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

[Kevin Carson]

On 5/18/09, Stefan Merten <smerten at oekonux.de> wrote:

>  > and use the full context of the
>  > dialogue to understand that interests makes it indeed interesting to keep
>  > your money in the  bank.

> If you give money to the bank then you do **NOT** keep it. This very
>  sentence you wrote just makes no sense. It's nonsense again.

I think this vehement reaction to a semantic dispute over whether one
"keeps" money in a bank is just plain silly.  Obviously, someone who
deposits money in a bank isn't "keeping" it in the same sense as
someone who physically hoards cash in their personal possession (under
a mattress or whatever).  But I don't think Michel was suggesting
anything of the sort in the first place.  And the expression "keep
money in a bank" is just normal, idiomatic English usage.

 it is well-known that
>  banks give money to capitalists in the form of credit. In turn the
>  capitalists then apply it to labor force and machinery to produce
>  products they can sell for a higher price than they had themselves for
>  the input. The logical conclusion is that interest is a share of the
>  profit of a capitalist. The amount of interest is directly coupled to
>  the amount of expected profit and the risk involved to actually make
>  this profit [1]_. In other words: What you are trying to accomplish
>  with your [named above] stuff is what actually happens in capitalism
>  all the time. It's in fact the very core of capitalism.

I think you're missing the fact that the causality works two ways.
The scarcity of credit, the difficulty of obtaining it and the
artificially high price of credit, also influences the rate of profit.

Interest is not just determined by the rate of profit, but by
state-enforced entry barriers against competition in the supply of
credit, and restrictions on self-organized credit by producers
advancing their own products to one another against future production.
 As both Thomas Hodgskin (a Ricardian socialist) and Alfred Marshall
(the founder of mainstream neoclassical economics) pointed out, the
"wage fund" doctrine was nonsense because the capitalist was not
advancing the savings from past labor, but rather giving workers a
claim on current production by other workers during the production
process.  And both Hodgskin and Marshall both pointed out, also, that
that function could be carried out directly by workers themselves in a
cooperative manner, if the capitalist had not interposed himself
between producers and preempted the function of advancing current
production against future production.

That was one of the fundamental disagreements between Marx and
Proudhon (whom I suppose you'd include among the "money tricksters").
Proudhon believed that eliminating the barriers to free,
self-organized credit among the producing classes would make it easier
for ordinary working people to aggregate their own capital, and thus
drive down the rate of profit.  As a whole host of people have pointed
out, wage employment competes with self-employment:  the capitalist
can only extract surplus value unless he can use the state to
foreclose direct access to the means of self-employment on more
favorable terms.  Marx wanted to treat credit as neutral in this
system, but it's not.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html