CWO reviews Mosley book

[ZJW]

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2019-08-22/review-of-money-and-totality-by-fred-moseley

 

Note comment by Noa after it.

[ALB]

Just got round to reading this. It’s really two articles. One on Moseley’s book. The other on capitalism in the 20th century. The part on Moseley is okay, saying more or less what we did when we reviewed it

But they imply it’s only valid for the so-called ascendant period of capitalism up to 1914 when capitalism for them supposedly entered into its period of “decadence”. Here they go off the rails by seeming to suggest, as Noa points out, that capitalism has been kept going, as it were “artificially”, by inflation of the money supply by both the state central bank and by private banks.

But while the state can create more money-tokens commercial banks cannot. They are, as Mark himself accepted, essentially financial intermediaries shuffling already existing money. Their lending cannot cause inflation.

Banks can only be regarded as creating new money if you extend the definition of money to include bank loans. But this only confuses things.

What is really surprising is that a group in the Martian tradition should reference a rightwing banking reform group like Positive Money which seeks to explain why booms end in purely monetary terms.

Perhaps what the CWO has in common with them is that it offers a purely monetary explanation for capitalism’s continuation beyond the sell-by date they have fixed for it.

 

 

 

[ZJW]

You might post this, expanding on the last paragraph ( which I assume refers to, or is related, to the tendency-of-the-rate-of-profit-to-fall (TRPF) theory to which the CWO holds) on the libcom page where discussion of it (well, one comment so far, from Spikymike) is underway as of yesterday: https://libcom.org/blog/review-money-totality-fred-moseley-28082019 .

 

(Might change ‘Martian’ to ‘Marxian’ though!)

[ZJW]

I just noticed that as of today — Mon, 2019-09-02 01:14 and Mon, 2019-09-02 10:15 — there is further back-and-forth between Noa and the CWO.

[ALB]

Yes it is linked to their theory that another world war is needed to devalue capital, by literally destroying what is it embodied in, so that the rate of profit can be restored (the same amount of profit on a smaller amount of capital) capital accumulation can resume. Since, however, it is nearly 85 years since the end of the last world war, they need a theory to explain why there has not been another one and how capitalism has survived — hence their recourse to a monetary explanation.

Ok, will post something on libcom blog.

 

[ALB]

CWO’s reply here, re-affirming that they still think that another world war will ultimately be needed if capitalism continues and their explanation why this hasn’t happened yet:

https://libcom.org/blog/review-money-totality-fred-moseley-28082019#comment-615245

So if global warming does get us a global war will. Talk about doom and gloom.

 

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