tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3591186784456519139.post2395246864966170607..comments2024-01-02T17:38:32.872+00:00Comments on Economics of Imperialism: Value Theory, Finance and ImperialismTony Norfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03896437404164741498noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3591186784456519139.post-54799806491037052702016-07-16T23:25:34.538+01:002016-07-16T23:25:34.538+01:00Hi Kumiko: Thanks for your appreciation of my book...Hi Kumiko: Thanks for your appreciation of my book, and for your perceptive and intelligent comments. Because these comment items and replies tend to get hidden at the end of an article in this blog format, I have decided to put your main comments and my reply in a new blog post, dated 16 July 2016.Tony Norfieldhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03896437404164741498noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3591186784456519139.post-74318552234524487062016-07-16T18:25:09.216+01:002016-07-16T18:25:09.216+01:00Congrats on your recently published book, "Th...Congrats on your recently published book, "The City". It is written in an admirably clear and easy to read style that all of us who aspire to reach beyond a specialist or academic audience should seek to emulate. <br /><br />You are on the right track generally as far as the theoretical framework goes. But I'd note that in Vol II, where the analytical assumption of the identity of individual with total social capital is still in place, Marx 1) divides the total productive capital into productive-, commodity-, and money-capital circuits, and regards each independently. Here Marx arrives at the conclusion that the commodity-capital circuit can be excluded from further consideration for the purpose of the analysis, that purpose being the determinations of the sources and destinations of surplus value, the source being found in production, the destination necessarily being found in money under capitalism. But Marx also notes the peculiarity of the commodity-capital circuit in that it is the only circuit of the three to both begin and end "bearing" surplus value. In practice that could give rise to various interesting arbitrage possibilities for independent commerce, once the assumption of identity is dropped.<br /><br />And that brings me to Vol III Part IV. This is limited to the regard of commercial capital in independent form. Note also Marx's assumption that independent commercial capital is scheduled for extinction in the course of the development of capitalist industrial production. This may be true enough, but the question begged here concerns the *combined* forms of industrial, commercial and financial capital, these being the common social aliases for the three circuits mentioned above. You are correct to dismiss the traditional counter-position of "industry" with "finance" as if these still exist only in independent form. Further, one could go on to critique the classical Hilferding formula for "finance capital" that combines banking with industrial capital as perhaps only applicable to Germany in a certain historical period, as only a specific combination of the three circuits. Even if we agree that modern capital nearly always appears in combined form, we could go on to question the "balance" in the combination of the three circuits, where one or another "dominant", with that dominance also fluctuating with the other circuits over the course of history. And finally we can also question the "inevitability" of the rise to "dominance" of industrial capital, particularly in the three different cases of the United States, Britain and France. Otherwise we would not be speaking of "deindustrialization" today. Kumikohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14998443928912368318noreply@blogger.com