stuartw2112 wrote:Relatedly,
Ah (or should that be aagh) Hillel Ticktin! All his arguments start from the basic premise (shared by Trotsky) that capitalism is essentially private enterprise capitalism and that state intervention is a negation of “capitalism”. This means that for him (as for Trotsky, if not for all trotskyists) “state capitalism” is a contradiction in terms. So, for him, the USSR couldn’t have been capitalist and the notes and coins that circulated there were not money in the sense analysed by Marx. In fact, he seems to be saying that money in Britain, etc isn’t really money either because it is now managed by the state.Apart from that, most of what he claims in the latter part of his article (presumably the transcript of a talk) are facts as wrong. For instance, Marx did not call money lent at interest “fictitious capital”. For him, this was a notional capital sum arrived at by notionally converting a future regular income stream into a sum that if invested would produce the income in question as interest; what accountants and actuaries called “capitalization”. Such sums of money can be bought and sold. Of course such fictitious capital (and a variation of it called “securitization”) did play a part in the financial bubble that collapsed in 2007-8 — when the stream of future income on which they were based didn’t happen the capital sum calculated on the basis of it was reduced to zero. putting some financial institutions in serious trouble.Basically, I don’t think Ticktin needs to be taken seriously here (though he does seem to be the permanent flavour of the month with the Weekly Worker people).