Marxism or Modern Monetary Theory | Theorizing with a Hammer

source : Marxism or Modern Monetary Theory: A Conversation with Colin Drumm - YouTube

tags : [[marxism]] [[Modern Monetary Theory]]

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