Getting all Tied Up (5)

This series considers Paul Mason’s “Risks are ‘a Thing’… and so is the Death of Capitalism”, a critique of MMT.

In the previous post I argued that Mason’ s choice of Prof. Ferguson’s views as emblematic of the theoretical differences between Marxism and MMT was problematic.

Thus, so far in this series I’ve focused on things I believe Mason got wrong. But it’s time to go into the things he got right.

There may not be a theoretically “irreconcilable split” between Marxism and MMT, as Ferguson claims. However, to me and in terms of policy recommendation, things look different. Mason pointed to this passage in Ferguson’s article

“Rather it [MMT] implicitly de-prioritizes gravity’s causality in political and economic processes, showing how the ideal conditions the real via money’s distributed pyramidal structure”.

That was a good choice.

Getting all Tied Up (4)

This series considers Paul Mason’s “Risks are ‘a Thing’… and so is the Death of Capitalism”, a critique of MMT.

In the previous post I argued that Prof. Tcherneva’s quote doesn’t support Mason’s “finding” of a monetary theory of value native to MMT.

To buttress his case on the alleged differences between MMT and Marxism Mason invokes Prof. Scott Ferguson’s article “Some Remarks on MMT & Marxism”, from where Mason takes this quote, which, in his opinion, sums up neatly said differences:

Marxism assumes that money is a private, alienating, and crisis-ridden exchange relationship that ought to be overcome. Yet MMT holds money to be a boundless public utility that, while by no means untroubled, is well-equipped to actualize radical collectivist ends.

Ferguson’s views on the differences between Marxism and MMT are the subject of this post.

Getting all Tied Up (3)

This series considers Paul Mason’s “Risks are ‘a Thing’… and so is the Death of Capitalism”, a critique of MMT.

Mason believes to have detected in MMT a monetary theory of value. In the previous post I argued that is just a mirage. So, where did he take a wrong turn?

Much like Marxists, MMTers write a lot. Out of the ever expanding MMT literature, academic and popular, this single sentence, taken from one of Prof. Pavlina Tcherneva’s papers, is the smoking gun proving the existence of an MMT ToV: “since the currency is a public monopoly, the government has at its disposal a direct way of determining its value” (Mason’s emphasis).

Getting all Tied Up (2)

This series considers Paul Mason’s “Risks are ‘a Thing’… and so is the Death of Capitalism”, a critique of MMT.

The previous post discussed Mason’s political doubts about tying the Green New Deal to MMT. Although that is evidently an urgent concern, by itself it has little theoretical implications for Marxists. The focus of this and the next posts are the two subheadings “What does MMT say?”, “What’s wrong with MMT?”, where Mason expresses his views on what MMT is.

Getting all Tied Up.

(right-click to open a larger image in a separate tab)

The big and tiresome MMT versus everybody else punch-up seems to be abating. Finally. Readers may guess the whole thing has left me unimpressed.

But my expectations about the part of the debate involving mainstream economists were low to begin with, so their bit in the debate didn’t surprise me. What surprised me, in the worst possible way, was how awful the MMT/Marxists debate was.

Commenting recently on that, Prof. Bill Mitchell, one of MMT founders, writes that Marxists are getting all tied up on MMT.

As both a Marxist and a sort of MMT sympathiser, I reached the conclusion he is right, unfortunately. But there’s more to that.