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source :: Marxism or Modern Monetary Theory: A Conversation with Colin Drumm - YouTube
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tags :: marxismModern Monetary Theory
Notes
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Colin: a fundamental point of MMT is the question of imperialism
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Varn: Fred Mosley was the closest he got to understanding commodity money
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Varn: MMT has issues when it comes to currency sovereignty
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It only works in countries with it
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Colin: Capital Vol. 3 is not a solution to Marx's money problem
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Colin: Marx assumes that the market is an externality, money does not have a price. Money itself is not something that is bought and sold, therefore we get "for free"
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Colin: Market is an exchange of equivalents
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Colin: Marx believes the ultimate question to answer is to explain M-C-M'
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Colin: The market as a system of equalities is the problem with Marx
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Colin: what makes the market is the bid/ask spread
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Marx assumes this away
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Varn: a problem with Marx is that Marxists cannot find where valorization occurs
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See: Stone Age Economy
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Varn: Banaji said that capitalism could have started in the Roman Empire
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Varn: Marx gets a lot of ideas about economy from Aristotle
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Colin: capitalism is much more nebulous than Marxists put it
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Black Death in England had an interesting economic situation
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All subjects were part of the money economy
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Pretty historically unique
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Colin: Marx's baggage is Aristotle's baggage
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Colin: Capitalization is what capitalism is about, i.e., turning things into money
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Capitalism makes having a horde of money no longer necessary because money can be valorized / capitalized
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The Code of Capital
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England in late 14th century needed cash in the economy, needed "pennies to do more work"
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Colin: why did the English off-shore their metabolic base? via colonialization
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Colin: Marx lived in a period of time where prices were basically flat for 100 years, which is why Marx thought what he did about prices
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Colin: what if capitalism is a temporary period?
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Colin: Chartalism and metalism are two parts of the same system
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Varn: the USSR had three types of rubles, wanted to be autarchic
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Varn: it's wrong to assume that law is class neutral
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Law starts as religious and becomes political
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Colin: it's western common sense that a sovereign is not above the law
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Colin: as soon as you invent a "unit of account", loans can grow out of proportion to the real economy
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Colin: most loans are not the lending of physical coins
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Colin: writing was invented to keep track of debts
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Colin: Europe sold slaves to Asia
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Colin: Christianity is the religion where debt abolition is a central concept but can only be escaped at the end of the world
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Varn: the reason why taxes in the early Americas were tarriffs etc. was because you couldn't find everyone you needed to tax
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And also probably because wage labor didn't exist
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Colin: English king was incredibly constrained to raise revenue. Peasants revolted when individually taxed
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Colin: we only have paper money because it doesn't matter what kind of money we have
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Colin: Marxists are wrong in that state activity monetize economies
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Varn: first people to draw salaries historically were soldiers
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Colin: term "soldier" means someone who's paid with "solius" (?) i.e. gold coin
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Colin: money is a class conflict phenomenon
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Colin: people assume that austerity exists because politicians don't know how money works
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Varn: implementing MMT would require a lot of conflict
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Colin: the English monetary system became the global monetary system
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Varn: taxation only exists to limit inflation
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Varn: skeptical MMT is possible in a democracy
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Colin: All GDP growth since the 70s is an accounting gimmick
Takeaways
This was a very winding conversation with a lot of rabbit holes. Some important points were:
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Money is a tool of class conflict
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The market is not necessarily a system of equivalent exchange
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If capitalism is nothing else, it's the system under which money is valorized
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MMT may be more on track than Marxism but implementing MMT in a liberal democracy would be a waste of time
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