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theory
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I love these little metaphors he puts in, here from the end of 35.
"The monetary system is essentially a Catholic institution, the credit system essentially Protestant. "The Scotch hate gold." In the form of paper the monetary existence of commodities is only a social one. It is Faith that brings salvation. Faith in money-value as the immanent spirit of commodities, faith in the mode of production and its predestined order, faith in the individual agents of production as mere personifications of self-expanding capital. But the credit system does not emancipate itself from the basis of the monetary system any more than Protestantism has emancipated itself from the foundations of Catholicism."
I bet he'd be fascinated by how far credit systems have developed since he was around.
- Catholics: Cash,
- Protestants: Credit,
- Mormons: MLM schemes
- Jews: Useless family heirlooms.
This part of a paragraph was interesting to read, especially the last sentence.
[...]Even when a man without fortune receives credit in his capacity of industrialist or merchant, it occurs with the expectation that he will function as capitalist and appropriate unpaid labour with the borrowed capital. He receives credit in his capacity of potential capitalist. The circumstance that a man without fortune but possessing energy, solidity, ability and business acumen may become a capitalist in this manner — and the commercial value of each individual is pretty accurately estimated under the capitalist mode of production — is greatly admired by apologists of the capitalist system. Although this circumstance continually brings an unwelcome number of new soldiers of fortune into the field and into competition with the already existing individual capitalists, it also reinforces the supremacy of capital itself, expands its base and enables it to recruit ever new forces for itself out of the substratum of society. In a similar way, the circumstance that the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages formed its hierarchy out of the best brains in the land, regardless of their estate, birth or fortune, was one of the principal means of consolidating ecclesiastical rule and suppressing the laity. The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the foremost minds of a ruled class, the more stable and dangerous becomes its rule.
The same wars through which the Roman patricians ruined the plebeians by compelling them to serve as soldiers and which prevented them from reproducing their conditions of labour, and therefore made paupers of them (and pauperization, the crippling or loss of the prerequisites of reproduction is here the predominant form) these same wars filled the store-rooms and coffers of the patricians with looted copper, the money of that time. Instead of directly giving plebeians the necessary commodities, i.e., grain, horses, and cattle, they loaned them this copper for which they had no use themselves, and took advantage of this situation to exact enormous usurious interest,
Yep, that's revolutionary, in one sense (acceleration of old economic mode's destruction)
It must be said that this does not make a transition to capitalist mode of production necessarily tho, as it is conservative in this way
Usury, like commerce, exploits a given mode of production. Usury tries to maintain it directly, so as to exploit it ever anew; it is conservative and makes this mode of production only more pitiable. The less elements of production enter into the production process as commodities, and emerge from it as commodities, the more does their origination from money appear as a separate act.