Re: Information requested: US finance capital? which fraction of thebour

Chris, your articles really help a lot, especially at the 
conceptualization stage. I will check them out tomorrow. Actually, I was
just reading Christian Marazzi's article, published in _Zerowork_, Fall
1977, under the title "Money in the World Crisis: The New Basis of
Capitalist power". Marazzi critically comments on the political
implications of Hilferding's  distinction between "productive"
and "non-productive capital", where Hilferding opposes finance capital as
"unproductive income formed through credit as capital". Mind you that
Marazzi was writing specifically about the historical crisis of 1970-71,
the crisis following decline of Keynesian capitalist development and the
Bretton Woods System..

Marazzini comments: 

"Like Marx Hilferding saw that there was no real such thing as any real
value of money as such; there was only a qualitatively determined rate of
exchange money, and that rate was manipulated by finance capital. 
Hilferding had the merit of seeing that one aspect of the problem for the
composition of capital at that time, and the reason for the way in which
money was being manipulated , was the relation between the banking system
and the capitalization of the rentier class, and the mobilization of
unproductive income through credit as capital. This new relation between
the banks and the state--the centralization of credit--he saw to be the
lever whereby sush non productive income coould be mobilized for a
relaunching of productive industrial capital.The relevance of this for the
present period should be clear: today, once again,capital is manipulating
money to transfer value from an unproductive role to a productive use in
capital investment. but today the unproductive income is not financing a
rentier class, but rather the working class; which converts wages to
income through its refusal to function as labor power".

"But is a reading of Hilferding reveals this sort of useful similarity, it
can also be misleading, because of Hilferding's limitations. For he
unfortunately hypostatized the regime of inconvertable money and failed to
see the finance capitalism he confronted as an historical phase of capital
centered on the emergence of the big banks and joint stock enterprises.
The subsequent  dominance from the big banks to industrial capital marked
the transitory nature of what he studied"

"Moreover, even in the period of its usefullness for understanding the
mobilization of income for capital, other limitations of Hilferding's
analysis led to disastrous political pratice. Seeing the big banks as the
enenmy, his strategy was the social democratic nationalization of the
banks, pension funds, insurance funds etc..Socialism in this perspective
becomes the socializaiton of credit for the development of the prodcutive
forces such as capital was unable to achieve. ... What Hilferding and his
successors failed to see, and what we must grasp today, is the process of
socialization which was at the root of the finance capital phase... The
working class in Hilferding's approach is seen as external, as an
exagonous factor in this reorganization, for he could not see the
historically defined composition of the working class upon which and
against which capital was forced to reorganize itself and which had
historicaly contradicted  both the previous industrial and monetary
systems. What Hilferding and official Marxism (he is referring to vulgar
orthodoxy here) of all varieties failed to see was that the gold standart
depended on  an international class composition thathad been
superseded. When we examine capital recourse to incorvertable money in the
present crisis, we must see how it is a means of transforming working
class conquests into a further socializaiton and concentration of control"
(p.99).

When I read the literature on the crises of 1970s (Mazzini, Pijl, Prof.
Wallerstein's article in _Foreign Policy_), I see a common preoccupation
with the demise of the capitalist world system. Some leftish fellows 
writing around those times, such as Pijl, for example, thought that the
internationalist capitalist system was falling apart, expecting
unresolvable conflicts among the trans-atlantic bourgeoisie. Looking
retrospectively, however, it did not happen that way. Capitalism has once
again found a solution to obscure its own contradictions _on the surface_,
not by resorting to Keynesianism this time, but by switching to
neo-liberal class hegemony headed by the US finance capital. How can one
explain this shift in the economic policy with respect to the role of
American finance, and its ideological and organizational capacity to
survive under crisis circumstances (from 1970s through 1990s, ie., South
East Asian Crisis)? Any prospective views are welcome.. (especially in
light of IPE and world system theory. Other theories are okey too)..

mercissss... 

Mine


 >There is some evidence that the distinction between financial and
>industrial capital is increasingly blurred, from the perspective of
>attempting to distinguish discrete units of capital with distinct
>functions. 

>If "financial capital" be understood as capital that appears in the form
>of financial assets (stocks, bonds, bills, deposits, etc.) and which
circulates in Marx's M-M' circuit, growing at an interest rate and
involved in activities such as borrowing and lending, facilitating the
reorganization of corporations, and facilitating the accumulation of real
capital ("pure"  financial capital); and if "industrial capital" is
understood as capital embodied in fixed and circulating "real" or physical
capital seeking a profit through organizing production and selling
products in Marx's M-C-P-M'-C' circuit, then it is difficult to determine
which category most economic units of capital (corporations) fall within
each category. 

>This is primarily so because ostensibly nonfinancial firms such as
General
Electric or General Motors increasingly have a large percentage of their
capital in the financial circuit.

>I wrote two small papers which appeared in the Journal of Economic Issues
in the 1980's which offered empirical evidence regarding the phenomenon:

>"The increasing importance of financial capital in the US economy," June
1988 and "Financial innovation and the distinction between financial and
industrial capital," June 1986.

>Sociologial analysis of the class structure of society probably should
take this phenomenon into account.

>Chris Niggle


On Fri, 16 Jun 2000, Richard N Hutchinson wrote:

> Mine-
>
> Ah, good old power structure research.
>
> Two sources that are particularly useful on the question of bank control,
> and finance capital, and its relation to corporate capital, are:
>
> Mintz, Beth and Michael Schwartz.  1985.  The Power Structure of American
>       Business.  U. of Chicago Press.
>
> Kotz, David M.  1978.  Bank Control of Large Corporations in the United
>       States.  U. of California Press.
>
> Kotz summarizes the important work of the Soviet scholar Menshikov
> (Millionaires and Managers, Moscow, 1969).
>
> I try to follow this field, and I know of no works that have updated the
> two works I've cited.  Domhoff is great, of course, but his work focuses
> on evidence for, and a theory of, the existence of a ruling class/elite,
> and he doesn't take it farther into the murky depths of factions.
>
> Good luck!
>
> Richard
>
>
>