u/MarsLowell - originally from r/GenZhou
I’ve been trying to come up with a more concise answer to why prices have risen, as opposed to just “it’s complicated”. Popular liberal narrative has been trying to simply reduce it to “printing more money bad” and thus something something we shouldn’t help the poors, but we know the more expansive reasoning behind it (strained supply chains, deprecating value of commodities, etc).
I suppose the question is, where can I find good “in summary” explanations from a Marxist-Leninist perspective?
u/Keepnasstychips - originally from r/GenZhou
Because of the nature of the academe, you won’t have many professors who are out as socialists/MLs but many will do you they specifically conceptualize of their work in line with Marxist analysis. (Particularly in the states, where you are dependent on large grant-providing institutions like the NIH, NIJ, etc.)While not from a ML perspective, Greta Krippner’s work is some of the best in the field. She is explicitly trying to “re-socialize” fiscal and monetary policy, and makes the argument for the social nature of all such policy. Her book “Capitalizing on Crisis” is a very in-depth analysis of US monetary policy, how it is used to prop up the US imperial order through dollar-hegemony, and also points to your question on inflation. In short, that the easy availability of credit for large corporate borrowers is a major driver of inflation in conjunction with the flex in fiat currency that makes these massive surplus pools of credit possible. In effect, the massive amount of credit leads to lots of dollars chasing too few investment outlets and that is what drives inflation. For instance, prior to the collapse of the gold standard regular consumers and corporate borrowers were competing for the same limited pools of credit, particularly in order to make purchases like homes. So while this lead to tight credit markets with potentially high interest rates (mediated by the State which had various levers to pool in order to manipulate interest rates on credit), you didn’t see the explosive rise in costs for things like houses. Now, for any given home sale, you may have dozens of people with lines of credit in the hundred of thousands if not millions for a single-family home (not to mention corporate borrowers amassing property), so the competition over purchase is relocated to the price. When you’re playing with sums this big, the “$1400 stimulus checks as an inflationary driver” argument really rings hollow.
You can see the same phenomenon happening in the area of Private Equity capture which is what I study. Too much credit/capital chasing too few purchasable and exploitable companies is leading to record deal prices but fewer total deals. So while they blame “labor” or “inflation” for their compressed margins, (because investors and their cronies are incapable of self-reflection or doubt), the bigger problem is the speculative frenzy around assets which spikes the price like crazy and is a direct result of their own exploitative investment activity. (Of course, this really isn’t a problem for the high-net worth individuals and institutional investors they serve, as when the bubble eventually pops they’ll be able to exit gracefully by gutting these acquisitions for parts, repurchase comparable investments at a bargain, and then regain their high ROIs as they ride the assets for years into a new economic upturn over the corpses of labor.)
u/Anti_Terrestrialist - originally from r/GenZhou
capitalists raise prices. it could be in response to any number of things but at the end of the day it’s a capitalist deciding to raise their prices to take advantage of some kind of perceived or real supply issue, worker demand, more money being put in the economy (stimulus checks) etc etc. they do this without real regard to how it will affect the working class.it’s legitimately that simple. you tell people to stop raising prices tonight, inflation ends tomorrow.
u/temporarilythesame - originally from r/GenZhou
The idea that the rate of profit will fall over time. A company that exists for a long enough time will run out of ways to make higher profits year after year through market saturation and competitors entering the market. This leaves cutting costs (workers for example) or raising prices as a short term solution to making the business seem like it’s doing well.u/I_am_a_groot - originally from r/GenZhou
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2022/03/26/the-war-on-inflation/