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

• tags :: marxismModern 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