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STRENGTH OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM   329

which installment selling necessitated. Installment selling was one of the means by which finance capital put into profitable use the credit at its disposal. Installment selling added a new feature to the functioning of the capitalist credit system.7 Hitherto the capitalist use of credit in industry and commerce has been such as to cut down the elapse of time among the various sections of the capitalistic processes of production and distribution. (This has not, of course, excluded contrary tendencies through the "cornering" of commodity markets.) The function of credit in this sphere is to permit the reproductive process to continue in the period between the time when the goods have left the productive process and when they are finally dispossed of to the consumer. Installment selling has thrown the use of credit beyond the point where the consumer pays for commodities out of his current income. It has therefore, occasioned some misgivings among the bourgeois ideologists.

Benjamin Anderson, for examples, states that he is not "disposed to be doctrinaire in commenting upon a moderate use of bank credit for consumption purposes as represented in the financing of installment buying, though this obviously stands at the opposite pole from the conversion of income into capital. When commercial bank credit is used to finance consumption we have not merely the conversion of present capital into income, but even the hypothecation of future capital for current income. As a minor factor in the commercial bank credit situation, this is manageable, but it obviously cannot become a very important element in the situation without standing things on end." (Chase Bulletin, November 8, 1926).

Installment selling increased present consumers' purchasing power. It concentrated consumers' purchasing power of the future into the present. The credit system has been extended everywhere to cut down to the minimum the time element ascribable to the mechanics of commodity production. The function of the credit system in the process of circulation is to get commodities to the retail stage in the least possible length of time aside from that which production, transportation, etc. entail. Installment selling has not been able to increase the totality of consumers' purchasing power. It constitutes the final link in the credit system. It is the link which reveals the impossibility of overcoming the contradiction between the purchasing power of the masses and the volume of commodities they produce, through the medium of the credit system. American capitalism has tried to lift itself by its bootstraps

7. This fact has been neglected almost entirely in discussions of installment selling. In Com. Ross' discussion this was also the case.