This is the second article on Modern Marxist Monetary Theory which looks more deeply and broadly at the dialectical interaction between legacy value and newly produced value.
From the 19th Century, Marxists, including Rosa Luxemburg, were of the opinion that the restrictive consumption of the masses was the primary cause of lack of markets which explained the drive to acquire new markets in which to offload surplus commodities. Indeed there was a structural restriction, but not one caused by the limited consumption of the masses, but because of the limitation imposed on capital itself, namely that new value can only be circulated by value previously produced – legacy value (revenue). In a rapidly expanding world economy at the time, that is to say, with the rapid expansion of value in successive cycles of production, trailing legacy value became insufficient to circulate the new value. Thus what these theoreticians saw as a phenomenon of space was in fact a phenomenon of time, one of sequencing, thus more difficult to detect and understand. It was the old holding back the new in the absence of new credit. In order to present this observation starkly, the article does not expand on the issue of profitability and its effect on legacy value.
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