Thursday, July 25, 2019

"Land, labor, and capital" -- and also finance

From Grundrisse 17:
Monied capitalists and industrial capitalists can form two particular classes only because profit is capable of separating off into two branches of revenue. The two kinds of capitalists only express this fact; but the split has to be there, the separation of profit into two particular forms of revenue, for two particular classes of capitalists to be able to grow up on it.
Again: Monied capitalists and industrial capitalists exist as two separate classes because profit includes two types of revenue. Therefore, the existence of the two classes of capitalists is evidence that profit includes the two types of revenue.

I can live with that.


From Chapter 23:
I was brought up to believe that the attitude of the Medieval Church to the rate of interest was inherently absurd, and that the subtle discussions aimed at distinguishing the return on money-loans from the return to active investment were merely Jesuitical attempts to find a practical escape from a foolish theory. But I now read these discussions as an honest intellectual effort to keep separate what the classical theory has inextricably confused together, namely, the rate of interest and the marginal efficiency of capital. For it now seems clear that the disquisitions of the schoolmen were directed towards the elucidation of a formula which should allow the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital to be high, whilst using rule and custom and the moral law to keep down the rate of interest.


Finance is not a factor of production. Finance is a factor of facilitation: it facilitates production. But finance has a cost, just as land and labor and capital do, and must be included on any list of cost categories.

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