Unleashing Usury Quotes

“All factors of production operate in concrete specific ways to produce use values. Tropical soils grow mangoes. Carpenters work wood. Precision lathes fashion metal tools. But in capitalist economies the essential object is not production of use values for consumption. It is production of goods as value objects for the abstract social goal of value augmentation or profit making. Capitalist value augmentation, in other words, requires a factor of production that has both a concrete specific and abstract general aspect. That factor of production is human labor power. Only it can be shifted from one concrete specific form of production to another: Or, alternatively, rendered indifferent to production of specific use values in favor of producing any good as a vehicle for value augmentation. Labor power cannot be rendered indifferent to production of specific use values unless it is “freed” from access to its means of livelihood and extra-economic social relations confining it to task and/or place. Capital, in other words, requires the conversion of the direct producers into a proletarian class. This is its sine qua non.”
― Richard Westra, Unleashing Usury: How Finance Opened the Door for Capitalism Then Swallowed It Whole

“When we use concepts such as the commodification of labor power and the real subsumption of the labor and production process by capital it is with respect to the wholesale transformation of socioeconomic relations that the foregoing entails. The commodification of labor power involves the effective separation of the direct producers from the means of production and livelihood. These means of production are then concentrated in agriculture in the hands of landlords and capitalist farmers and in industry in the hands of the industrial capitalist class. The working class, whether in agriculture or in industry, gains access to the product of their necessary labor only indirectly through the wages they receive. They must then purchase the full spectrum of goods required to sustain their livelihood, and reproduction as a class, in the impersonal cash nexus of the capitalist market. The capitalist market itself is populated by small independent businesses across a division of labor in producer goods, consumer goods and agricultural. The rise of the mechanized cotton industry in Britain thus heralds the first historical embodiment of paradigmatic industrial capital.”
― Richard Westra, Unleashing Usury: How Finance Opened the Door for Capitalism Then Swallowed It Whole

“Marx’s central question was: how can a society that converts interpersonal material relations into impersonal relations among things, and reproduces economic life for the abstract purpose of value augmentation or profit making, simultaneously meet general norms of economic life as a byproduct? This is the question seeking the “logic” or “method” of capitalist madness in our earlier words. All other questions of the march of capitalism in human history, its process of becoming, and the conditions of its historical transitoriness, hinge on that. And answering it is systemically threatening because, firstly, it reveals what bourgeois economic thought from its inception in classical political economy has fought to conceal: that capitalism is not a natural order but a historically transient society. And secondly, it shows that capitalism is not just an asymmetrically wealth distributive, exploitative, alienating, crisis ridden society. Rather, it is an “upside-down”, “alien” order (as Marx put it), which reproduces human material existence as a byproduct of its “extra-human” goal of augmenting abstract, quantitative value – or profit making.”
― Richard Westra, Unleashing Usury: How Finance Opened the Door for Capitalism Then Swallowed It Whole

“Dante, in The Inferno, “places usurers in the third ring of the seventh circle, a place worse than the one reserved for blasphemers and sodomites”.69 Worldly repayment possibilities for “time” also existed, however. The cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris was built by funds donated to the church by a wealthy usurer who was urged to do so by the bishop of Paris as a means of saving his soul.”
― Richard Westra, Unleashing Usury: How Finance Opened the Door for Capitalism Then Swallowed It Whole

“The bedrock source of ancient condemnations of usury is Deuteronomy in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. Bracketing here translation disputes, Deuteronomy holds: “Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of anything that is lent upon usury”. Yet, it continues, “Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not”. This so-called “Deuteronomic double standard” became a contentious point in the feudal era. It was used to justify lending practices of particular ethnic and social groups such as the Jews and Lombards. A second point of dispute also arose. This was the differentiation between usury and interest.50 For Christian purists, of course, humanity is all one. To justify charging interest to Christians or others amounts to turning the world’s population into “strangers” which is tantamount to endorsing Thomas Hobbes “war of all against all” as the human condition. Similarly, usura in its formative incantation is simply paying for the use of money. There is thus no difference between usury and interest.”
― Richard Westra, Unleashing Usury: How Finance Opened the Door for Capitalism Then Swallowed It Whole

“The bedrock source of ancient condemnations of usury is Deuteronomy in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. Bracketing here translation disputes, Deuteronomy holds: “Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of anything that is lent upon usury”. Yet, it continues, “Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not”. This so-called “Deuteronomic double standard” became a contentious point in the feudal era. It was used to justify lending practices of particular ethnic and social groups such as the Jews and Lombards. A second point of dispute also arose. This was the differentiation between usury and interest.50”
― Richard Westra, Unleashing Usury: How Finance Opened the Door for Capitalism Then Swallowed It Whole

“When merchants intervened between producers and consumers, pricing became increasingly “irrational” from the perspective of feudal interpersonal socioeconomic relations. The “measure” of costs in feudal society was always “geared . . . to preserving a traditional way of life”.48 But merchants sought to buy cheap and sell dear. What drove their trading had little to do with “traditional” life. Rather their pursuit was abstract mercantile wealth. Hence, they strived to circumvent guild production wherever possible to garner the greatest profits. It is precisely this kind of deviation from expectations that everything in feudal society should have a “just price” that factored into Christian inveighing against usury as the money economy of trade and abstract exchange struck hard at peasant life.”
― Richard Westra, Unleashing Usury: How Finance Opened the Door for Capitalism Then Swallowed It Whole

“In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”
― Richard Westra, Unleashing Usury: How Finance Opened the Door for Capitalism Then Swallowed It Whole

“Capitalism and its logic, however, are attuned to material goods production-centered activities where close to half of working age people are employed in manufacturing related activity. Current employment profiles of advanced economies do not look very capitalist. And these profiles run too much interference on capitalist logic as we will see.”
― Richard Westra, Unleashing Usury: How Finance Opened the Door for Capitalism Then Swallowed It Whole

“The historical antecedent of neoclassical economics is what Marx referred to as “classical” political economy. Classical theorists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo were very much mouthpieces for the ascendant bourgeois class. This is not to say that their explorations of the political economy of the day did not produce important knowledge upon which critics like Marx built. After all, it was only after Smith and Ricardo that Marx began referring to “vulgar” economics. The problem resided in their bourgeois class blind faith that pursuit of abstract mercantile wealth in impersonal markets was somehow the “natural” way of organizing human material affairs. With bourgeois tinted glasses coloring their vision, so to speak, classical political economy began to read all human history in bourgeois terms.”
― Richard Westra, Unleashing Usury: How Finance Opened the Door for Capitalism Then Swallowed It Whole

“Such glaring trends are precisely what Marx understood by the conditions of possibility for capitalism being outstripped by history. As expressed in his iconic Preface, at some point in history the forces of production (existing technologies and related production and energy accouterment) will come into conflict with relations of production (existing social relations of ownership and work) to initiate a period of social and economic tumult until humanity hopefully manages to socioeconomically reconfigure its world.”
― Richard Westra, Unleashing Usury: How Finance Opened the Door for Capitalism Then Swallowed It Whole

“In precapitalist feudal societies agriculture employed around 80 percent of the population, basic manufactures about 10 percent and services 10 percent. Capitalist economies were marked by industry and manufacturing which, on average, employed 40 to 50 percent of total labor forces in advanced states. Agriculture employed around 20 percent and services the remainder. At the dawn of the 21st century, manufacturing in the US employed around 20 percent of the workforce, agriculture less, with services reaching over 75 percent of all employment.”
― Richard Westra, Unleashing Usury: How Finance Opened the Door for Capitalism Then Swallowed It Whole

“there is consensus among critical economists that the most glorious period or “golden age” of capitalism which began in the 1950s (for those living advanced states at least) fell into crisis by the late 1970s.4 And, it was on the road from there to the 21st century that untoward things started to happen. First, advanced economies including Britain, the US, major European (EU) states, built prosperity across the 20th century around expansion and sophistication of their industrial production systems and rising real and social wages for the mass workforces that operated them. Yet, by the time the century came to a close, these industrial production systems had been sliced and diced with their components disarticulated across the globe. Parallel to this slicing and dicing of industries the decently paid jobs of the industrial mass workforce vaporized.”
― Richard Westra, Unleashing Usury: How Finance Opened the Door for Capitalism Then Swallowed It Whole