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

Mon May 18 22:32:40 CEST 2009

Ryan,

I have not followed this discussion closely, but I think others are talking
about "money as it ought to be" not how money is today.

But I maybe wrong. Just thought I'd mention the possibility...

Marc

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 12:03 PM, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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Marc Fawzi
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