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