📕 subnode [[@ryan/20210118211817 marxism_or_modern_monetary_theory_theorizing_with_a_hammer]] in 📚 node [[20210118211817-marxism_or_modern_monetary_theory_theorizing_with_a_hammer]]

Notes

  • Colin: a fundamental point of MMT is the question of imperialism

  • Varn: Fred Mosley was the closest he got to understanding commodity money

  • Varn: MMT has issues when it comes to currency sovereignty

    • It only works in countries with it

  • Varn: there's no such thing as barter

  • Colin: Capital Vol. 3 is not a solution to Marx's money problem

  • 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"

  • Colin: Market is an exchange of equivalents

  • Colin: Marx believes the ultimate question to answer is to explain M-C-M'

  • Colin: The market as a system of equalities is the problem with Marx

  • Colin: what makes the market is the bid/ask spread

    • Marx assumes this away

  • Varn: a problem with Marx is that Marxists cannot find where valorization occurs

  • See: Stone Age Economy

  • Varn: Banaji said that capitalism could have started in the Roman Empire

  • Varn: Marx gets a lot of ideas about economy from Aristotle

  • Colin: capitalism is much more nebulous than Marxists put it

  • Black Death in England had an interesting economic situation

    • All subjects were part of the money economy

    • Pretty historically unique

  • Colin: Marx's baggage is Aristotle's baggage

  • Colin: Capitalization is what capitalism is about, i.e., turning things into money

  • Capitalism makes having a horde of money no longer necessary because money can be valorized / capitalized

  • The Code of Capital

  • England in late 14th century needed cash in the economy, needed "pennies to do more work"

  • Colin: why did the English off-shore their metabolic base? via colonialization

  • 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

  • Colin: what if capitalism is a temporary period?

  • Colin: Chartalism and metalism are two parts of the same system

  • Varn: the USSR had three types of rubles, wanted to be autarchic

  • Varn: it's wrong to assume that law is class neutral

    • Law starts as religious and becomes political

  • Colin: it's western common sense that a sovereign is not above the law

  • Colin: as soon as you invent a "unit of account", loans can grow out of proportion to the real economy

  • Colin: most loans are not the lending of physical coins

  • Colin: writing was invented to keep track of debts

  • Colin: Europe sold slaves to Asia

  • Colin: Christianity is the religion where debt abolition is a central concept but can only be escaped at the end of the world

  • Varn: the reason why taxes in the early Americas were tarriffs etc. was because you couldn't find everyone you needed to tax

    • And also probably because wage labor didn't exist

  • Colin: English king was incredibly constrained to raise revenue. Peasants revolted when individually taxed

  • Colin: we only have paper money because it doesn't matter what kind of money we have

  • Colin: Marxists are wrong in that state activity monetize economies

  • Varn: first people to draw salaries historically were soldiers

  • Colin: term "soldier" means someone who's paid with "solius" (?) i.e. gold coin

  • Colin: money is a class conflict phenomenon

  • Colin: people assume that austerity exists because politicians don't know how money works

  • Varn: implementing MMT would require a lot of conflict

  • Colin: the English monetary system became the global monetary system

  • Varn: taxation only exists to limit inflation

  • Varn: skeptical MMT is possible in a democracy

  • 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:

  • Money is a tool of class conflict

  • The market is not necessarily a system of equivalent exchange

  • If capitalism is nothing else, it's the system under which money is valorized

  • 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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