Capital as Power by Bichler Shimshon Nitzan Jonathan & Shimshon Bichler

Author:Bichler, Shimshon, Nitzan, Jonathan & Shimshon Bichler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Sciences
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2009-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

The two languages

These profound differences have crystallized into two separate languages. Unlike industrial activity, with its tangible, material categories, business traffic and achievements are counted strictly in pecuniary terms. Economists insist on reducing ‘nominal’ business magnitudes to ‘real’, utilitarian units, though that insistence merely attests to their pre-capitalist habit of thinking. As we have seen earlier in the book, this reduction is impossible to achieve. But even if the conversion proved feasible, according to Veblen the capitalists couldn’t care less. Under the price system, he pointed out,

men have come to the conviction that money-values are more real and substantial than any of the material facts in this transitory world. So much so that the final purpose of any businesslike undertaking is always a sale, by which the seller comes in for the price of his goods; and when a person has sold his goods, and so becomes in effect a creditor by that much, he is said to have ‘realized’ his wealth, or to have ‘realized’ his holdings. In the business world the price of things is a more substantial fact than the things themselves.

(Veblen 1923:88–89, emphases added)

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