michel wrote:
> > In one of the last posting on list-en, Stefan argues that no money can be
> > made through interest, something easily disconfirmed by anyone having a
> bank
> > account or working for a credit card company, or any economist looking
> into
> > the techniques of rent extraction in capitalism. Not only did he deny
> that
> > possiblity, but he thinks that people making such a empirical observation
> > must be deluded ('propaganda' 'esotericism').
>
> There is a difference between what can be empirically observed and how such
> an observation can be explained. Let's consider two assumptions: (a)
> interest is an inherent property of money (and can thus be removed by
> modifying the properties of money); (b) the Sun revolves around the Earth.
> Both assumptions seem to correspond to empirically observable facts, yet
> further analysis shows that they aren't true. In both cases, rigorous
> scientific investigations are necessary in order to discover the truth--if
> we're unwilling to undertake such investigations, we will have the
> impression that we understand things (isn't the superficial explanation
> "empirically" true?), but we don't really.
>
> Whether the Sun revolves around the Earth, or vice versa, can only be
> decided through deeper empirical investigations--which of the two theories
> fits better with the facts as we observe them? In case of the interest
> question, things are actually easier since we already know from basic
> physical laws that there can be no thing that grows or goes on forever
> without requiring an external source of energy--such a thing would be
> Perpetuum mobile <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion> which is
> physically impossible. So we already know, without even having to look at
> the empirical evidence, that money cannot generate other money (interest)
> out of itself, that there must be some other explanation for interest.
>
> That much we can learn without even having to look at the evidence, but in
> order to find out more--to discover the actual source of interest--, we
> need
> to take the empirical evidence into account and find a theory that fits it
> best. Marx has formulated one such theory, which says, in a nutshell, that
> interest in capitalism is derived from *profit,* and that profit results
> from the fact that some people are forced to sell their labor power, while
> others control the means of production and can thus benefit from their
> labor. See
>
> http://www.keimform.de/2009/03/07/marx-theory-of-value-and-why-exchange-can-be-equal-and-still-bad/
> and
>
> http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-March/001714.html
> .
>
> So, from Marx' theory it follows that we cannot get rid of interest without
> getting rid of profit, and that we cannot get rid of profit without getting
> rid of the necessity to sell your labor power.
>
> Now, I'm sure it can be discussed whether Marx' theory is the one that fits
> the facts best or whether there is a better one (which might lead to
> different conclusions about interest). But anybody who claims that interest
> is an inherent property of money (and can thus be removed by modifying the
> properties of money), argues in violation of all possible theories, since
> such a thing is physically impossible.
>
> Best regards
>        Christian
>
> --
> |-------- Dr. Christian Siefkes --------- christian at siefkes.net ---------
> |   Homepage: http://www.siefkes.net/   |   Blog: http://www.keimform.de/
> |   Better Bayesian Analysis:           |   Peer Production Everywhere:
> |   http://bart-project.com/            |   http://peerconomy.org/wiki/
> |------------------------------------------ OpenPGP Key ID: 0x346452D8 --
> Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find
> easier ways to do something.
>        -- Robert Heinlein
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> p2presearch mailing list
> p2presearch at listcultures.org
> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>
>

-- 
Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net -
http://p2pfoundation.ning.com

Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens

The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN,
http://www.shiftn.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20090513/fb2e41c8/attachment-0001.html>