#+title: Marxism or Modern Monetary Theory | Theorizing with a Hammer
- source :: [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_hl4VGvqPc][Marxism or Modern Monetary Theory: A Conversation with Colin Drumm - YouTube]]
- tags :: [[file:../marxism.org][marxism]] [[file:../20200629125826-modern_monetary_theory.org][Modern Monetary Theory]]

* Notes
- Colin: a fundamental point of MMT is the question of [[file:../20200607220252-imperialism.org][imperialism]]
- Varn: Fred Mosley was the closest he got to understanding [[file:../20210118212004-commodity_money.org][commodity money]]
- Varn: MMT has issues when it comes to [[file:../20210118212122-currency_sovereignty.org][currency sovereignty]]
  + It only works in countries with it
- Varn: [[file:../20210118212432-there_s_no_such_thing_as_barter.org][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 [[file:../20200716134542-m_c_m_exchange.org][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