Reading Marx's Grundrisse with David Harvey (PT2)
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- Опубликовано: 5 окт 2024
- A new course featuring David Harvey teaching Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft).
Written during the winter of 1857-8, the Grundrisse was considered by Marx to be the first scientific elaboration of communist theory.
Recorded live in 2020 first at The People’s Forum and then in quarantine, these 12 accessible lectures both guide the reader through the major themes of Marx’s seminal text, as well as feature contemporary commentary relating the text to the pandemic and economic crisis.
David Harvey is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY).
Syllabus:
Class 1: Introduction, pages 83-111
Class 2: The Chapter on Money, Pages 115-238
Class 3: The Chapter on Capital, Pages 239-304
Class 4: The Chapter on Capital, Pages 304-370
Class 5: The Chapter on Capital, Pages 373-423
Class 6: The Chapter on Capital, Pages 423-515
Class 7: The Chapter on Capital, Pages 516-594
Class 8: The Chapter on Capital, Pages 595-668
Class 9: The Chapter on Capital, Pages 668-706
Class 10: The Chapter on Capital, Pages 707-758
Class 11: The Chapter on Capital, Pages 759-880
Class 12: Bastiat and Carey, Pages 881-893 & Reprise
The page numbers Professor Harvey refers to are valid for the Penguin Classics edition of Grundrisse.
Diagram:
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Course Site:
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David Harvey Podcast:
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He was a smart cookie was our Karl. Essential stuff. Love the shirt - even reds need a break from red...
A big thank you for uploading this!
This brilliant lecture on Marx's concept of the money-commodity make me particularly thankful for Prof David Harvey!
Wow, I had been reading the Grundrisse on my own as a precursor to rereading Capital Vol 1 (I hope to read vol 2 and 3 afterward), and there were some things I missed the Prof. Harvey focused on that have greatly increased my understanding of the text. Thank you so much!
When C and C differ by a great amount , that happens when Money was stashed off for a while by someone somewhere , only to be reinvested later to boost up production and marketing that production. But there is no conservation of money , nor is there any conservation of total commodities . Thus either by simply force or fiat money can be printed, not necessarily followed by any inevitable disaster, but if the production of commodities are increased many folds then printing more money may actually be creating more value and might correct the downward vortex into a development of spirally moving up of development
@20:00 Harvey only gives half the story here. When the state currency (aka. tax credits) are pegged to a commodity like gold, i.e., the currency tokens are convertible (redeemable by promise) to gold bullion, then a production crisis triggers the currency crisis, but completely needlessly, it is always a choice to peg to gold,[^] not a necessity, because tax liabilities are sufficient to dive a completely worthless currency token, provided the currency is hard to counterfeit. The pegged currency exacerbates the supply crisis, so it is an inherent instability in commodity currency forms, and governments with tax power should (if they were wise) never use a commodity backed currency -- commodity backed currency inevitably encourage state piracy of one form or another (draconian taxation). They have no need to promise to redeem for gold, since taxes, levies and fines are sufficient to drive the demand for the fiat state currency. There is no disputing this, it is what the USA have been doing domestically since 1933 and what even small open economies like New Zealand have been doing since 1985 when we stopped pegging to the USD (which to us is equivalent to gold standard since we in NZ cannot issue USD).
Modern Marxists who still think like Marx and take their queues from Marx are like preachers of old-time religion. Most developed nations, and even many in the global south have sensibly recognized state currency is just a tax credit, a social relation, not a commodity. So they move to fiat currency and floating exchange rates, making everything Marx asserts about the money form (which in his era was absolutely correct) completely incorrect and irrelevant to the modern economies.
State currency gets used as a commodity only because the state permits secondary private trading in its currency tokens (pure financial markets). But there is no real need for financial markets when the state currency is fiat, since price discovery operates perfectly well if the state guarantees fair distribution of the tax credit. The fact no nation state does guarantee fair distribution of tax credits is one huge reason why money markets exist, serving to exacerbate financial inequality (the rich get richer effect). If the democratic state is not prepared to guarantee fair distribution of tax credits they should be at least banning all currency trading markets, to properly de-commodity tax credits (aka. the state currency).
[^] Notice that whenever a nation goes to war it always suspends the gold standard, since otherwise they'd lose the war. This is not an argument for moving to a gold standard to prevent war, since nothing prevents a war-like government from suspending gold convertibility when they please. It is merely an argument that a gold standard is artificially constraining. The flip side of it is that on a gold standard the nation state cannot guarantee full free healthcare services and free education and full employment. The artificial constraint of a gold standard or fixed exchange rate (functionally the same thing for most purposes) is never actually used to suppress war, but is used instead to suppress free healthcare and full employment. So, go figure! Good honest lefties need to wake-the-hell-up and realize this. Once a nation has a floated fiat currency then it can always afford to go to war by mobilizing an army, but by the same token can choose not to go to war and instead fully provision and mobilize free healthcare, free education and full employment (which arguably are all superb anti-war policies) up to real sustainable resource/labour availability limits. That's becasue the currency-issuing government does not borrow and cannot tax its own currency before first issuing it (spending). The spending goes first. So free healthcare and free education do not depend upon tax receipts (tax receipts delete dollars, they do not create dollars, only government spending or bank lending creates dollars) free social services depend only upon people willing to do the work, they get paid the dollars, spend them, save some, and some are taxed back to limit inflation but not to fund the spending in the first place.
It is incredible this knowledge of the full fiscal pace of a currency-issuing nation state has been known in modern context since at least Keynes' day, and in ancient context since the Sumerian nation-states. And yet the neoliberal plutocratic elites (this includes Krugman and Stiglitz) have managed to indoctrinate the mass population into believing tax credits are a scarce resource governments can "run out of" --- as if computer keystrokes are in finite supply (because that is all a tax credit is, a record of account on a secure ledger).
El dinero fiscal sigue siendo mercancia en tanto que existe la emisiones de bonos de deuda publica, que se venden y compran en el mercado financiero
Can I get access to the flow chart in the background? This is alot to wrap my head around, would be obliged if someone could help me find it.
It's on David Harvey's website - there's a link at the bottom of the Grundrisse page.
@@Tom-vb1gh thanks a bunch mate ^_^🙏
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Marx's political economy therefore is built from critiques of the Classical Political Economy and Proudhon's conceptualisation.
I was born into a world ruled by abstractions. Didn't have anything to do with its creation.
@13:00 oh dear, oh dear. I rarely disagree with Harvey, but he has crypto-"currency" totally wrong. Bitcoin is wasteful and totally inefficient, an environmental disaster already (consuming the power output of Argentina for a paltry three transactions a second, this is not a currency friends!). Blockchain however is a nice thing, a distributed ledgering algorithm, central banks could use it (or simpler more efficient digital wallets) but it is not bitcoin. Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme, merely utilizing blockchain as a ledger, which you'd realize observing you can almost double your conversion to USD over a year in bitcoin --- ask yourself what real material value is backing this? Nothing. It is pure mob ponzi psychology --- the "fool another fool" or "dupe another dope" theory. It works fantastically well on the way up for those who cash-out early enough, but will be a disaster when it crashes for the last fools into the scheme. A pity, because the idea of anonymous payment for buyers is good, but it is rotten if sellers are also anonymous, and a much superior payments system that has the ethics correct and which correctly runs off the tax-driven state currency is GNU Taler, which never pretends to be money, it is only an anonymous payments systems and that's how it is advertised, whihc is righteous. Bitcoin also is terribly inefficient, there are about 3 transactions a second in bitcoin, compared to billion a second in fiat currency. Why?
Partly because the ledgering is so inefficient it uses up the power output of Argentina, for 3 transactions a second! It's an environmental hazard and governments will thus probably soon ban bitcoin. The other reasons is that bitcoin is so purely ponzi it's conversion price to dollars can go infinitely high, as high as anyone is prepared to pay in dollars. There is no game theoretic stable Nash Equilibrium in this because there is no stable fixed guaranteed pay-off, since no one is backing bitcoin with a promise of redemption (read Randall Wray's MMT Primer for learning about the history and social purpose of money state --- there must always be a promise of redemption, otherwise you do not have a money system you have a mere commodity or barter. Money (in token form) can be traded _like_ a commodity, but fundamentally money requires no tokens, just a credit/debt ledger, and is thus a unit of account, not a commodity itself, except secondarily).
So a psychologically-valued commodity like bitcoin can go sky-high in rice in dollars and can then easily plummet to ZERO value. Very easily, just when no merchants will accept it any more. A third reason is that because it is currently deflating against the dollar so rapidly, no one wants to sell their bitcoin, so it is being hoarded like gold, or rather, like super-deflating gold. For a currency this is untenable (and bitcoin is not a currency, precisely because no redemption backs it). The social purpose of a currency is to facilitate spending, not to facilitate saving, so i a very real sense bitcoin is anti-currency (almost now pure hoarding of a fictitious "store of value"). Bitcoin only stores value as far as what other dopes are willing to give up to get it. Pretty son this could be zero (but so foolish are bitcoin libertarians there are likely enough of them to fool each other leap-frog like for another decade or more). All depends on how many libertarians exist who have money to burn or computers to mine bitcoin.
Just for completion: state-currencies are stable precisely because they are tax-driven. The tax liability backs the dollar. The US government does not need your money, it creates the stuff on a computer, at almost zero electricity cost, every time it needs to spend. The government rather needs YOU to need its fiat currency. That is why it imposes a tax liability, to make you need the dollar. Stop taxing people and the dollar will fall to worthless value, very quickly. But continue taxation and the dollar will always be in demand, without question. How else can government spend otherwise worthless fiat tokens? It needs to find takers, and that is why it taxes, not to get the money, but to find people willing to _take_ the money in return for real goods and services (like civil servant labour). The governemtn only requires SOME (not ALL) of the currency back in taxes to enforce the initial tax liability, to establish trust it will enforce the tax. It can then destroy the money, it does not need it from you or I to issue more of it (hint: "revenue" come from the French "revenir" = "to return back.) It just needs us to want it so some of us will be willing to provision the state sector with workers and goods to run state services.
In other words, the way to stop the US dollar from being worth something is to overthrow the US government. Easy huh? Nothing less will destroy the dollar. It is impossible bitcoin will do it, it is a ponzi scheme, play it at your peril. The smarter central bankers know this, they will never advise government to redeem bitcoins for tax payments. Why would they? It'd be a lot like going back to a gold standard, only with a commodity they cannot control or hoard at Fort Knox.
Finally, does anyone seriously think bitcoin (or any other PRIVATE crypto-currency) can change the world for the better? Idiots! It is hyper-capitalism, and would really become anarcho-capitalism. (The real bitcoin insiders know this, but will not admit so in public, because they actually delusionally think their scheme will succeed, which is laughable. They have to first get the US government to stop taxing in dollars and start taxing in bitcoin.) Suppose (although total fantasy) bitcoin managed to displace the US dollar and the US government somehow were forced to start accepting bitcoin for tax payments (ha!) laughable, but just suppose some idiots in Congress make it law that bitcoin can be redeemed. Then how likely is it all the bitcoin trillionaires are going to distribute their hoarding equally to the poor? Seriously? What chance do you give that? If the more extreme crypto-currency nutters get their dream, they will destroy governemtn entirely. Then there will be no public agency or legal system to get them to share their coin. Total anarcho-capitalist neo-slavery privatization is the result. All that'll happen is that who is a billionaire will be switched around.
The very best thing an activist can do is encourage Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and ALL the other plutocrats to buy up big in bitcoin, release all their Treasury bonds too. Buy the whole supply. When bitcoin is abandoned they'll become paupers on paper and will have to sell their property to eat. But do not cry for them, they own enough real property to eat well for years.