Profiting Without Producing

[merjet]

I put a review of Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All on Amazon. Link.

If you like it, please click Yes.

[Brant Gaede]

All economic systems have financial systems integrated into and of the whole. Before we can address this aspect of observed capitalism, we have to find capitalism to observe it in action. "Financial Capitalism" will sell more books than "Financial Mixed-Economyism" but is sort of similar to Rand's using "The Virtue of Selfishness" instead of "The Virtue of Rational Self Interest" as a set up for bait and switch, but the reader won't be able to make a clean transition with the title left hanging in his mind. Both "capitalism" and "selfishness" represent very strong naughty wordism to all and sundry and very strong naughty sells.

--Brant the Capitalist (let me exploit you or I'll just exploit you anyway and just be thankful my name ain't Bill Crosby)

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Merlin,

I don't expect this book to get a wide audience, but for those who will look at it, your review is good.

I liked the clarity of this phrase:

Marxist thought cherry-picks who is a producer or worker. Those in roles readily visible to making products or providing services, and roles easy to understand get top priority. Roles less visible and understandable like research and development, executive-level decision-making, marketing, and especially financial people get low priority and may even be considered expropriators.

Even a befuddled college student (from all the economic indoctrination in higher education) can understand there is something that needs looking into further and, I believe, this will plant a seed of doubt in his or her mind to think through.

Doubt has to precede new thinking in the indoctrinated. That's just the way humans are. Your review does a pretty good job of prompting doubt in the party line.

Michael

[merjet]

By reading Profiting Without Producing I learned some new things about Marxist thought after Marx. The author Lapavitsas refers to an earlier guy Hilferding, who wrote a book Financial Capital published in 1910. According to Lapavitsas, Hilferding wrote about founders profit as the future profit of enterprise which accrues in a lump sum to the founder, or to the financial institution that has acted as promoter of the floatation. I presume it has something in common with what Austrian economics calls entrepreneurial profit. It surprised me to learn a Marxist can refer to such a thing without calling it entirely exploitation of labor.

I copied the following at the above link: "The socializing function of finance capital facilitates enormously the task of overcoming capitalism. Once finance capital has brought the most importance branches of production under its control, it is enough for society, through its conscious executive organ – the state conquered by the working class – to seize finance capital in order to gain immediate control of these branches of production."