Explanation of interest (was: Re: [ox-en] Apple trees (aka capitalism) are bad. What about barter exchange?)
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:15:44 +0200
Hi Diego and all!
5 days ago Diego Saravia wrote:
interest only reflect the fact that economy is a growing process and if you
acumulate money you cant grow with it, so you must pay to have useless
money.
Not really. Very short: Interest is derived from surplus value
production which is created by applying abstract labor.
In fact human labor (and nature - but this is not my point here) are
the only sources of (exchange) value. Human labor has a price which is
set by the means needed to reproduce the worker - or course in a wide
sense including the costs to reproduce workers as a whole. However,
the abstract labor done by the worker is able to create more exchange
value than the reproduction costs are. This applies the more the more
sophisticated the (technical) means of production are the worker uses
for her work [1]_.
.. [1] The same argument applies to surplus *goods* of course and in
fact this the even more basic consideration. However, interest
is a term of the abstract exchange world and thus surplus goods
are not in the focus of this mail.
What the capitalist does with her capital is to buy machinery and
abstract human labor force - collectively called means of production -
and applies the last to the first resulting in the production of
commodities. If market conditions allow the capitalist can sell the
commodities by a price higher than her own costs. This is the surplus
value or profit.
In case the capital of the capitalist comes in the form of credit the
interest is only a share of the surplus value the capitalist creates
anyway. So by now it should be clear that interest is only a derived
form of a more fundamental things.
This is very basic knowledge and not very difficult to understand.
Funnily these very simple facts are ignored by the money trickery
fraction.
If you want to remove interest - which the money trickery fraction
usually demands - than you have to remove production of surplus value
which removes the need for capital which removes the need for money
and exchange altogether. In *this* sense attempts to remove interest
is fine with me - though it would better be called removing the money
system completely.
In any other sense I can not see any reason to remove interest. As I
said: It is like removing the leaves from the apple tree.
Grüße
Stefan
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