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

[Ryan Lanham]

Is there anyone who disagrees with what Kevin is saying here?   That these
points are in doubt I think is the beginning of the discussion.

Some basic understanding of the theory of money and its history has to be
understood.  I'm more than willing to discuss or sort out any ideas, but I
for one need to understand what someone accepts or rejects, or the discuss
is truly nonsensical.

For example, money is taken to be fungible by its very nature:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility

More importantly, money is a token for an idea...it isn't a physical thing.
The idea is that value can be transferred from one activity or good to
another and stored in between.  During that storage, it can be lent
out...like any good or service. People may more may not charge a fee while
it is lent out...that fee is called "interest."

The vast majority of world money has no physical manifestation at all.
Money is an idea that is created and moved under certain social rules that
are quite explicit and quite strict.  Without it being an idea, we are in
commodity economies...and bound to be poor and hopeless inefficient...that
IS an equality of sorts.

These discussions filled the US newspapers--in 1890!  It spurred the rise of
neoclassical (Marshallian) economics and then Keynesian economics as
response when Marshallian economics argued for permanent equilibria in
economies.   Bretton Woods, etc. are essential points of basic understanding
to have any meaningful discussion of modern concepts of money.

I am starting to think three fundamental P2P Foundation Projects are in
order... 1. A discussion on the nature of value.  2. A discussion on the
relationship of property to value.  3. A discussion on the relationship of
money to value and property.  All of these are basic modern social ideas.
Breaking with those social ideas leads rapidly to nonsense in trying to
interact with a modern world.

Ryan


On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 1:14 PM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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