From: Gerald A. Levy (Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM)
Date: Fri Oct 22 2004 - 07:42:54 EDT
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@hetnet.nl> Sent: Friday, October 22, 2004 3:21 AM Subject: Re: (OPE-L) recent references on 'problem' of money commodity? Hi Jerry, If you read German, in their insightful book "Globalisierung der Unsicherheit: Arbeit im Schatten, Smutziges Geld und Informelle Politik" [Globalisation of insecurity: labor in the shadows, dirty money and informal politics], (Munster: Westfalische Dampfboot, 2002) Elmar Alvater & Birgit Mahnkopf discuss some contemporary issues regarding money: debt extortion, rentseeking, informal money, countertrade, microcredits, moneylaundering, Hawala banking, etc. This book focuses on the implications of how, as neoliberal policies try to make everything "negotiable" to expand the market, formal institutionalised rules that existed previously begin to break down, and can no longer be enforced, so that the "grey" or "black" economy (informal economy) grows as well as its concomitant corruption. In this regard, the authors get back to one of the real concerns of Marx, i.e. viewing exchange as a social process. One point they make, that I didn't think of before, is that the growth of countertrade is something really inexplicable for the Ricardian "comparative advantage" theory (as well as for "orthodox" Marxist theories which claim that commodities must necessarily exchange for money, or which claim that capitalists are "indifferent" to use-values). Alvater & Mahnkopf cite IMF estimates that overall countertrade represented between 10% and 25% of the value of total world trade in the 1990s. In the early 1990s, up to 40% of the foreign trade of Central and East European countries was bartered; in Russia, it's supposed to be around a quarter of trade. In the CEE at the end of the 1990s, barter-type agreements still averaged about 12% of trade. In the Ukraine, something like half of the value-added by enterprises is said to be bartered in some form (op. cit., pp. 198, 200). The authors write: "according to the theorem of comparative cost advantage everybody wins in a positive-sum game. According to the theorem of comparative power advantage, some win while others lose. Only zero-sum or negative sum games are possible." (p. 203). They also emphasize that "countertrade is unequal exchange. In this case the norming effect of labor and money is underdeveloped. Other than in the controversial debates about unequal exchange in the early 1970s, involved here is not value transfer in consequence of the "modified operation of the law of value in the world market" (...) or in consequence of the historical deterioration of terms of trade between producers of raw materials (extractive economies) and industrial countries (production economies), but rather the exchange of use-values for their [specific] use-value." (p. 204). It's a significant phenomenon, because one could predict that as the international monetary system generates ever greater disparities in monetized purchasing power, countertrade will increase; what matters here, is the power of ownership of resources. In a certain sense, it signifies a kind of "objective socialization" of circulation (which eliminates a series of intermediating transactions, through the direct exchange of products), and in fact the authors even suggest that "From this perspective, modern countertrade within the fully capitalised world market resembles the socialist monopoly of foreign trade" (of the COMECON type) (p. 204). Jurriaan
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