Guglielmo Carchedi’s bad advice for activists

Keynesian economic policies don’t work, but fighting for these policies will?

Guglielmo Carchedi’s essay on the so-called Marxist multiplier has me bugging. He is handing out bad advice to activists in the social movements and telling them this bad advice is based on Marx’s labor theory of value. The bad advice can be summed up concisely: Keynesian policies do not work and cannot work, but the fight for these policies (as opposed to neoliberal policies) can help end capitalism:

From the Marxist perspective, the struggle for the improvement of labour’s lot and the sedimentation and accumulation of labour’s antagonistic consciousness and power through this struggle should be two sides of the same coin. This is their real importance. They cannot end the slump but they can surely improve labour’s conditions and, given the proper perspective, foster the end of capitalism.

Frankly, Carchedi’s advice is the Marxist academy’s equivalent of medical malpractice. (For the record, Michael Robert’s has his own take on the discussion raised by Carchedi’s essay.)

Anarchists, Libertarians and Marxists need to change the debate on jobs and debt (2)

We have to change the terms of the debate on jobs and debt. We need to insist a job is nothing more than wage slavery and we don’t need Washington’s effort to create more of it by adding to this wage slavery even with more debt slavery. It is not like we have to argue existing jobs need to go away; why is Washington creating more of them, when existing hours can be reduced to solve the problem of unemployment rather than more debt?

2. Monetary Policy, or what happens when a hyperinflationary collapse of the dollar is NOT the worst possible outcome

The media is abuzz with speculation following the Federal reserves announcement of quantitative easing version 3.0. This version calls for the Federal Reserve to pour unlimited quantities of currency created out of nothing into the market, buying up worthless assets on a monthly basis to the tune of $40 billion per month. The result could be the printing of nearly a half trillion dollars in new, freshly produced, token money being forced into the economy every year until further notice.

The implications of this monetary insanity can be understood simply by reading the opinions of any number of economists and market watchers who are very delicately raising the spectre of a Zimbabwe style hyperinflation. Still subdued but growing talk of such an event has moved from the periphery of “financial advisers” and gold bugs into the mainstream argument of some pretty staid experienced players.

Take, for instance, a recent comment by Art Cashin, a veteran of the stock market who has probably seen every high risk moment in the market since well before Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, up to and including witnessing the market plunge 25% in a single day in 1987.  Cashin oversees the management of more than $600 billion in assets and is not given to losing his head over every minor fluctuation in the S&P 500. A market crash is not Cashins concern, however — he fears hyperinflation. Cashin notes Weimar Republic hyperinflation did not burst out all at once, but was preloaded by continuous money printing that only made its way into the market over time:

“It (the inflationary spiral) was in fact delayed for a couple of years.  But once it started, it could not be taken back.  So here in the United States and in the European Union, there are very few, if any, signs of inflation because people are so concerned (that they are hoarding money).

“[You] will have to keep an eye on the velocity of money.  Watch figures like, here in the United States, the M2 (figure), and see if it begins to grow through velocity, and get very cautious at that point.  There are some potentially eerie parallels (today vs the Weimar Germany era).  The United States trauma was unemployment and deflation (in the 30s), but in Germany in the 20s, it was money that ruined an entire society.”

Events are not yet to the point where Cashin is advising his clients to take their worthless fiat currency and sell it for gold, silver and other precious commodities, but he is suggesting there is such a heightened level of potential for a monetary catastrophe at present to warn people should begin to look for indicators of hyperinflation in the data:

“I think you are certainly at a ‘flashing yellow alert.’  You have in place a variety of things that could begin to react somewhat domino-like.  As I said, there are measures and items that the listeners (and readers) can look for themselves.  Look at, what is the growth in the money supply, M2?  It comes out every week.

If [the M2 measure of the money supply] begins to grow rapidly, then the money that the Fed has created will be seen as moving through the system.  That will create the high risk of accelerated inflation, and perhaps, God forbid, runaway inflation.”

Even if we discount Cashin’s argument as just another example of fringe hysteria, Zero Hedge recently explained, there are voices within the Federal Reserve’s own research department that echo Cashin’s argument:

Yes, it is ironic that the Fed is talking about “common sense”, we know. But the absolute punchline you will never hear admitted or discussed anywhere else, and the reason why the Fed can no longer even rely on its models is that…

Carlstrom et al. show that the Smets and Wouters model would predict an explosive inflation and output if the short-term interest rate were pegged at the ZLB (Zero Lower Bound) between eight and nine quarters. This is an unsettling finding given that the current horizon of forward guidance by the FOMC is of at least eight quarters.

In short: the Fed’s DSGE models fail when applied in real life, they are unable to lead to the desired outcome and can’t predict the outcome that does occur, and furthermore there is no way to test them except by enacting them in a way that consistently fails. But the kicker: the Fed’s own model predicts that if the Fed does what it is currently doing, the result would be “explosive inflation.”

You read that right: if Bernanke does what he not only intends to do but now has no choice but doing until the bitter end, the outcome is hyperinflation. Not our conclusion: that of Smets and Wouters, whoever they are.

And these are the people who are now in charge of everything.

Is there anything worse than a hyperinflation for capitalism?

The warnings by Cashin and the writers at Zero Hedge suggest Bernanke’s Federal Reserve is engaged in an extremely risky gamble on a policy that could lead to the dollar replacing Kleenex as the preferred method of catching sniffles during cold and flu season. I think it is safe to say the Fed would not be undertaking this gamble just to move unemployment a few points. A high risk gamble on this scale with the world’s reserve currency clearly hints what is at stake is likely much worse than a mere outburst of hyperinflation.

So what is worse than a hyperinflation of the dollar? What threat could there be to capitalism right now that risks reducing the dollar to a worthless piece of scrip with no purchasing power whatsoever? How about, a hyperdeflation, an inverse condition where all prices instead of going to infinity and beyond go to zero?

But there is a big problem with this argument: There is not a single recorded instance of hyperdeflation in history, we are told, and logically it cannot happen. Zero Hedge remarks on the question in a caustically titled post “The Monetary Endgame Score To Date: Hyperinflations: 56; Hyperdeflations: 0”:

We won’t waste our readers’ time with the details of all the 56 documented instances of hyperinflation in the modern, and not so modern, world. They can do so on their own by reading the attached CATO working paper by Hanke and Krus titled simply enough “World Hyperinflations.” Those who do read it will discover the details of how it happened to be that in post World War 2 Hungary the equivalent daily inflation rate of 207%, the highest ever recorded, led to a price doubling every 15 hours, certainly one upping such well-known instance of CTRL-P abandon as Zimbabwe (24.7 hours) and Weimar Germany (a tortoise-like 3.70 days). This and much more. What we will point is that at no time in recorded history did a monetary regime end in “hyperdeflation.” In fact there is not one hyperdeflationary episode of note. Although, we are quite certain, that virtually all of the 56 and counting hyperinflations in the world, were at one point borderline hyperdeflationary. All it took was central planner stupidity to get the table below, and a paper with the abovementioned title instead of “World Hyperdeflations.”

The Cato Institute’s paper presents a very powerful empirical argument against the case for deflation and hyperdeflation. Unfortunately it rests entirely on two fallacies that are hidden in its very title: First, hyperdeflation has nothing to do with the fate of any fiat currency, even the world reserve currency, the US dollar. A hyperdeflation is not the death of any particular currency nor even a series of currency collapses — it is the death of money itself.

The second fallacy in the Cato paper will take a bit longer to explain and once explained will show why it is so important to every anarchist, libertarian and Marxist.

Can there be such a thing as a hyperdeflation?

A hyperdeflation might possibly be defined as a situation where prices of commodities declined even as the supply of money increased. As the Cato Institute paper explains — there is no recorded instance of a hyper-deflation in the historical record. Of course, mild and even very severe deflations did occur several times up until the Great Depression; but history has many more examples of hyperinflations, as the Cato paper argues.

The problem with the Cato paper, however, is that its argument rests on the “quantity theory of money” fallacy — which according the Wikipedia states “that money supply has a direct, proportional relationship with the price level.” Which is to say, the Federal Reserve can force prices to increase — create inflation — if it increases the quantity of currency in circulation. In fact, this theory is wrong. The prices of commodities do not depend on the quantity of money in circulation, but on the quantity of socially necessary labor time required for their production. And here, at least theoretically, the case against hyper-deflation falls apart.

Here is the problem at the end of capitalism’s life: If the Marxist writers Moishe Postone and Robert Kurz are correct, the socially necessary labor time of commodities now have two distinct and contradictory measures: its labor time as a simple commodity and its labor time as a capitalistically produced commodity — yielding two quite different potential prices.

To put this in simpler terms, the price paid in a store for a typical commodity like an iPhone is mostly a reflection of the costs of economically wasted labor. The iPhone itself takes very little direct labor to produce, but, if its production is to be profitable, the accumulated costs of waste within the economy requires a massive mark up in the price you pay for it at the checkout counter.

What is this waste? Well, one source is the overhead created by the costly burden of government at present. Since the government doesn’t produce anything, its entire cost is borne by the rest of society. If, for instance, government accounts for about 50% of GDP, this means every product has a 100% markup just to pay for the operating expense of federal, state and local government. So about half the cost of your iPhone goes to cover things like drone attacks on Afghanistan civilians or corn subsidies to agribusiness. These cost don’t appear anywhere unless it comes directly from your wages in taxes, but even in this case the costs must be passed on in commodity circulation and will accumulate there in the costs of each commodity.

So every commodity essentially has two prices: the one that you pay at the checkout counter, which includes all the wasted economic activity in society, and the other, hidden, true price, which is the actual direct cost of producing to commodity. Surprisingly, this latter price is now only a negligible fraction of the total price of an iPhone, a pair of shoes, or even an automobile — the overwhelming bulk of the price of every product you buy consists of the hidden costs of economic waste within society that has accumulated over the past eighty years.

This is why, as I discussed in part one of this series, it now takes as much as seven dollars of debt, or even more, to create a single dollar of wages through fascist state economic policies designed to create jobs. Simply put, this internal discordance in the price of every commodity is a hyperdeflation weapon of mass destruction just waiting for a triggering event. What is making the Federal Reserve risk even the total collapse of the dollar on an insane gamble is the fact that this implosion can be triggered by the mildest hint of deflation. To prevent this event, the Federal Reserve must restart the failed system of debt accumulation that crashed in the financial meltdown of 2008.

Anarchists, libertarians and Marxists have a chance to put sand in the gears of the fascist state and bring it down along with the entire mode of production. All it requires is for us to change the debate over jobs and debt — opposing both Federal Reserve monetary and Washington fiscal policy aimed at expanding still further the system of wage slavery through policies designed to promote economic waste and debt.

But we can do this only if we are willing to take capital and the state head on by demanding an immediate reduction in hours of work until everyone who wants to work has a job, along with the elimination of all public and private debts, and abolition of all taxes.

Making austerity work in Britain for Dummies (Anti-statist version)

!Quelle Surprise! Like Greece and Spain before it, the UK finds austerity can only result in more austerity:

U.K. Tories to Press Ahead With $16 Billion of Welfare Cuts

The Conservative Party will press ahead with plans to cut 10 billion pounds ($16 billion) from the welfare budget and reduce spending by most other departments as it extends Britain’s austerity program into a seventh year.

The cuts to the benefits budget will go ahead as long as they meet safeguards sought by Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, who has clashed with Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne on the issue since the party came to office in 2010. Duncan Smith and Osborne published a letter today saying the differences had been resolved.

“We are both satisfied that this is possible and we will work together to find savings of this scale,” the ministers said, according to excerpts released by Osborne’s office.

Osborne will address activists at the Conservatives’ annual conference in Birmingham, central England, later today, seeking to assure voters that his party will spread the pain of austerity across society. He’ll accuse the opposition Labour Party of focusing too much of that effort on the rich.

“There’s unfairness if people listening to this show are about to go out to work and they look across the street at their next door neighbour with blinds pulled down, living off a life on benefits,” Osborne said in an interview with BBC Radio 5 today. “Is it fair that a young person straight from school who has never worked can find themselves getting housing benefit to live in a flat when people who are working, perhaps listening to this program, are still living with their parents” because they can’t afford to move out, he asked.

…

Osborne is seeking to extend spending reductions across government departments as a 2010 effort to rid Britain of its budget deficit by 2015 is pushed back a further two years. Britain spends more than 200 billion pounds a year on welfare, accounting for 30 percent of total government spending. The Treasury said in March that welfare cuts of 10 billion pounds are needed by the fiscal year that runs through March 2017 on top of the 18 billion pounds of savings already announced.

See this is the problem with austerity — the more you cut, the more you must cut. Folks, if the fascist state is subsidizing capitalism by accumulating debt, cutting fascist state deficits only weakens capitalism.Since the fascist state is propping up profits through its accumulation of debt, if this debt accumulation is reduced, it sets off a vicious cycle which can only end in each round of cuts making necessary the next round of cuts.

Anarchists, Libertarians and Marxists need to change the debate on jobs and debt (1)

We have to change the terms of the debate on jobs and debt. We need to insist a job is nothing more than wage slavery and we don’t need Washington’s effort to create more of it adding to this wage slavery even with more debt slavery. It is not like we have to argue existing jobs need to go away; why is Washington creating more of them, when existing hours can be reduced to solve the problem of unemployment rather than more debt?

1. Fiscal policy, or how to create one job on Main Street by borrowing five jobs from Wall Street

In 2011, a congressman made the argument that Obama’s stimulus program had produced jobs at the cost of $278,000 per job. Although the charge was nothing new, it made its rounds on the conservative GOP talking points circuit, and even ended up in the congressional record. This number, of course, was so outrageous by any measure of efficiency that it had to be analyzed by what we might call “clear thinking persons with no agenda”, i.e., the news media.

One “news source” in particular known for its ability to vet these things is PolitiFact.com, and it went after the congressman’s charge. PolitiFact established that the congressman, a Republican, was deliberately distorting facts against Obama’s stimulus program.

At $666 billion, the bill was estimated by the White house to have “saved or created” between 2.4 to 3.6 million jobs. What the congressman did, was employ the low end of the number of jobs “created or saved” and apply it to the total of the bill.

The Obama administration responded that this was unfair, since the money went to more than just creating jobs, it also invested in infrastructure, energy, education etc. Which is an odd response, since obviously the administration included those “investments” in its estimate of jobs “created or saved”. The Associated Press made the further argument that,

“Any cost-per-job figure pays not just for the worker, but for the material, supplies and that workers’ output — a portion of a road paved, patients treated in a health clinic, goods shipped from a factory floor, railroad tracks laid,”

So what AP is stating is that a job created by economic stimulus must account not just for the labor power directly expended, but also the constant capital used up in the course of this expenditure. But then AP performs an almost unnoticed sleight of hand and counts everything  twice. So we count the money spent to build a road in terms of wages and materials, then we count the road as a finished product; we count the wages and material employed to build a clinic, and then we count the clinic as an operating concern.

Once we remove the misleading double counting from our calculation in the argument in the AP version of this story, how this differed from what the congressman said, is unclear. Indeed his criticism was later refined by one conservative media outlet this way:

“He says he never said that $278,000 per job went to salaries, but ‘rather that each job has cost taxpayers $278,000.'”

Five dollars of debt to produce one dollar of wages

So what the worker actually receives of the $278,000 spent to create her job is one thing, and the cost of creating that job is another. Assuming the worker received an average hourly wage of around $19, she would have an annual wage of $38,760, minus taxes. But to receive this $38,760 minus taxes in wages, the taxpayer must pony up $278,000 minus the taxes paid by the worker.

Which is to say, it roughly takes about 7 dollars of spending to create 1 dollar worth of wages using fiscal stimulus. Moreover, this fiscal stimulus must be newly created money, through debt, and, therefore, created out of nothing. If we take the administrations preferred figure of $185,000 per job, this still amounts to 5 dollars of new debt to produce 1 dollar of wages.

Between the GOP and the Democrats, then, there is agreement that it takes somewhere between $5 and $7 of debt to create $1 of wages. For some reason, despite the general validity of the congressman’s claim, Politifact.com decided it was not true on a technicality:

“Contrary to Dewhurst’s statement, the cited cost-per-job figure was not aired by the Obama administration. At bottom, his statement leaves the misimpression that the money went solely for jobs rather than a range of projects and programs, including tax breaks. We rate his claim False.”

There is, of course, another way of looking at this from the point of view of Wall Street banksters. From their point of view, it only takes 1 dollar of wages to create 5 dollars of new debt. Since the banksters are only interested in the accumulation of debt, which sits on his book as an asset, this is a fine ratio.

If the fascist state wants to create one job, it has to borrow the equivalent of five jobs to create this one job. The accumulation of the public debt outruns the income of the members of society who must eventually pay off the debt with their income. For every dollar they get in increased income, their debt obligation increases by five dollars. They must work to pay off this debt, requiring a further extension of wage slavery beyond what is required just to satisfy their needs.

Since after the housing market meltdown citizens can no longer be relied upon to accumulate this debt on their own (they have all become subprime  borrowers) the state now takes on this obligation on their behalf, and raises the funds to service it by slashing their retirement and health benefits, reducing their access to public services like education, and inflating the prices of commodities by depreciating the currency.

This is how the scam works, folks!

You vote for Obama and the Democrats, and they mortgage your life and labor to banksters. They call this mortgaging of your life “progressive fiscal policy”, and sell it to you as a benefit.

However, since the congressman hails from the GOP, an avowed political opponent of the democrat president, he failed to add this additional fact: The argument does not change if, instead of democrat spending, we substitute GOP tax cuts, except that tax cuts are even more inefficient at “creating jobs” than fiscal spending. With GOP tax cuts, as the research suggest, the actual relation between the debt accumulated and the jobs created is aimless and dispersed and rather a bit more difficult to assess. Rather than aiming at some specific form of wage slavery as the democrats do, GOP tax cuts aim solely at subsidizing all wage slavery.

Tax cuts only have some definite targeted effect to the extent they increase the deficit and the flows of state expenditures into the coffers of banksters. While both spending and tax cuts result in a massive expansion of the public debt, in general, the less targeted the accumulation of the public debt, the more it directly favors only the banksters, who, in any case, underwrite this debt. The question is only one of degree, not result.

With democrat spending, the accumulation of debt takes a specific form — a road, a school, or an industry. It is targeted, and, therefore, can be more precisely applied, no matter that is still wasteful. What’s more, as Democrats and Republicans alike already know, the produced product can now be renamed the Obama Bridge-Tunnel Highway to Nowhere, or the Obama Elementary School, or the Obama Green Energy Research Park, or, as is always inevitable, no matter which party incurs the debt, the USS Obama.

If the outrageous cost of creating unnecessary jobs by fiscal policy is staggering, just wait until I next explain what knowledgeable insiders are saying about the cost of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy.

Letter to the Occupy Movement: The jobs number you never hear about says Washington’s fucked

Here is an interesting chart from Zero Hedge: In data going back to 1980, employment for younger workers aged 20-24 has never increased — that is, it has never increased until this year:

I know what you are thinking: the data provided by Washington is a fraud. I am going to show why, even if we take that chart on its face value as genuine, Washington is completely fucked. I am going to subject the entire category “employment” to an analysis using Marx’s labor theory of value. By “employment”. of course, I mean wage slavery; which means, although it is commonly treated as a good, it is actually an evil. But, I intend to treat this “employment” on its own terms, as it is commonly held a some sort of social good.

Let’s begin with this morning’s non-farm payroll report — 114,000 net hires in the economy and an unemployment rate of 7.8%. Both of these numbers are, of course, cooked beyond all credibility, but this is not the point. It doesn’t get us any closer to the actual situation to state (as the GOP will, no doubt) that Washington cooks the unemployment numbers. Dems cook the books when they control Washington, the GOP cooks them when they are in control.

Washington has always cooked the numbers — now the numbers are burnt beyond all recognition.

(First a note about this morning’s serving of cooked data: According Mish Shedlock, the minimum net new hires needed just to keep the unemployment rate flat is 125,000 per month. Last month there were 114,000 net new hires, however the unemployment rate declined from 8.1% to 7.8%. So, before you Obama voters celebrate, you should be aware than the economy did not even provide enough new hires to offset people coming into the labor force looking for jobs.)

Compulsory employment growth and inflation

It is the labor force participation rate that is most revealing in the numbers. The labor force participation rate (the blue line in the chart provided by Calculated Risk below) peaked in 2000-2001 and has been on a slow decline since that recession. From a high of just over 67%, that rate has now fallen to about 64% in this report. This reverses a trend of increasing participation in the labor force — folks actively seeking work — that goes back at least to 1962, according to the data available to me. Since 1962, in other words, as a general rule each year has seen more people trying to get a job than the year before. This trend higher reverses in the 2001 recession, and as a general rule, each year fewer people are participating in the labor force.

Why is this reversal in labor force participation important to analysis? Well, let’s look at this statement by President Truman in 1950 speaking of the military buildup that commenced with the start of the Cold War:

“In terms of manpower, our present defense targets will require an increase of nearly one million men and women in the armed forces within a few months, and probably not less than four million more in defense production by the end of the year. This means that an additional 8 percent of our labor force, and possibly much more, will be required by direct defense needs by the end of the year.

These manpower needs will call both for increasing our labor force by reducing unemployment and drawing in women and older workers, and for lengthening hours of work in essential industries. These manpower requirements can be met. There will be manpower shortages, but they can be solved.”

Following World War II, Washington set it as a priority that the labor force should steadily increase each year, in order to siphon off a portion of this growth for its military expansion. This goal was secretly given legal form as National Security Council Report 68. The goal of “full employment” was made the primary labor policy of Washington in 1946 and renewed in 1978.

“Full employment” in this case should be understood as full employment of labor power resources. In other words, it was the policy of the United States to seek full employment of its labor power resources for its strategic national ends. This “full employment” policy was sold to Americans as Washington’s commitment to providing a job to everyone who needed a job.

Which is fine and dandy, except at the same time, Washington was deliberately debasing the currency, driving up prices, and forcing more folks (particularly women) into the labor force to compensate for falling consumption, and moreover, forcing people to work well past their retirement. So what at first appears to be a benign policy, even an commendable agreement between Washington and its citizens that it would do everything in its power to create jobs, turns out to be a policy of forcing every person under its domination to look for work.

Children barely off the breast were abandoned to daycare warehouses, so mothers could find work just to pay for daycare; even substitute formulas for the breast were devised, so children could grow up attached to a rubber substitute for their mothers; essential functions within the home like child-rearing were thus commodified. And this, in turn, led to its own set of social ills, as women were assaulted by their bosses, discriminated against in their careers and under-paid — as the nation was convulsed with real or imagined terror of child abuse in day care centers. A generation of children were now referred to as “latch-key kids”, and teenage pregnancies proliferated. The elderly went back into the work force and became greeters at Wal-Mart, as people delayed or altogether gave up on the idea of retirement, unable to amass sufficient savings to stop working. Taking care of the elderly itself became a commodity sold as nursing home care.

Still, labor force participation increased despite these horrors.

Compulsory employment growth and debt: the hidden relationship

Hand in hand with this goes the ever increasing accumulation of consumer debt that working folk used to compensate for stagnant wages, despite the fact that each family was working more hours than their parents had. And all of these ills, which list could be extended almost indefinitely, appeared to have no cause other than the individuals themselves. If someone ended up working in a Wal-Mart at 70, it was because they had not saved enough; if a woman abandoned her child to day care, it was because she or her husband had not spent enough time in college; if teenagers were now getting pregnant at 13, it was because the morals of society were collapsing.

No one looked at Washington and said, “You fuckers are responsible for this!” And, if by chance, someone did say this, it was only in the form: “You democrat fuckers have tied up the economy with your regulations”; or, “You Republican fuckers have crippled Washington to the point that government can’t provide enough stimulus to create full employment.”

No matter what the policy advocated — tax cuts or spending increases — there was always someone to assure us it would create jobs and pay for itself with “increased economic growth”. Through most of the period from at least 1980 until now the growth of employment has always been proportional to the increase in debt. From 1980 until at least 2006, the savings rate of American declined until it went negative entirely in 2004-2005. It is particularly interesting that the saving rate actually touched near zero just as the labor force participation rate reached its peak.

The problem with the latest employment figures, however, is not to be found in the effects of a rising participation rate on working families, either in the form of social ills or the accumulation of debt. It is that, no matter these ills and no matter the accumulation of debt, total hours of labor must increase — the fate of capitalism depends on this growth.

But, it is not increasing.

Why compulsory growth of employment is necessary for Washington

Capitalism is a mode of production where the employment of labor power must constantly increase, no matter what the consequences. This mean, the duration of labor must constantly rise, a duration that is a function of the number of workers times their hours of work. Washington and the political parties always directs our attention to the unemployment rate, which figures are usually cooked, but, what really matters for Washington, is not the unemployment rate, but the duration of the social working day. At least this seems to be what is relevant, from the standpoint of Marx’s theory.

According to the date I have access to, social labor day has fallen only four times in the last 36 years: briefly in 1991 and again in 2001, and in a sustained way from 2007 to 2009. In other words, since this depression began in 2001, the total hours of work has fallen 3 years between 2001 and 2009. The response to this fall the first time, was the Bush tax cuts, Paul Krugman calling for a housing bubble to replace the NASDAQ bubble Bernanke’s speech on deflation, and Alan Greenspan being asked to retire from the Fed.

The second and third times the total social labor day shrank, coincided with the collapse of the financial system and Fed monetary policy.

This argues that this measure of economic activity is more significant than the hype over non-farm payroll numbers would have you believe. Such an argument might be said to be based entirely on coincidence, were it not itself based on the arguments of Postone and Kurz. They suggested the social labor day must constantly expand if existing relations of production are to be maintained.

What is more, each writer comes to this conclusion from different premises, i.e., different and contradictory notions of value. Postone’s argument suggests that the total labor time of society must expand despite the contraction of socially necessary labor time in the forms of value and surplus value; while Kurz suggests the increasingly fictional quality of credit, of fictional claims to future profits, requires the constant expansion of total labor time of society. In either case, Postone in 1993, and Kurz in 1995, using different notions of value, argue the total labor time of society must increase. And when, in fact, this total labor time actually did not increase, first a depression was triggered, then a financial collapse.

But, I hear you: ‘I am still not convinced by the evidence — it could, after all, be a really good scientific wild-assed guess on the part of those writers.’

Good point! Evidence suggests each writer, Postone and Kurx, was familiar with the writings of the other — so this could be just another instance of group-think. Instead of just going from Postone and Kurz to the empirical data, we need to go from Postone and Kurz back to Marx’s argument to establish a logical chain of reasoning, and figure out if, in fact, these guys were just making a wild guess.

In Marx’s argument, capitalism is not just a system of commodity production; it is a system of surplus commodity production, of the production of surplus in the form of commodities, of the production of surplus values. As a system of commodity production that aims always at the production of surplus value, capitalism relentlessly aims toward self-expansion beyond its given limits — as Marx put it, it employs existing value to create surplus value. Both Postone and Kurz employ this argument to uncover the absolute necessity of capitalism, at a certain stage in its development, to produce a sector consisting entirely of superfluous labor. In fact, Marx himself hints at just this result in volume 3, when he writes:

“If, as shown, a falling rate of profit is bound up with an increase in the mass of profit, a larger portion of the annual product of labour is appropriated by the capitalist under the category of capital (as a replacement for consumed capital) and a relatively smaller portion under the category of profit. Hence the fantastic idea of priest Chalmers, that the less of the annual product is expended by capitalists as capital, the greater the profits they pocket. In which case the state church comes to their assistance, to care for the consumption of the greater part of the surplus-product, rather than having it used as capital.”

Marx is clearly suggesting the unproductive consumption of the total social product becomes increasingly necessary when he closes with the wry comment:

“The preacher confounds cause with effect.”

Still later, Marx decries the result of this process:

“In the first place, too large a portion of the produced population is not really capable of working, and is through force of circumstances made dependent on exploiting the labour of others, or on labour which can pass under this name only under a miserable mode of production.”

Which is to say, a growing mass of workers makes its living by subsisting on the surplus value of the productively employed population. So, for me at least, there is a clear line beginning with Marx, through the argument of Postone and Kurz, that is expressed graphically below in the empirical data on the social labor day:

This decline is far more significant than the manipulated data foisted on the population of voters this morning. It suggests there is a real material dysfunction in fascist state economic policy that cannot be altered with a set of misleading stats. Beyond the convenient and willful ignoring of the shrinking labor participation rate, and the mass of unemployed no longer counted, the data suggests a situation that cannot be repaired by confidence tricks designed to keep the two parties in power.

Almost a fifth of the population is now permanently locked out of the labor force — the highest on record — according to Zero Hedge calculations:

If hours of labor do not expand at a sufficient rate to sustain existing relations of production, the entire Ponzi scheme must collapse. This process has probably already begun, which explains the insanely desperate actions of the Federal Reserve over the past month.

Sorry progressives, the Bush tax cuts did not kill the economy

United States Gross Domestic Product (Gold) 1929-2009

A quick note to slap down the standard progressive interpretation of the impact of the Bush tax cuts on the economy. Sorry folks, there is no real empirical support for your position.

Progressives who praise the Clinton era job creation performance versus Bush era job creation performance, and link this to Clinton tax increases versus Bush tax cuts, overlook two things that lead to the wrong conclusion: First, the Clinton job performance came during a time of a general economic expansion, Bush’s performance came during a general contraction. This fact is lost in the data because the data employs dollars as measure of economic activity and so masks the depression that began in 2001. If you discount the dollar denominated economic data using the price of gold, the contraction clearly shows up beginning in late 2000.

The second thing overlooked with this comparison is that Clinton era job creation (not “Clinton job creation” or “Bush job creation” — the two men created nothing) was exactly the wrong policy. The Clinton era succeeded in creating jobs, true. But it was creating jobs into the face of rising imports from China and other low wage nations and a general glut of capital on the world market. The depression did not appear suddenly because of the Bush tax cuts, but resulted in a too long social work day leading into the Bush era. To put this another way, the Bush era’s poor legacy creating jobs was a legacy of the Clinton era’s success at creating too much superfluous work.

The Bush tax cuts came in response to this, which was already evident as he began his term, and was his justification for the tax cuts. Progressives don’t want us to remember why Bush demanded the tax cuts, but some of us do not have such a short memory. This is not a whitewash of the Bush tax cuts; clearly they failed entirely to stop the depression from emerging and gaining steam — but they did not create the depression. Nor, were they responsible for poor job creation during the Bush and Obama years. It was already baked into the cake by overaccumulation of capital.

For those who are interested, as proof of my argument, I include the chart above showing GDP as measured by gold between 1929-2009. In the chart you can see clearly the three depressions that occurred over those years: 1929-1934, 1970-1981, and 2001-present.

The problem is not, and has never been, Republican anti-tax policies versus Democrat social spending policies — both are a sideshow to chronic overaccumulation of capital. Tax policy cannot fix this.

Theories of the current crisis: Closing thoughts on the hyperinflationists

This is my final installment on the hyperinflationists section of theories of the current crisis for now. As I find in any good examination of a theory out there, I come away from this one with a better understanding of some of the problems of capitalism under conditions of absolute over-accumulation. The hyperinflationist argument forced me to confront several  problems from the standpoint of the law of value, including, world market prices versus existing prices; ex nihilo currency and price behavior; definitions of price deflation, inflation and hyperinflation; definitions of depressions and recessions; the purchasing power of ex nihilo currency; and the rivalry between the monetary policies of the various nations states in relation to the Fascist State.

One of my conclusions from this examination is that FOFOA, properly understood, should not be in the hyperinflationist camp. I have no idea why he is advocating for dollar hyperinflation, since he, more than any other writer in the hyperinflationist camp, realizes the relationship between the purchasing power of an ex nihilo currency and the circulation of commodities. In 2010, he wrote:

Gold bids for dollars. If gold stops bidding for dollars (low gold velocity), the price (in gold) of a dollar falls to zero. This is backwardation!

Fekete says backwardation is when “zero [gold] supply confronts infinite [dollar] demand.” I am saying it is when “infinite supply of dollars confronts zero demand from real, physical gold… in the necessary VOLUME.” So what’s the difference? Viewed this way, can anyone show me how we are not there right now? And I’m not talking about your local gold dealer bidding on your $1,200 with his gold coin. I’m talking about Giant hoards of unencumbered physical gold the dollar NEEDS bids from.

Don’t let the term “backwardation” throw you. It is one of those insider terms among commodity traders, which, for our purpose, can be safely ignored, since it adds nothing to FOFOA’s essential argument. What FOFOA is saying in this excerpt is that the purchasing power of an ex nihilo currency rests on the willingness of gold owners to accept it as means of payment in exchange for their commodities. Unfortunately, FOFOA limits his argument to gold and misses the significance of his insight. This is because, for reasons previously mentioned, he articulates the viewpoint of the petty capitalist, who, unable to operate independently, must of necessity hand his meager wealth over to Wall Street investment banksters if it is to operate as capital, or, failing this, accept the depreciation of its dollar purchasing power, or, convert it to a hoard of useless gold.

There is, however, no reason to limit FOFOA’s insight to gold. Having been displaced in circulation as money, gold is simply another commodity whose particular use value is that it serve as a store of value. It is excellent in this regard, but broccoli is excellent as a vegetable, while gold is not. The specific quality of gold is its limited use as mainly a store of value, and, in this regard, it has few substitutes, while broccoli has many substitutes. This, however, should not blind us to the fact that it is now an ordinary commodity like any other. The true significance of FOFOA’s insight is that the purchasing power of any ex nihilo currency is directly a function of the willingness of commodity owners to accept it in exchange for their commodities.

If commodity owners are unwilling to accept an ex nihilo currency in exchange for their commodity, or prefer another currency in exchange for their commodity over that particular currency, its purchasing power will quickly fall toward zero — hyperinflation. This is precisely what happened in the case of the Zimbabwe dollar, which was undermined not only by the profligacy of the state, but also, by the preference of commodity owners for dollars and euros as a result of this profligacy. As FOFOA knows, the dollar is not likely to suffer such a fate, since its purchasing power rests on the fact that it is accepted for any commodity on the world market, and, consequently, is “undervalued” against all other ex nihilo currencies. Even if the purchasing power of a single ex nihilo dollar falls, the purchasing power of the total sum of dollars in circulation is not affected — it is still “undervalued” in relation to all other ex nihilo currencies, and must be undervalued as long as the total quantity of all other currencies is greater than zero.

By the same token, FOFOA’s insight demonstrates why, despite the constant depreciation of a single ex nihilo dollar, the sum of existing prices within the world market must be higher than world market prices denominated in dollars. No matter the depreciation of a single ex nihilo dollar, the sum of world market prices must fall toward world market prices denominated in dollars. Thus, the monetary policies of other nations is determined by the monetary policies of the Fascist State. Any nation wishing to pursue a so-called loose monetary policy, as Zimbabwe did, must find its ex nihilo currency displaced by dollars as commodity owners demand dollars in place of the national currency. On the other hand, the “tightening” of monetary policy by other nations cannot save these national currencies, since such “tightening” only leads them to the same fate as gold itself — they are withdrawn from circulation in a deflation of prices.

The end result, in either case, is the demonetization of all ex nihilo currencies except the dollar, and the equalization of the sum of prices within the world market with world market prices denominated in dollars. Hyperinflation and deflation do occur, but they occur in every other ex nihilo currency except the dollar.

From John Williams and FOFOA, I better understand the likely consequence of Fascist State economic policy — the front-loading of a series of events leading to the collapse of ex nihilo currencies by the fall of the sum of prices within the world market to the price level imposed by the dollar. This is because, as opposed to the deflationists, the hyperinflationists show the Fascist State will not sit by and let its dominant position be threatened by mere accounting identities. It will defend that position even at the expense of all other currencies. FOFOA is clearer on this point than Williams, but Williams implies it as well.

Paradoxically, FOFOA’s argument lends support, not for the hyperinflationist camp, but Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). His insight confirms the assumptions of the modern money theorists that the Fascist State faces no external constraint on its expenditures, since all ex nihilo currencies are only worthless dancing electrons on the computer terminals of central banks. The question raised by Fascist State expenditures is not its effect on national accounting balances, but the effect of these expenditures on other ex nihilo currencies. The accelerated spending of the Fascist State drives all of these currencies out of existence.

I look forward to examining this in a similar survey of modern money theory at another time.

Theories of the current crisis: Why non-dollar currencies are finished

In a recent post, Deflation or Hyperinflation, FOFOA begins the meat of his argument with investment adviser Rick Ackerman (who, until recently, predicted this present crisis will end in a debt deflation) by directly addressing Ackerman’s core deflationist argument, which originally was set forth in a 1976 book by C.V. Myers, The Coming Deflation:

Ackerman wrote:

My instincts concerning deflation were hard-wired in 1976 after reading C.V. Myers’ The Coming Deflation.  The title was premature, as we now know, but the book’s core idea was as timeless and immutable as the Law of Gravity. Myers stated, with elegant simplicity, that “Ultimately, every penny of every debt must be paid — if not by the borrower, then by the  lender.”  Inflationists and deflationists implicitly agree on this point — we are all ruinists at heart, as our readers will long since have surmised, and  we differ only on the question of who, borrower or lender, will take the hit.  As Myers made clear, however, someone will have to pay.  If you understand this, then you understand why the dreadnought of real estate deflation, for one, will remain with us even if 30 million terminally afflicted homeowners leave their house keys in the mailbox. To repeat: We do not make debt disappear by walking away from it; someone will have to take the hit.

FOFOA’s response to the deflationist argument was both simple and fatal for the deflationist argument:

Yes, someone will pay. But there is a third option that is missing from Myers’ dictum. “The hit” can be socialized…

What the deflationist miss, says FOFOA, is that Washington will never accept the collapse of its failing economic mechanism. It will create whatever quantity of ex nihilo dollars it takes to socialize the losses of financial institutions, pension funds, etc. — even if this threatens the viability of global financial system and the dollar itself.

Like FOFOA, I want to begin this post by directly addressing the core argument of both camps, that this crisis must end either in the deflation or hyperinflation of dollar prices, or both. As FOFOA has argued, the present crisis will likely end in both hyperinflation and deflation at the same time. I agree with this analysis, but I disagree with his targets. Both hyperinflation and deflation of prices will occur, but they are likely to hit every ex nihilo currency on the planet except the dollar. If other currencies survive at all, they will do so only as boutique items marketed to private collectors, like their predecessor, gold. The deflationary/hyperinflationary hit will be not just socialized, but globalized as well.

Is this argument true? I don’t know for sure. To be honest, there are so many variables in the current crisis that any attempt to make a firm prediction must end in embarrassment for someone — a whole lot of “someones”, in fact. But, let’s assess the probabilities determining the outcome of this crisis using Marx’s Law of Value, rather than Austrian economics:

Zero divided by zero equals ?

To be absolutely clear at the outset, there is no difference between the fundamental facts underlying the dollar and the fundamental facts underlying all other national currencies — they are all worthless and possess infinitely more purchasing power than their actual value. From the standpoint of the law of value, any exchange rate between any two ex nihilo currencies is meaningless, since it is merely the ratio between one object that is entirely worthless and another object that is entirely worthless. For the past decade, the purchasing power of the euro has risen against the dollar despite the absolute worthlessness of either currency. The Zimbabwe dollar is collapsing into hyperinflation, but not so far as to actually represent in circulation its actual value — a Zim$1.00 note has exactly the same value as a Zim$1,000,000,000.00 note (and exactly the same value as a one hundred dollar bill for that matter).

Likewise, prices denominated in any ex nihilo currency are meaningless, since they can never rise to actually reflect the values of the commodities which the ex nihilo money denominates. An increase in the purchasing power of an ex nihilo currency would, in any case, conceal the utter worthlessness of the currency. And as to the fall in the purchasing power of any currency, it suffices to state no matter how far the purchasing power of Zimbabwe dollars fall, Zimbabwe dollar denominated prices of commodities never reflect how worthless the currency really is.

What both the hyperinflationist camp and the deflationist camp need to explain is why, despite the absence of value of all ex nihilo currencies, no major currency was put back on the gold standard after Washington closed the gold window in 1971? Why was gold, despite its value as money, relegated to the basements of major central banks or the private collections of hoarders? Why was it necessary for all major trading nations to remove a commodity standard for the general price level from the world economy? The questions answer themselves: a commodity standard for the general price level is incompatible with an economy founded on capitalist social relations at this stage of its development — absolute over-accumulation. The rather stunning fact presented by gold is this: if prices of commodities were denominated in gold, no commodity would be “worth” the gold standard price quoted for it, i.e., the purchasing power of gold as money would be below its value as a commodity — a situation previously found only during over-production of commodities is now a permanent feature of the capitalist mode of production. It is this situation that initially drove gold from circulation as money, that compelled it to strip off its monetary form.

Without understanding this piece of the puzzle, it is not possible to understand the nature of the present crisis, which, despite appearing as the product of a massive accumulation of worthless debt threatening all existing currencies, is actually the cause of this accumulation of fictitious capital. It is futile to try to understand the current crisis by comparing the attractiveness of various existing or imagined alternative ex nihilo currencies on the world market, since each is worthless, and are as prone to sudden and unexpected hyper-depreciation of their purchasing power as the dollar — and which, moreover, owe their role as money to the fact the gold has ceased to be able to function as money. Since there is nothing about the currencies themselves that set them apart from each other or from the dollar, predictions about their respective fates as currencies must rest, not on the respective attraction of the currencies themselves, but solely on the material relation between respective national states — we must ignore the apparent differences in the purchasing powers of various ex nihilo currencies and delve into the actual economic relations between and among the various states.

World market prices versus existing prices

No matter the differences in the exchange rate between dollars and all other currencies, the following conditions hold: on the one hand, world market prices are denominated in dollars, while, on the other hand, the total sum of present prices throughout the world market as a whole are determined by the ratio of the total sum of currencies of every nation to the total quantity of commodities in circulation throughout the world market. If the dollar was the only currency in circulation there would be no difficulty with regards to world prices and existing prices — they would be identical. However, if we have two currencies — we will call them ex nihilo dollars and an ex nihilo “Rest of the World Currency” (rotwocs) — the situation is changed. Although the dollars and rotwocs are identical — i.e., both are worthless — in circulation the effect on the total sum of world market prices is the ratio between all ex nihilo currency in circulation (X dollars plus Y rotwocs) to the total quantity of commodities in circulation throughout the world market.

Despite this fact, world prices are determined by dollars alone, and under the following circumstances: the dollar is not accepted for all commodities because it is world reserve currency; rather, the situation is precisely the opposite: because it is universally accepted in exchange for any commodity, it is the world reserve currency. This means the dollar’s purchasing power is absolute, while the purchasing power of the rotwoc is only relative — the rotwoc can purchase any commodity whose price is denominated in rotwocs, but to purchase a commodity denominated in dollars, it must be exchanged for dollars before the transaction can be completed. If we assume the world market is divided into two zones — a dollar only zone and a combined dollar/rotwoc zone — of equal size, it is obvious that the existing stock of dollars can readily serve as means of purchase in the entire world market, while the existing stock of rotwocs can serve as means of purchase only in the rotwoc zone. The purchasing power of the stock of dollars is, therefore, twice that of the stock of rotwocs, i.e., there are twice as many commodities available to be purchased by dollars as there are by rotwocs.

It should be obvious now that the sum total of all other ex nihilo currencies provide no additional purchasing power to global demand — they are entirely superfluous. On the other hand, the dollar actually exchanges with all other ex nihilo currencies at a rate significantly below its purchasing power throughout the world market — even against ex nihilo currencies that are, at any given moment, appreciating in purchasing power against it. Since the purchasing power of any ex nihilo currency is not inherent in the currency itself, but depends solely on the total quantity of commodities available to be purchased by it, it follows the purchasing power of the ex nihilo dollar is not limited to the commodities available to be purchased in the dollar zone alone, but all commodities that are available to be purchased by it throughout the world market.

On the other hand, it should be equally obvious that the total sum of prices in the world market must be above world market prices. Since world market prices are here determined solely by the ratio of the total sum of ex nihilo dollars in circulation to the total sum of commodities in circulation within the world market, but the actual sum of prices is determined by the ratio between total sum of dollars in circulation plus the total sum of all other currencies in circulation (x dollars plus y rotwocs) to the total sum of commodities in circulation, any quantity of non-dollar national currencies in circulation above zero results in prices that are above world market prices.

The endpoint of this crisis

The question is how all this works out in the crisis as it is now unfolding. While I don’t have a crystal ball, I will attempt to outline a likely course.

As we have seen in this crisis, no matter how profligate the Fascist State is in its spending on a massive global machinery of repression, and on socialization of the losses of incurred by the failed economic mechanism, the more expenditures it undertakes, the greater the pressure on other national monetary authorities to tighten their own monetary policies in response — to impose naked austerity on their citizens, to further constrain domestic prices in the face of rising global prices. Rising global prices translate into a falling rate of profit in the non-dollar states. To offset this falling rate of profit, the domestic labor forces of the various non-dollar states must be squeezed still further, and the resultant surplus product exported. The profligacy of the Fascist State and the austerity regime of these non-dollar states are only two sides of the same process, feeding on each other, each reinforcing the other.

The two do not merely reinforce each other, however, they also act to make their opposite insufficient in resolving the crisis. Insofar as the profligacy of the Fascist State increases, the pressure on the non-dollar states toward domestic austerity increases, and with this also increases its exports. Insofar as exports increase, global overaccumulation is intensified and the world market settles even more deeply into depression. But, as we have already seen, with an ex nihilo currency regime depressions are now associated not with deflation of prices, but the inflation of prices — so actual prices rise still faster in response to domestic austerity.

A straight-line assumption of the crisis indicates constantly rising world market prices, combined with increasing austerity and monetary policy contraction of non-dollar states. However, living processes do not move in a straight line; in any event non-dollar currencies are likely to experience an existential endpoint — separately, or in groups — since the collapse of any one of them involves fewer complications than replacement of the dollar as world reserve currency. Moreover, replacing the dollar with another currency does not solve the problem that these non-dollar currencies are superfluous. Non-dollar currencies are likely finished; nothing in this crisis appears to offer them another fate.

The question provoked by the above is not “What is the fate of the dollar?” Nor, is it, “What is the fate of non-dollar currencies?” Rather, the real question posed by my analysis is this:

“Why should any of these worthless currencies survive?”

Continued

Theories of the current crisis: How FOFOA renders Williams more profound

I know I promised to examine John Williams’ argument that hyperinflation hinges on an exogenous political event: the rejection of the dollar as world reserve currency by other nations. I will return to this point. But, before I do, I want to respond to Neverfox, who asked me to evaluate the argument of the writer FOFOA’s theory of the imminent hyperinflation catastrophe:

To summarize the argument of John Williams: The economy is spiraling into a severe depression of the 1930s or 1970s type. To meet its various present public obligations, future promises, and prop up the economic mechanism — which, for the moment, we can call debt-driven economic growth — the Federal Reserve is forced to monetize Washington spending. This monetization is itself producing a collapse in the credibility of the dollar. Sooner or later this loss in credibility will result in the outright rejection of the dollar as world reserve currency, triggering a hyperinflationary depression. In the course of this hyperinflationary event, lasting about six months or so, the dollar will become worthless.

To a great extent, although differing on some subtle points with Williams, FOFOA throws light on Williams’ own thinking. In FOFOA’s description of events, the hyperinflation event is front loaded with the essential dry tender: the accumulation of fictitious assets denominated in dollars over an 80 year period produced as a by product of the economic mechanism — debt fueled economic expansion. The event is triggered by a collapse of debtors’ ability to make good on their debts. This, in turn, is followed by an attempt by the Fascist State to rescue the financial institutions on whose books the fictitious assets reside, which produces a loss of confidence in the currency and its rejection as world reserve currency. It is only at this point, government begins printing money to survive and pay its obligations, generating the onset of extremely rapid price increases and the core hyperinflation event..

A deflationary episode can, and probably will, proceed the actual hyperinflation of prices. The hyperinflation episode does not invalidate the arguments of those who predict a deflationary depression; in fact, the hyperinflationary episode will in all likelihood start out as a deflationary episode. Those predicting a deflationary depression, however, miss the response of the Fascist State. Moreover, the deflation does occur just as those who predict deflation assert; only the deflation takes place in gold terms, not dollar terms. Expressed in gold terms, it is a deflation; however, in dollar terms, it is a hyperinflation. FOFOA believes the difference between a deflation measured in gold and a deflation measured in dollars is key to understanding the hyperinflation that is imminent:

“What’s the difference between a deflation denominated in gold versus dollars?” Well, there’s a huge difference to both the debtors and the savers. In a dollar deflation the debtors suffocate but in a gold deflation they find a bit of relief from their dollar-denominated debts. And for the savers, the big difference is in the choice of what to save your wealth in. This is what makes the deflationists so dangerous to savers.

A deflation imposes an extremely heavy burden on debtors, requiring them to repay their debts with ex nihilo denominated debt whose purchasing power is increasing, and which, therefore, requires increasing amounts of effort to repay. By contrast, a hyperinflation reduces the burden of accumulated debt by depreciating the purchasing power and burden of ex nihilo denominated debt. In the thinking of those predicting deflation, as the debt bubble of the last 80 years bursts, the Fascist State will find it impossible to reflate the debt bubble and will be forced to accept deflation. Thus, a full scale debt deflation depression is in the offing.

FOFOA argues that while it is not possible to reflate the debt bubble, the Fascist State can save the paper assets of financial institutions that are the fictitious claims on these debts. Decades of debt fueled growth has swollen dollar-denominated assets held by these institutions to fantastic dimensions. FOFOA argues the Fascist State will not and cannot let these institutions fail because it is merely the political expression of these financial institutions. The aim of Fascist State intervention is not to save the debtors — which it cannot do even if it wanted to — but, as events of the last three years show dramatically — the Fascist State aims to save the the assets of these institutions. FOFOA quotes another writer from whom he derives his own name, FOA:

hyperinflation is the process of saving debt at all costs, even buying it outright for cash. Deflation is impossible in today’s dollar terms because policy will allow the printing of cash, if necessary, to cover every last bit of debt and dumping it on your front lawn! (smile) Worthless dollars, of course, but no deflation in dollar terms! (bigger smile)

The process of actual hyperinflating prices begins with the attempts to monetize bad debts — to socialize the losses of big capital — not with money printing; the money printing only begins in earnest once monetization of bad debt leads to a loss in the credibility of the dollar.

…it is the US Govt. that will make sure this becomes a real Weimar-style hyperinflation when it forces the Fed to monetize any and all US debt. And as dollar confidence continues to fall, that’s when the debt must go exponential just to purchase the same amount of real goods for the government. One month the debt will be a trillion, the next month it will be a quadrillion just to buy the same stuff as the previous month. How long will this last? Less than 6 months is my guess.

According to FOFOA, on the balance sheets of the failed banks there now is more than enough reserves to fuel a sudden burst of hyperinflating prices should society suddenly lose confidence in the dollar. As this base is pulled into circulation by a general demand for goods in the face of rising prices, the Fascist State will be forced to begin printing money to cover its own obligations. Each month the amount of ex nihilo dollars needed to fill the same demand for government spending increases, and with this increase, the amount of new ex nihilo money created will increase. This compounding growth in the supply of ex nihilo currency will provide added impetus to the explosion of prices. The explosion of prices will not be contained short of a new monetary regime in which assets and debt are somehow tied to gold.

The problem is that the present monetary system, in FOFOA’s view, is that lending and saving both take the same form — either a gold backed system or an ex nihilo money system. FOFOA argues money lent out inevitably dilutes the value of money being saved, since they both come out of the same pot:

The problem is that the expanding money supply due to lending always lowers the value of a unit of currency. Even if it is gold. If I loan you a $1 gold money, you now have $1 gold and I have a $1 gold note. The money supply has just doubled, and the value of $1 gold just dropped in half.

This is a fact of money systems. We can try to get rid of it by outlawing lending, but that is like outlawing swimming in the summertime, or beer drinking.

The solution is quite simple. And I didn’t come up with it. The problem is that at the point of collapse, some of the savers are wiped out, whether gold money or fiat. Think about those at the back of the line during the bank runs of the 1930’s. They didn’t get their gold. They lost their money.

Today we don’t have this problem anymore. The guy at the back of the line gets all his money, it’s just worthless in the end. We solved the problem of bank runs (bank failures) but not the problem of value.

This problem, which is often referred to as debt deflation, is inherent in the prevailing monetary system, and will lead to financial crises even if the United States went back to a gold-backed dollar. He proposes instead to bring gold back into the money system, but within strict limits: split the functions of store of value and credit into two separate monetary systems — ex nihilo for lending, and gold for saving — so that ex nihilo currency lent out will indeed be diluted, but the gold-backed value of saving will freely rise to express this dilution:

The solution is that the monetary store of value floats against the currency. It is not the same thing that is lent! It is not expanded through lending and thereby diminished in value. Instead, as $1 is lent, and now becomes $2 ($1 to the borrower + $1 note to you the lender) and the dollar drops to half its value, the saver, the gold holder will see the value of his gold savings rise from $1 to $2.

I don’t want to get into the weeds on this proposal by FOFOA, since it is entirely beside the point of the examination of non-mainstream theories of the current crisis, and, in any case, a non-sequitur from the standpoint of capital. But, he inadvertently touches on a salient point for my examination: suffice it to say, capital is not and cannot be thought of as the accumulation of gold or any other commodity. It is the process of self-enlargement, or self-expansion, of the capital initially laid out in the capitalist process of production. At any given moment, this capital can take the form of money-capital, fixed and circulating capital, wages, and final commodities, but it is not identical with any of these momentary identities — it is relentlessly converted from one form to another constantly — both serially, and simultaneously in what, over time, comes to resemble a vast cloud of interrelated transactions — as it passes through the process of self-expansion. FOFOA’s proposal imagines the point of self-expansion is precisely what it is not: to assume the form of a hoard of gold — or any other store of value. This is true only insofar as we are thinking of capitals that are no longer capable of functioning as capitals — that are incapable of acting on their own as capitals, owing to the ever increasing scale of capitalist production, which renders these petty capitals insufficient to function on their own as capitals. Unable to operate on their own, they must be placed at the disposal of larger agglomerations of capital in order to continue functioning as capital, resulting in great stress for their owners, who now have to turn their otherwise lifeless hoards over to giant vampire squids of the Goldman Sachs type or cease being capitals at all.

This is, in part, what Marx meant by the concentration of capital, which is not simply the concentration of ownership of the means of production, but also the concentration of owners of capital who can continue to operate independently as capitalists. The existence of even very large savings does not permit these owners to operate independently as capitalists, given the scale of productive undertaking now required. Marx described the process 150 years ago:

A drop in the rate of profit is attended by a rise in the minimum capital required by an individual capitalist for the productive employment of labour; required both for its exploitation generally, and for making the consumed labour-time suffice as the labour-time necessary for the production of the commodities, so that it does not exceed the average social labour-time required for the production of the commodities. Concentration increases simultaneously, because beyond certain limits a large capital with a small rate of profit accumulates faster than a small capital with a large rate of profit. At a certain high point this increasing concentration in its turn causes a new fall in the rate of profit. The mass of small dispersed capitals is thereby driven along the adventurous road of speculation, credit frauds, stock swindles, and crises. The so-called plethora of capital always applies essentially to a plethora of the capital for which the fall in the rate of profit is not compensated through the mass of profit — this is always true of newly developing fresh offshoots of capital — or to a plethora which places capitals incapable of action on their own at the disposal of the managers of large enterprises in the form of credit. This plethora of capital arises from the same causes as those which call forth relative over-population, and is, therefore, a phenomenon supplementing the latter, although they stand at opposite poles — unemployed capital at one pole, and unemployed worker population at the other.

FOFOA’s proposal seems to confirm my identification of the social base of the hyperinflationist camp: a motley collection of petty speculative minnows, who are desperately trying to avoid the predation of the very biggest financial sharks and vampire squids — not to mention the Fascist State itself, which represents the interests of these predatory vermin. The hyperinflationists as a group imagine the dollar has reached the end of the line. They imagine this will lead to a revaluation of gold and the creation of a new monetary system to replace the dollar, driven by the dissatisfaction of the majority of the planet with the monetary policies of the United States.

So, we need to move on and examine this thesis.

Continued

Theories of the current crisis: What Williams doesn’t know about ex nihilo money

Even if we assume John Williams’ prediction of a hyperinflationary depression turns out to be correct — and the global economy is plunged into an apocalyptic nightmare as prices rise with blinding rapidity, while economic activity shudders to a standstill — his argument for this outcome is so defective as to merely represent the chimes of an otherwise broken clock for the following reasons:

First, his prediction rests on mere accounting identities, and assumes the Fascist State can be counted on, or forced, to observe these accounting identities. As a counter-argument, I offer the historical evidence of Washington’s behavior over the past 80 years, when it routinely ignored whatever accounting identities as were forced upon it by circumstances and left the rest of American society and the global population as pitiful bag-holders of worthless ex nihilo currency. Williams offers no argument why the Fascist State will act differently in this crisis. In all likelihood, Washington will effectively renounce its debts and continue business as usual — leaving China and other exporters to absorb the impact.

Second, Williams does not understand hyperinflation. His definition of hyperinflation is entirely defective, because he doesn’t realize ex nihilo currency is not made worthless by hyperinflation; rather, it is already a collection of worthless dancing electrons on a computer terminal in the Federal Reserve Bank. Ex nihilo currency was worthless the moment the Fascist State debased the token currency from gold in 1933 and 1971. Hyperinflation and inflation are not the more or less sudden depreciation of money, but the more or less sudden depreciation of the purchasing power of an already worthless money.

Third, Williams does not understand depression, and in particular the Great Depression. Depressions are produced by the overproduction of capital — whether this overproduction is momentary or persistent. They are characterized by a general surfeit of commodities, fixed and circulating capital, and a relative over-population of workers. These are periodic occurrences, owing their genesis not to simple fluctuations of economic activity, but to constraints imposed on consumption by the necessity that all productive activity is carried on, not with the aim of satisfying human needs, but for profit. All depressions result in the sudden devaluation of the existing stock of social capital, of the existing stock of variable and constant capital, which is the absolute precondition for the resumption of self-expansion of the total social capital.

Before the Great Depression, this last point always meant a rather pronounced and sudden deflation of prices. After the Great Depression, this devaluation is accompanied, not by a sudden and spectacular collapse of prices, but a sudden and spectacular explosion of prices. The event itself has not changed — it is still a devaluation of the total social capital. What has changed is the expression of this devaluation in a general fall in the price level. I argue the source of this change was the debasement of national currencies during the Great Depression.

What the three points made above tell me is that Williams and the growing community of hyperinflationists do not understand ex nihilo money; they do not understand how prices behave under an ex nihilo regime; and, finally, they do not understand why ex nihilo money was a necessary result of the Great Depression. They are an odd collection of petty speculative capitalists concerned only with preserving their “wealth” through what are likely to be very interesting times.

Understanding ex nihilo money

Like money in general, ex nihilo money, is not simply a “thing” — a currency without commodity backing — rather, it is a social relation that appears to us in the form of this thing. It is a social relation that takes the form of worthless currency because this social relation itself can only take the form of things. The social relation, of course, is a global social cooperation in the act of labor. Since, this social cooperation does not by any means result from conscious decisions of the members of society and proceed with their conscious direction, the requirements of this social cooperation impose themselves on the members of society as necessities — as the law of value, as the value/prices mechanism.

What is peculiar about ex nihilo money as a form of money is that the relation between value and price has been completely severed — the two most important functions of money have devolved on entirely different objects. By debasing the currency from gold money’s function as standard of price was completely severed from its function as measure of value. This much is acknowledged by the hyperinflationist, who place the blame for this separation on the Fascist State; however, historical research shows impetus behind this separation did not first appear as a matter of State policy, but as a matter of financial common sense.

Every depression begins with money exchanging for commodities below its value, or, what is the same thing, with the prices of commodities at their apex for the cycle. Prices near the top of the cycle rise to unsustainable levels, and the competition to dump commodities on the market under favorable price conditions gets fairly intense. Everyone is optimistic about the economic outlook, profits expand, credit flows freely, workers are hired, factories furiously churn out commodities around the clock, the stocks of goods begin to pile up in the warehouses. And, then, BOOM! — depression erupts just as wages, prices, profits and interest are at their highest, and the purchasing power of money is at its lowest.

As the disorder spreads, profits and prices collapse, credit is choked off, debtors default, factories grind to a halt, millions of workers are laid off… yadda, yadda, yadda — we all know the drill. Side by side with this disorder, money is with drawn from circulation. Gold money disappears into hoards, as capitals attempt to avoid the worst of the devaluation of the existing social capital. The competition at this point is not to see who can sell the most commodities, but who can avoid taking any of the losses that the social capital as a whole must suffer. While this total social capital must take the hit, which capitals actually take this hit is a matter of entirely other circumstances.

As Marx put it:

The class, as such, must inevitably lose. How much the individual capitalist must bear of the loss, i.e., to what extent he must share in it at all, is decided by strength and cunning, and competition then becomes a fight among hostile brothers. The antagonism between each individual capitalist’s interests and those of the capitalist class as a whole, then comes to the surface, just as previously the identity of these interests operated in practice through competition.

How is this conflict settled and the conditions restored which correspond to the “sound” operation of capitalist production? The mode of settlement is already indicated in the very emergence of the conflict whose settlement is under discussion. It implies the withdrawal and even the partial destruction of capital amounting to the full value of additional capital ΔC, or at least a part of it. Although, as the description of this conflict shows, the loss is by no means equally distributed among individual capitals, its distribution being rather decided through a competitive struggle in which the loss is distributed in very different proportions and forms, depending on special advantages or previously captured positions, so that one capital is left unused, another is destroyed, and a third suffers but a relative loss, or is just temporarily depreciated, etc.

The total social capital is devalued; and, this devaluation takes place both in terms of the values of the capital — prices fall, etc. — and by a winnowing out of the players — some definite portion of the total social capital is pushed out of productive activity altogether. Capitals go bankrupt, factories are shuttered, the reserve army of the unemployed expands. At the lowest point in the ensuing depression, prices and profits have fallen to their lowest point in the cycle, while the purchasing power of money is at its highest point in the cycle. Assets can be snatched up at bargain basement prices, labor power can be had for a wage below its value. If the capitalist has survived the wash out, he stands to accumulate on a prodigious scale, since unemployed productive capacity is just laying around collecting dust.

There was one problem with this scenario during the Great Depression: the economy hit this point and just laid there like the decaying carcass of a beached whale; the condition for the “‘sound’ operation of capitalist production” were never restored, money just sat in hoards as investors, waiting out the crisis for better times, clung to their useless gold stocks for dear life. There was, as usual, a general over-accumulation of capital, i.e., an overproduction of commodities, an excess of fixed and circulating capital, and an excess population of workers, but these excesses were rather persistent. As with any general over-accumulation, it was not a matter of “consumer confidence” returning, but the necessary actual devaluation of the existing total social capital. Absent this devaluation, attempts to increase production would merely result in an over-supply that further forced down prices and profits. Under these circumstances, a portion of the existing stock of commodity money could not circulate until the devaluation of the existing stock of social capital had taken place.

So, it was not the Fascist State that expelled gold from circulation as money; rather, because gold money could no longer circulate as money, the Fascist State was forced to replace it with ex nihilo currency. The Fascist State debased the currency from commodity money, because the circulation of commodity money had already halted. This action was no American exceptionalism, however; within a short period of time all industrialized nations went off the gold standard domestically.

I want to emphasize an extremely important point here, a point that is vital to understanding the present crisis: going off the gold standard did not simply convert money into a worthless, debased, token — entirely fictitious from the standpoint of the law of value — it also changed the behavior of prices, i.e., the behavior of the purchasing power of the currency itself. On this basis alone the Fascist State could take control of the social process of capitalist production.

The behavior of prices under ex nihilo money

Ex nihilo money is not commodity money, it is not token money, it is not fiat money — it is an altogether different animal entirely. For instance, under a commodity money regime an over-accumulation of capital produced falling prices during depressions, while the purchasing power of the commodity money rose. As I will show, ex nihilo currency inverts this relation after the Great Depression — now prices denominated in the debased ex nihilo currency rise as economic activity contracts, while the purchasing power of the ex nihilo currency falls.

So far as I know, there is no instance of a commodity money suffering a hyperinflation. Hyperinflation does not render a currency worthless; rather, the currency is immediately rendered worthless during debasement from a commodity that can serve as standard of price. Debasement can result in hyperinflation, but hyperinflation is not the necessary result of debasement. Hyperinflation must be defined as the extreme and rapid depreciation of the purchasing power of a currency that is already worthless, that already has been debased. Historically, while hyperinflation follows the debasement of the currency from gold, not every debasement of currency from gold has led to hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is historically associated not with commodity money per se, but with ex nihilo currency.

Here a distinction must be made between money — the commodity which performs the function of universal equivalent — and ex nihilo currency, which has no relation to commodity money at all. While this ex nihilo currency can replace commodity money in circulation like token money under certain definite circumstances, what makes it different from token money is that it has no definite relation with a commodity that serves as money — it is not “honest” money, i.e., tokens whose purchasing power is held within limits governed by the laws governing the circulation of commodity money. However, like the circulation of tokens of money, ex nihilo currency is subject to certain laws, the most important of which is it can only represent in circulation the value of the commodity money it replaces.

When we speak of the purchasing power of ex nihilo money, we are in fact only referring to the quantity of commodity money this ex nihilo currency actually represents in circulation. In this case, the commodity money on which I base my discussion is gold; so, the purchasing power of an American ex nihilo dollar represents the quantity of gold having a price of one dollar. If gold has a price of $22.67 an ounce, the purchasing power of one ex nihilo dollar is equal to the value of 0.044 ounce of gold; if gold has a price of $1525, the purchasing power of an ex nihilo dollar is equal to 0.0006557 ounce of gold. If the price of gold falls from $800 per ounce to $250 per ounce, the purchasing power of ex nihilo currency has risen from 0.00125 ounce of gold to 0.004 ounce of gold. If the price of an ounce of gold rises from $250 to $1525, the purchasing power of ex nihilo currency has fallen from 0.004 ounce of gold to 0.0006557 ounce of gold.

In any case, the purchasing power of ex nihilo currency refers only to the quantity of gold that would otherwise be in circulation circulation had not it been replaced by ex nihilo currency. It does not refer to the purchasing power of ex nihilo currency in relation to any other commodity. But, the quantity of gold in circulation at any point is not given — at one point it may be higher, while at another point it is lower. If, despite these fluctuations, the amount of ex nihilo currency in circulation is unchanged, it will, in the first case, represent more commodity money, and, in the latter case, represent less commodity money. The purchasing power of the ex nihilo currency will rise or fall with the fluctuation of economic activity which it denominates in itself. Since, when actually in circulation, the currency of commodity money is only a reflex of the circulation of commodities — rising and falling with this circulation — the purchasing power of the ex nihilo currency will only represent this quantity of commodity money irrespective of the absolute quantity of ex nihilo currency in circulation.

The circulation of commodity money is only a reflex of the circulation of commodities. Assuming the value of commodities and the velocity of money are fixed, when the circulation of commodities increases, the quantity of commodity money in circulation must increase. When the circulation of commodities decreases, the quantity of commodity money in circulation must decrease. Consequently, a fixed quantity of ex nihilo currency will represent a larger or smaller quantity of commodity money respectively as economic activity expands or contracts. If a fixed quantity of ex nihilo currency is in circulation when the circulation of commodities is increasing, the purchasing power of this fixed quantity of ex nihilo currency must increase. If a fixed quantity of ex nihilo currency is in circulation when the circulation of commodities is decreasing, the purchasing power of this fixed quantity of ex nihilo currency must decrease.

The supply of commodity money and the supply of ex nihilo currency are not the same thing. While the circulation of commodity money is naturally driven by economic activity, the amount of ex nihilo currency available to circulate is always dependent on the State issuance of ex nihilo currency. Moreover, once ex nihilo currency is in circulation, it will tend to remain in circulation. Thus, while the quantity of commodity money in circulation rise or falls with the circulation of commodities, the purchasing power of the ex nihilo currency replacing commodity money tends to increase or decrease with the circulation of commodities instead. For this reason, ex nihilo currency presents us with the paradox that prices tend to fall as economic activity increases and rise with the fall in economic activity.

If all else is given, we are forced to the following conclusion regarding the purchasing power of ex nihilo currency :

1. the purchasing power of ex nihilo currency rises during periods of economic expansion, i.e, a given quantity of ex nihilo currency can purchase a greater sum of values. This is precisely the opposite of what we would expect from commodity money. While,
2. the purchasing power of ex nihilo currency falls during periods of economic contraction, i.e, a given quantity of ex nihilo currency can purchase a smaller sum of values. Again, this is precisely the opposite of what we would expect from commodity money.

The behavior of prices are the inverse of what we would expect if ex nihilo currency behaved like commodity money. With commodity money, we should expect to find commodities being over-valued during expansions and devalued during periods of contraction. But. with ex nihilo currency, we find instead that commodities are devalued during expansions and over-valued during periods of contraction. Prices denominated in ex nihilo currency fall during expansions and rise during contractions.

When an economic contraction takes place, the sum value of commodities in circulation falls; since the circulation of the commodity money is only a reflex of the circulation of commodities, the circulation of commodity money too must fall. A given supply of ex nihilo currency now represents the value of a smaller quantity of commodity money. The values expressed by commodity prices fall, or, what is the same thing, a given value is expressed in higher ex nihilo currency prices. On the other hand, when an economic expansion takes place, the sum value of commodities in circulation rises; since the circulation of the commodity money is only a reflex of the circulation of commodities, the circulation of commodity money must rise as well. A given supply of ex nihilo currency now represents the value of a larger quantity of commodity money. The values expressed by commodity prices rise, or, what is the same thing, a given value is expressed in lower ex nihilo currency prices. The result is that, absent a commodity to serve as standard of prices, prices denominated in an ex nihilo currency will tend to rise during periods of economic contraction, but fall during periods of economic expansion.

Moreover, in a pure ex nihilo money economy where no commodity serves as standard of prices, prices of commodities are subject to disturbances in the ratio of the existing supply of ex nihilo money in circulation and the quantities of commodities in circulation that are denominated in the ex nihilo currency.

Thus,

1. Should the quantity of commodities in circulation suddenly increase, while the supply of ex nihilo money remains unchanged, the general price level expressed in ex nihilo money will just as suddenly decrease. Should the quantity of commodities in circulation suddenly decrease, while the supply of ex nihilo money remains unchanged, the general price level expressed in ex nihilo money will just as suddenly increase.
2. Should the supply of ex nihilo money in circulation suddenly increase, while the supply of commodities remains unchanged, the general price level of commodities expressed in the ex nihilo money will just as suddenly rise. Should the supply of ex nihilo money in circulation suddenly decrease, while the supply of commodities remains unchanged, the general price level of commodities expressed in the ex nihilo money will just as suddenly fall.

In either case, the sum of prices are not related to the sum of values of commodities, but only to the ratio of the sum of ex nihilo money to the sum of commodities in circulation. In fact I question whether money exists at all. Insofar as money function as a measure and store of value, it cannot circulate within society; insofar as is circulates within society and serves as a standard of prices, it cannot be a measure of value. What is left after the debasement of money is money, the social relation, irretrievably broken.

Actually, we’ve been in a depression since 2001

Whatever the outcome of the present crisis, John Williams’ prediction rests on such a defective theory of money and ex nihilo price formation that his prediction is useless to us. Ex nihilo money appears to allow the formation of so-called monopoly pricing in the economy. By restricting production, monopolies can, in fact, pad their profits, even as society descends into abject scarcity and want under an ex nihilo monetary regime. Rising prices during a depression is not a defect of an ex nihilo monetary regime, but the way prices would be expected to behave under that regime as capital is devalued. From the standpoint of the capitalist mode of production, inflation of ex nihilo prices is to be expected, and is the expression of the mode’s attempt to establish the sound basis for its future operation.

When I look at gold prices, I find evidence that the economy actually has been in a depression since 2001. According to my figures, gold prices bottomed in 2001 at around $271.04, and have been rising steadily for most of the decades after this. This is the first time gold prices have risen so consistently since the 1970s great depression/great stagflation. It follows from this that Williams’ depression, at least, has nothing to do with a hyperinflation of prices itself. At the same time, hyperinflation, in his model, does not coincide with a depression, but hinges on an exogenous political event: the rejection of the dollar as world reserve currency by other nations. To this we will turn next.

Continued