Forum Post: Forgetfulness: a 21st Century Maxim
Posted 6 years ago on Sept. 12, 2017, 11 a.m. EST by agkaiser
(2516)
from Fredericksburg, TX
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
The more we knew the less we know. Distortions, distractions and lies grow.
"In keeping with his materialist view of history, Marx expected banking to be subordinated to the needs of industrial capitalism. Equity investment - followed by public ownership of the means of production under socialism - seemed likely to replace the interest-extracting 'usury capital' inherited from antiquity and feudal times: debts mounting up at compound interest in excess of the means to pay, culminating in crises marked by bank runs and property foreclosures.
"But as matters have turned out, the rentier interests mounted a Counter-Enlightenment to undermine the reforms that promised to liberate society from special privilege."
http://michael-hudson.com/2010/07/from-marx-to-goldman-sachs-the-fictions-of-fictitious-capital1/
The truth is our economic system is sick and it's man-made. It can be fixed to work for the 99%, if we have the will to do it.
As Hudson explains:
"The result is that today’s economy is burdened with property and financial claims that Marx and other critics deemed “fictitious” – a proliferation of financial overhead in the form of interest and dividends, fees and commissions, exorbitant management salaries, bonuses and stock options, and “capital” gains (mainly debt-leveraged land-price gains). And to cap matters, new financial modes of exploiting labor have been innovated, headed by pension-fund capitalism and privatization of Social Security. As economic planning has passed from government to the financial sector, the alternative to public price regulation and progressive taxation is debt peonage."
and
"As matters have turned out, the expansion of finance capital has taken the form mainly of what Marx called “usury capital”: mortgage lending, personal and credit card loans, government bond financing for war deficits, and debt-leveraged gambling. The development of such credit has added new terms to modern language: “financialization,” debt leveraging (or “gearing” as they say in Britain), corporate raiding, “shareholder activists,” junk bonds, government bailouts and “socialization of risk,” – as well as the “junk economics” that rationalizes debt-leveraged asset-price inflation as “wealth creation” Alan Greenspan-style."
and
"This asset-stripping dynamic, which Marx characterized as usury capital, is antithetical to that of industrial capital. Based on the liabilities side of the balance sheet, financial securities take the form of anti-wealth – legalized claims on the means of production and income earned productively. The underlying dynamic is fictitious, because it cannot remain viable for long. It sustains interest payments by stripping assets, leaving the economy with less ability to produce a surplus out of which to pay creditors. And indeed, the financial sector destroys life on a scale similar to military conquest. Birth rates fall, life spans shorten and emigration soars as economies polarize."
and, possible solution:
"To save society, its victims must see that asset-price inflation fueled by debt leveraging makes them poorer, not richer, and that financialization is the destroyer and exploiter of industrial capital as well as of labor. The objective of classical political economy was to bring prices in line with socially necessary costs of production. This was to be achieved in large part by taxing away economic rent in order to prevent it from being capitalized into loans to new buyers. Buying rent-extracting opportunities on credit increases prices for basic needs, turning society into a “tollbooth economy.” It also forces governments to compensate by raising taxes on labor and tangible capital.
Many Social Democratic and Labour parties have jumped on the bandwagon of finance capital, not recognizing the need to rescue industrial capitalism from dependence on neofeudal finance capital before the older conflict between labor and industrial capital over wage levels and working conditions can be resumed. That is what happens when one reads only Volume I of Capital, neglecting the discussion of fictitious capital in Volumes II and III and Theories of Surplus Value."
Great article, thank you.
Even intelligent conservatives think only approved thoughts. So how have their minds been restricted from seeing the perfidies and other evils of their billionaire and corporate masters?