I don’t mean that people can’t or don’t work to expand economic production. I do mean the idea that people frugally and virtuously defer consumption, forgoing now to create stockpiles they can use to greater use in the future, doesn’t actually reflect material reality.
In reality, all of this work is both social and current. If I decide to work to expand production—build a factory, plow and manure a field, whatever—I can’t also be producing the food I need to eat or the clothes I need to wear. Someone else has to be doing that work while I do mine, in addition to anyone supplying me with the tools and raw materials I might need to do my work.
And they’re almost certainly not doing it from stockpiles reflecting past work. They’re doing it from current production. No one first stockpiles all the food a team of workers needs to eat for a month or a year before those workers start to build a factory. They feed them as food becomes available, out of constant current production, just like anyone else.
So when that field or factory is done and can start producing more stuff than was possible before, those new products will in turn go to those original workers who supplied me while I was doing my work, or to yet some other worker making something entirely different, who will in turn supply my original benefactor.
That’s all the economy is—a giant network of workers constantly doing useful work, making things of value for each other, advancing their product to each other with the understanding that others’ products will be advanced to them.
I owe this understanding of the economy to the brilliant @KevinCarson1 who, in the essay below, argued compellingly that credit was and should be a commons. Anyone can supply anyone else, with the expectation that they will be supplied in turn—a giant network of constantly-turning over credit.
Financial investment is, then, a reflection of the state’s enclosure of credit. The state monopolizes the production of money with its capitalist partners, banks and other financial institutions. If you want to access the money you need to invest—to access that network of workers advancing product to each other—you have to first agree to pay interest to banks on loans, ie, rents on their control of credit.