[Prime Valencia]
Just to drop it here. May take a textbook full of source-annotated analysis, but just feel there is something in the following:
In Negri & Hardt’s Empire (of which I like parts of the analyses, not necessarily the conclusions/synthesis/solutions!), the analysis goes about Worker Production being larger than Worker pay, the rest flowing to Capital, of which a tiny part is shaved off as Capital Owner ‘pay’. The rest of the surplus seeking redeployment ‘outside’ of the system and how the outside may no longer exist.
Haven’t read on far enough, but I feel that when Capital (surplus) folds back onto itself, it creates a sort of Non-Worker Production in the form of investment in financial instruments created out of thin air for no other reason than creating ‘value’ (quod non); with money producing ever more … money, surplus.
And that’s the bubble that deflated ‘recently’, it was no longer sustainable, stretched too thin.
And that’s why ‘the 1%’ wants to keep ‘capitalism’ as is, with creation of more worker proletariat squeezing out the middle class to lower Worker pay to (literally) starvation levels, in order to keep and increase their own cut of surplus and inflate the bubble in some other direction again.
Whereas ‘we’ need not money as an end goal, but as place- and time-shifting grease against the frictions of barter. There are no markets, there’s demand, and there’s supply.
Well, more on this later.