Can the World Market Ever Become Exhausted?

Around the turn of the 20th century, the belief that the world market was headed for eventual exhaustion was widely accepted among the left wing of the Social Democracy, especially in the German-speaking world. But the refutations of Rosa Luxemburg’s “Accumulation of Capital” and her “Anti-Critique,” based on Marx’s Volume II models of capitalist reproduction, pretty much discredited the idea that the world market could ever face a situation of permanent exhaustion.

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2 thoughts on “Can the World Market Ever Become Exhausted?

  1. (…) The credit system cannot free itself from its cash basis. And cash bases ultimately come down to a gold basis. As the credit system expands relative to its cash and ultimately gold bases, the point will be reached where it cannot be stretched any further. (…) And the fiat money? And the cripto-moneys? They are not dependent of gold. Therefore, the expansion of monetary basis could be infinite, in principle. J.Figueiredo, resistir@protonmail.com

    1. You should really read the rest of Sam Williams work before making the comment. I am not saying you have to agree per se but it is a perspective worth listening to. Fiat and crypto only represent a certain amount of gold, central banks hoard the stuff and currency traders are always looking at the value of gold compared to everything else. Those currencies could be infinite in principle but beyond the fact that they would quickly lose value if they didn’t have some sort of limiting factor, where gold comes in is it serves as an expression of embodied social labor. The labor it takes to mine gold makes it ideal to serve as a universal equivalent to be traded for commodities produced by non-gold producing labor under various conditions of production and socialization. Money makes private-production social and gold is money

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