Sincere thanks for that Gian

That was an above average article link.

When he says;

"that Marx's analysis of capital was in its rawest, most fundamental
form, based upon an admittedly fictitious (albeit valid in essential
ways) situation of a single global capital facing the entire world's
population of wage workers"


I think it is worth bearing in mind that Karl made it clear in
volume III that his analysis was based on the assumption that there
was free movement of capital and labour. In Karl's time this was
pretty much the case and the limitations to this then were
geographical and technical. Ie the physical difficulties of people
and capital moving from A to B.

I think sometimes people loose sight of the fact that Karl's
analysis is supposed to be a basic or fundamental and to be used to
make sense of a complex and dynamic or mutable situation. The idea
is that the basics always apply.

This is standard methodology in pure science although it is the
anathema of reductionism to most of the `social scientists' who
mostly know nothing.

Newton did not get distracted by birds flying in the sky or feathers
not falling to the ground, sometimes, but concentrated on the apple
and the tree to try and get the basics sorted out first.

Much of Karl's thesis uses `thought experiments', again another
successful technique used by scientists.

I think much of the problems we are seeing know revolves around the
issue of fictitious capital or capitalisation of surplus value or
capitalisation of interest payments on debt.

The capitalists think thus roughly, again a model;

Let the average rate of profit per year, what you can get from
dividends on shares or money invested in a bank etc be 5%.

Then $100 will earn you $5 un-earned income

Then they do something `clever' they say if something provides $5 a
year, like a magic purse for instance then the magic purse is worth
$100.

Now debt or interests on a debt may `promise' to provide you with an
income of $5 so such an IOU is nominally worth something like $100.


The problem with these IOU's, bonds, or collateralised debt
obligations, CDO's, after they have been bundled and mixed up
together and resold and bought and passed through many hands is that
no one is too sure what they are. Apart from an unearned income
stream.

The concern then grows that the debt or the money loaned has been
spent and `pissed up against the wall' by lazy Americans and the
initial interest payments have themselves been paid by borrowing
more money from elsewhere.


Interestingly they seem to have been using these CDO's as money
itself .swapping them for other stuff, just as with money, in the
buying and selling game in the banking community.

As confidence fell in the real value of these CDO's as potentially
toxic debt they became to be viewed like counterfeit money and
nobody would accept them in exchange for anything. Hence the
liquidity crisis and the requirements of the central banks in
inject `real' counterfeit money, greenback dollars, into the money
markets.

Capitalisation of surplus value can also happen in industrial
production proper. I had some friends that worked in a very
successful computer software house that was very profitable. With
less than 200 staff and 100 pc's basically and located in a rented
building it had no assets. However it was sold for £40 million based
on its anticipated earnings and profits.

The owners, workers originally who had built it up from the 1970's
pissed off of to the south of France and the new capitalist owners
ran it into the ground in less than ten years. What was left of it
was sold for less than a million last year after almost 10 years of
close to zero profits.




--- In WSM_Forum@yahoogroups.com, "Gian Maria Freddi"
<gm.freddi@...> wrote:
>
> http://www.metamute.org/en/Waiting-For-the-End-of-the-World
> Waiting for the End of the World, by Jeff Strahl, an analysis of
the
> potential of the current growing global crisis to lead to a new
society.
>