It will be relatively easy for anyone who has read the prophetic writings of Uncle Charles, especially those concerning the operation of Capital and money, to understand how much closer to his own views is the correct answer to the new dilemma of today, the one that has not yet been answered by the Left:
Should we continue to produce new money (and inevitably all its toxic derivatives) from bank loans or should we base the production and circulation of new money on another method.
And if so, what will it be confronted with?
With working time (or, equivalently, time off work) he would answer effortlessly.
If you don't care why, go straight to the next line.
The first thing is that, if he were alive today, he would scoff at the views of some so-called Marxists as myopic. Like Stathakis, who is struggling to cap every Marxist or even leftist view with new recipes for “Financial Stability” of the Eurosystem banks. And he thus “caps” both SYRIZA and Tsipras, who unfortunately still trusts him to write “positions” when he has no business translating European directives on energy exchanges, I forget. At the same time Tsipras is trying to set conditions for social convergence on the principles of the EU, before it is dismantled by the prescriptions of adapting to the arbitrarily defined ”stabilities” of the neoliberals, the Lisbon Treaty that is bothering us.
As contradictory as the view that another Europe can be built as a union of its societies on the goal of their social convergence with this euro is, it will also be contradictory to maintain Stathakis-type views as dominant in a programme that the place called Greece needs. Marx would probably say today.
It would probably also play to the carpazzi and Yanis, who continues to insist on unfounded and dangerous “solutions” of alternative ways of producing vouchers against future taxes to pay ...taxes. In other words, the joy of every laundryman, without seriously questioning the current system of money production through loans, as it emerged in '71 from the Nixon's trick, which thus shaped the conditions of the domination of neoliberalism ver1.0 over the previous Globalization.
The one that ended the year before last on the steps of the US Capitol and now with some sanctions that will hover like a ghost over Europe, which shot its foot off in the last decades under its neoliberal direction. It seems to have definitively missed the opportunity to complete the vision of the EU founders “from the Atlantic to the Urals” by opting for the Cold War Euro-Atlantic doctrine, which now makes it an insignificant geopolitical dwarf, energy-dependent and with a currency doomed to play the role of the dollar's vassal.
But the same kicks would be thrown, I think, at some “intellectuals” of the Left who, with metaphysical “political” analyses of the presence of so-called cryptocurrencies, draw arbitrary “conclusions” without having understood their transitional function towards another monetary system on the digital background of the economy called the internet, which comes without their permission.
Perhaps to justify Stathakis“ ”tendency" as an economic thought and the political narrative that emerges from it, if one follows it up to its implications in positions on either development (almost identical to Pissarides' general choices on Green horses) or national issues (here he cleans up Semitistan). Unprecedented coherence!
It focuses this academic (but out-of-touch) school of economists on bitcoin, since it seems to be completely ignorant of everything else. Some elements of their critique, which are also reflected in the schools of thought of economists within the “daily left”, are correct. But some others, including the conclusions, are elsewhere for someone else. Here is why:
Indeed, bitcoin-type cryptocurrencies started in 09 as an experiment in creating alternative means of trading that could survive financial crises. Even when the Banks collapse, since they are not produced primarily by loans, like classical currencies, but by some “proof of work” (solving a computer problem that becomes more difficult as the maximum number of cryptocurrencies set to be issued approaches). Hence they are not currently (correctly) seen as currencies but as exchangeable digital assets.
It is of course ignored that there are already circulating or planned to circulate others that are not “mined” in this way, by computers, but are all produced “once and for all” and made available on the market for trading by demand related to some real indicator of the economy. Among them are a number of those related to the leisure time of Internet users, to pay with it for the advertising of the companies that advertise in online gathering places or to make online purchases of users from these companies that advertise. Thus bypassing dollars, euros, bank cards and Visa commissions, etc.
A similar logic of production/disposal has the UAE's state-owned, but non-banking, cryptocurrency that is “released” from a central electronic wallet associated with the kwh of hydrocarbons extracted. It has been circulating since 18 through the financing, with this digital aber cryptocurrency, of the Emirate's public investments. And it is already being used for interbank clearing of trade transactions with S. Arabia, displacing the volatile US petrodollar.
There are others like it, some issued by producers and traders in the real economy, usually excluded from the Banks, to trade with each other (such as the German berliner).
But also the cryptocurrencies issued by the Central Banks, the so-called CBDCs (but also produced primarily from a loan) such as the digital yuan of China, the digital currency of Haiti, the Marshall Islands, Nigeria, which are already in circulation, the digital euro which is in preparation, the digital dollar of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the digital Swedish krona, the digital Indian rupee, the digital ruble, etc.
All of these operate under the standards set by the rabbit of technologies that supports all of the above, bitcoin, (called blockchain technologies). Any cryptocurrency or digital asset as a medium of exchange, no matter how or by whom it is issued, must follow these rules:
Not an infinite number of coins can be produced, but a maximum number strictly defined from the beginning. If their availability on the market is related to some reasonable indicator of the real economy, they make the concept of “inflation” fit only for museums and the inflation mechanism for correcting the central banks' imperfections in money supply unnecessary. At this point they collectively commit suicide and tear up degrees of all the Chicago school neoliberals, etc., who made a career out of beating inflation.
All transactions are made between e-wallets, which do not need to be connected to banks directly or indirectly.
All transactions between these extra-bank wallets are almost zero-cost (they are paid automatically through blockchain algorithms and the technological platform that serves them with something in the order of 0.00001% of the transaction value) compared to the 2.5% of Banks and the 4-6% of credit cards.
All transactions are nominal and are recorded in the history of each currency by the currency itself. This is where bankers and those who continue to trade in black (smuggling, tax evaders) or grey (banks and funds with derivatives and grey currencies) and conspiracy theorists who see big brother everywhere commit suicide. Their presence is not required!
It is impossible to counterfeit these coins. Each one in circulation automatically certifies the validity of all the others. Go hack the 51% of wallets to do it.
Their value is either fixed to a classical currency, as is the case with the digital yuan, or it is determined by the supply of currencies (so how they are produced is crucial) and their demand.
Most people still focus his criticism only on this last point to say another profound leftist bullshit with a lot of words.
Indeed the bitcoin types that have been produced by mining since 09 are hardly used for trading today. The various yuppies and advisors to the big investors have sniffed out their resilience to possible major banking crises and are “playing” them on the currency exchanges (since Jan 21 and inside Wall streat), just as they play with gold or wheat.
The price of bitcoin is currently , from the speculative play created by the uncertainty of the survival of the classical currencies, around 35.000$ each. And it will continue to rise, despite its fluctuations.
The 10 I bought with 10 bitcoins in Canada, which I had bought 1$ each, a pizza worth 20$. The most expensive pizza ever eaten I think, 350,000$, I'm going for a Guinness record!
I was thinking like these economists at the time, almost completely unaware of all of the above and of the way new money is produced (and then uncontrollably reproduced) by the Commercial Banks. I was also unaware at the time of the size of the bubble they have thus created with toxic: there is toxic money out there between the Banks and the funds that are now buying us, worth 1,500trillion $, as much as 21 times the world GDP!!!!
Linked to this bubble and the one created with bitcoin. The difference is that if the first one bursts, the second one does not collapse but is blown up into the atmosphere, since humanity will have no other practical means of trading if it has to settle for bitcoin! And even concentrated by a few, the current rich, who, for the same reason, have “wiped out” all the gold on the market and will now wipe out the houses of the newly-employed middle class along with fields or whatever else is considered a fixed asset or commodity.
Thus, these leftist analyses obscure the role of the Banks in the new Global Supply and Demand Crisis created by the gambling games on the toxic derivatives of the Banks. The Banks got a free pass! And Stathakis is then legitimized to say “the Left's goal is Financial Stability in the Ekt”. Dax, we'll ask her not to go too far with toxic derivatives, she'll listen to us and all will be well.
In addition, they seem to be unaware of what is coming with the next generation of the Internet, web3.0, where all transactions on it are based on compensating (!) users for their time (see also comment #1) by using digital over-the-counter alternative means of transactions.
But they also block, through this uncharismatic leftism of neither-nor-nor-nor, the Left's perception of composing new solutions outside of Tsakalotos' manuals.
For example, how we could now, legally and realistically, finance the reform of halving working time without reducing pay with a state-owned digital out-of-banking fixed fee, which would be counterbalanced by the most real indicator of the economy: Working time! An idea straight out of Marx's Capital.
Or our development, endogenously, with digital fixed assets matched with the value of gas reserves (regardless of when they will be extracted), as already proposed by PRATO.
I think Marx would agree today that any new currency should be produced only in relation to what is real and relevant to the real economy, forbidding any Koutsoubas to speak for him, since he says nothing about all of the above that follows from the above question! He is looking at the tongue.
He would say little about what is going on in the right-wing social democracy of the Kinal type and the retarded neophiles in the Southwest and its environs.
What can you say about the rearguard battles fought by the banking system and the elites through their political employees, who today only profit from playing casino-capitalism in bubbles?;
This is a tribute to one of the greatest revisionist geniuses of the way we perceive the world around us and our economy within it to function and change.
Yannis Hatzichristos
development consultant
