What is a commodity?

[Dennis R Redmond]

The recent postings on banks and finance capital in general raise some
important issues about finance capital. I hate to wax utopian,
but here goes anyway:

(1) We need to be careful about lumping together all forms of mediation in
capitalist economies as somehow identical. Stock shares are claims on
corporate ownership; bonds are long-term loans; bank loans can be short or
long-term loans; and pension funds are little more than deferred wages.
Abolishing certain parts of the credit infrastructure would be
absolutely essential to any future socialist society: i.e. divesting the
rich of all those stocks and bonds, turning over companies to
worker-elected bodies, capping interest rates to levels which correspond
to real economic growth. Other parts need to be socialized: pension funds
should be state-guaranteed for all and state-run, as in many European
countries; nationalized health insurance for all would also need an
appropriate financing plan; most of all, banks and capital markets would
need to be transformed into community-run and community-owned
institutions, run by and for the working folks themselves. Some of this
also exists in Europe today. We shall see what the Euroleft comes up with
in the future. 

(2) The politics of global finance capital are the politics of global
class struggle. I.e. private capital does not completely control the
creation of money, though it can seem this way sometimes. This is because
money is international, and in today's globally-integrated capital
markets, the supply of German deutschemarks is as important to the world
economy as that of Japanese yen or the US dollar. This is important,
because the American ruling classes DO NOT OWN OR RUN THE WORLD-ECONOMY
ANYMORE. The US is a net debtor in world credit markets; Europe and Japan
are the creditors. And the objectives of the European and Japanese 
ruling classes are very, very different from that of the 
American lumpen-rentiers: the new metropoles must have industrial
financing for themselves and their newfound neocolonies, Russia/Eastern
Europe and China/Southeast Asia. Wall Street, on the other hand, wants
45% returns -- not now, yesterday. This is probably why the Long
Depression of the 1990s called forth such different responses from each
zone: North America devalued its currencies and threw money at Wall
Street, while West Germany spent $100 billion a year to revive the East
German economy (this spilled over quickly into the Visegrad zone, which is
now growing quickly because of these subsidies); meanwhile Japan has been
bailing out its banking system, to the tune of maybe $750 billion to $1
trillion over the past five years (facilitating precisely the weakened but
still impressive sort of expansion which the tiger economies have
experienced recently). The net result has been an enormous surge in global
liquidity, with no corresponding increase in wages or demand anywhere. So
where did the money go? Into the European and Japanese banking system,
that's where (very little went to fund the present Wall Street bubble,
most of which came out of the hides of the American
working-class). The world-system has consequently been cycling in low gear
for almost a decade. This suggests that concerted political action in
Europe/Japan could mobilize the resources to set another long wave of
accumulation in motion (kind of like how the US financed the boom of the
1950s-1970s, via military Keynesianism). Eurokeynesianism, anyone? Would 
any of the European comrades out there like to comment?

(3) Everyone knows it, noone says it: Wall Street is going to crash.
big-time, and then this pathetic, decaying carcass of Empire is going to
exit the stage of History in a cloud of REIT bankruptcies, pension-fund
bailouts, and third party initiatives. Any bets on when, and by how much?
(I'd put a stash of euros on a 35% drop in November 1997 myself).

-- Dennis