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racefortheironthrone · 6 months

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What are your thoughts on Tony Benn? Because much as I admire him in some ways he does come across as a bit impractical in an idealistic way, with his challenge to Healey and describing the 1983 general election as a triumph for socialism.

I'm of very mixed opinions about Tony Benn.

On the one hand, I think he was a very sincere and well-meaning man with fairly laudible beliefs (although he did I think have a problem where he would sometimes prioritize following a consistent ideological line over his personal moral instincts, which I think were more reliable).

On the other hand, I don't think he was very good at his job and would have done better as a social movement organizer than as a politician and government minister - or at the very least, I think he would have been better suited to a ministerial portfolio that spoke to his strengths, which were much more in the area of social policy rather than economic policy.

So as Minister for Technology or as Secretary of State for Industry or Energy, I'm sympathetic to his support for industrial democracy in and out of nationalized industries, but he wasn't ultimately very good at putting worker control into practice. And that's the thing; when you're in government, you have to be able to translate your beliefs into effective public policy.

Likewise, I think his Alternative Economic Strategy was just a bad strategy for achieving left-wing economic objectives:

it focused on the very blunt instruments of direct economic controls on prices and imports and finance rather than more flexible approaches that would have fewer negative side effects.

it had a heavy emphasis on issues that Benn cared about (like nationalization and industrial democracy) but weren't really relevant to how to deal with stagflation in the short term.

meanwhile, it under-emphasized policies to deal with unemployment and ironically relied on a rather standard "commercial Keynesian" solution for reflation rather than more social democratic alternatives.

the anti-European/autarkic emphasis of the AES was profoundly counter-productive, especially for the economic context of Britain in the 1970s.

finally, it really neglected the crucial question of how to develop state capacity. In part because Benn really didn't get along with the Civil Service and viewed them as essentially hostile, the AES didn't spend nearly enough time on how to develop the expertise, coordination, staffing, etc. needed to carry out economic policies that were very heavy lifts.

So yeah, "impractical in an idealistic way" is fair.

#history #historical analysis #labour party #political history #intellectual history #political economy #uk history #economic policy #tony benn #industrial democracy #co-determination

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cicaklah · 2 years

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Being an economist on main again, soz...

So my last post got reblogged by people but I wanted, in true economist fashion, to really, truly, highlight why the current UK bullshit is so upsetting as a very normie, mainstream, working economist.

Economics is broadly split into two disciplines, microeconomics, which is basically the way the economy and individuals interact, and macroeconomics, which is how the economy as a whole-ass beast works. The main problem between these two disciplines is that a lot of rules of micro don't 'hold' when you get to the macro level, and vice versa. You might remember how economists always say that treating debt at country level the way we think about individual credit card or mortgage debt is wrong, that is a prime example of how micro and macro rules don't hold. Things, generally, are so much more complicated at macro level.

Because of this, most economists specialise in one or the other. I am a microeconomist, specifically a health economist, and while there is some macro stuff, generally we treat health spending as a micro level problem, i.e. we're fairly sure that if we make decisions at an individual level, the macro will look after itself (the pennies will look after the pounds).

(Now, this is a simplification because you can rightly say, cicak, my friend, the NHS is falling apart, to which I will say: you is right, but it is because of 'externalities' rather than the conceptual decision making process inherent to microeconomics, to wit: over a decade of deliberate underfunding, a global pandemic, and Brexit have all led to NHS problems. The solution to all of these problems can be understood in micro terms: more money, applied where it is most needed, as part of a plan, with measurable goals and targets. Ultimately: politics.)

Anyway, tangents aside, microeconomics is pretty ideologically stable. Most mainstream economics is based around social welfare theory, which is that people do things for reasons that bring them the most benefit, and they broadly, mostly, in aggregate, do that to an acceptable level of efficiency. If you would like to argue about this: please proceed to your nearest economics masters course, you'll fit right in.

The main difference between the schools of macro is: do individual changes make differences at the macro level? Or do only governments really make a difference at macro?

This used to be a BIG ARGUMENT back in the 20th century, mostly around what should be done with the Great Depression in 1929. Basically, should you just let the economy burn to the ground, and see what comes out of it? Or should governments stop the economy from collapsing? The Austrian school thought burn it down, Keynes thought: government. Keynes, broadly, won. There was a 2nd world war, and Keynesianism was refined. Then, it went out of fashion. Then it came back into fashion. A lot of this depends on the concept of 'full employment', the 1980s, economic stability, boom and bust, but these days, most macro policy is described as Neo-Keynesian and is considered broadly settled on government finding a balance between price, inflation, employment, growth and stability. This is done through monetary policy and fiscal policy, stuff government does.

But then you've got your Austrians, your Hayekians, your Mises. They think that government should butt out of the market, and that individuals are far more important. Individuals, especially rich individuals, should be allowed to do what they want with their money, and everything will be better if government just stops taking their money and lets the free market solve it. This is why the first thing Truss & friends did was cut the top rate of tax. Less money for government (bad with money) but more money for the people that they believe are already good with money, because they have a lot of it, see?

Modern Austrians believe that individuals are the only thing that matter at macro level. There are no groups of people, only individuals. Credit is bad and the real cause of business failure. Stability can be gained by pegging currencies to gold reserves. Oh and as we can't model all 67 million people in the UK, theres no point even trying. It'd just be chaos. Even model nerds say 'all models are wrong'. So no point. Just do it and be a legend. It'll all work out in the end. Just trust us. OBR? Have a beer. The numbers don't real.

Instead, everyone fucking PANICKED. Because as I said, 99% of economists are in the business of predicting the future. The future suddenly got unpredictable. No one saw the top rate of tax being cut coming. There's no economic justification for it, no 'dont worry, it'll be funded by XYZ'. Just Austrian bullshit of 'here comes freedom lads.' No one is talking to each other. A man credited with keeping all the fiscal, monetary and political systems moving has been fired because it turns out the chancellor didn't like that he worked from South America. The Bank of England are furious. The markets are in peril, but Kwarteng's bezzie mates at his cocktail party bet that the pound would crash, and are rolling in it. Everyone loves a run on the pound, it seems.

So yeah there's some more of why the uks economy kind of exploded this week.

#uk politics #economics on main #economist on main #apols i will shut up about this #but some lib dem man at church insulted me today #and no one hates lib dems like a former lib dem #ie me

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thoughtlessarse · 28 days

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There’s a story Joe Biden’s foreign policy team likes to tell itself about the recent history of the world—a tale of hubris, setback, and restoration. It goes something like this: Since the vanquishing of the Axis in the Second World War, the United States has been the foundation stone for a global peace based on maintaining and the expanding the international liberal order. That order was dedicated to ever-growing and freer trade between nations and the expansion of democracy and human rights through a strengthening regime of international law, all undergirded by American military hegemony. With the vanquishing of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union from 1989 to 1991, this liberal international order stood unchallenged. But in its moment of triumph, the makers of American foreign policy made a series of arrogant mistakes that undermined the system previous generations had worked so hard to create. By invading Afghanistan and Iraq, the administration of George W. Bush mired the United States in forever wars that drained treasure and blood while undermining the American public’s commitment to engagement with the outside world. Meanwhile, bipartisan elites ignored the fact that trade agreements, particularly with China, were destroying the economic security of middle-class America. These problems opened the way for the demagogue Donald Trump to run on a twin platform of unilateralism and protectionism. In response, the Biden team was prepared to restore the liberal international order—but on fairer and more stable terms, using infrastructure spending and military Keynesianism to rebuild the middle class while renegotiating trade agreements on terms more equitable to American interests. This would allow the United States to once more assume the mantle of global leadership with confidence.

#us #us pol #us foreign policy #israel #us hypocrisy #biden

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metamatar · 11 months

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The Keynesian utopia will have the good parts of capitalism — the “efficiency of the decentralization of decisions and of individual responsibility” — without the bad, “its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.” The period in which people earn income simply from holding wealth is “a transitional phase which will disappear when it has done its work.” The coming of utopia “will be nothing sudden, merely a gradual but prolonged continuance of what we have seen recently in Great Britain, and will need no revolution.” But Keynesianism departs from classical liberalism in not seeing liberal society as natural or self-sustaining. If it stays on the rails, it moves towards utopia, but capitalism tends to derail itself. In the General Theory Keynes explores one dimension of this — a tendency for investment to fall below the level needed for full employment — but this is just one instance of a broader theme in Keynes’s work — and in Keynesianism more broadly. The health of capitalism depends upon deliberate political management going well beyond the nightwatchman duties of protecting property. Some of this may be unobtrusive — the central bank’s management of the interest rate — but it may require nothing less than “a somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment.” (Keynes was vague on what he meant by this, and certainly did not mean the seizure of the means of production, but he at the least believed that the amount of investment in a given period should be decided by policymakers.) Capitalism needs help staying on the tracks, but it is on tracks: it can’t be driven just anywhere. What it needs in the way of management is not up to the managers; it depends on the structure of the economy itself. It needs not only management but expert management, and that has two big implications.

First, it breaks with the classical liberal commitment to laissez-faire. The liberal enthusiasm for individual choice was always, as Mann puts it, “modified by a series of ad hoc qualifications,” but Keynesianism goes further, holding that individual freedom in general depends on not making an absolute of it. Politics must curb some liberties to defend Liberty. Free enterprise left to itself tends to generate poverty, inequality, and unemployment. If these get out of hand, there is a real risk that political rebellion will lead to much worse than red tape.

Second, it is in tension with democracy. Liberal pluralists see the democratic political system as a way of addressing and managing the social conflicts and dissatisfactions that capitalism produces. Interests are channeled into politics, where they are forced into compromise, and problems are sorted out piecemeal. But for Keynes, there is no reason to believe that political representation of interests really would solve the underlying problems. Economic problems are complex, so their solutions will be delicate and call for expert judgment. What makes for a finely-balanced political compromise may have nothing to do with what solving the problem will actually take. The contenders — parties and their constituencies — often badly misunderstand the causes of their woes. Keynes, says Mann, “was definitively not a democrat, because anything approaching popular sovereignty was in his view antithetical to the long-term interests of civilization.”

Mike Beggs in the Keynesian Counterrevolution

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shituationist · 9 months

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Do you have any good sources/links critiquing market socialism? I’m thinking C4SS in particular.

I think the best book critiquing market liberalism in general is John O'Neill's the Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics, which comprehensively addresses major arguments in favor of markets or against socialist planning. O'Neill examines the Weber/von Mises "calculation problem," the von Hayek "knowledge problem," as well as critiques of planning from public choice theory and neoclassical welfare theory. O'Neill does this by contrasting the philosophies and underlying philosophical assumptions of pro-market thinkers to those of Otto Neurath, who was a partisan of non-monetary socialist planning up until his death, and whose contributions to the debate are often underpublicized (usually in favor of making Oskar Lange, himself a market socialist, the primary interlocuter with the Austrians).

Otto Neurath himself is worth reading because he provides an epistemological defense of economic planning. You can find his collected economic writings on libgen pretty easily. It's worth perusing in tandem with O'Neill's book.

Honorable mention to Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell's essay "Anti-Hayek", which is a decent materialist counter to the esoteric epistemology von Hayek uses to suggest socialist planning is ineffective. Their essay on Leonid Kantoravich's linear programming and in-kind planning is also worth reading as a critique of the Weber/von Mises position on economic calculation. Cockshott has unfortunately sullied his legacy via his 70s Maoist sex politics, but his essays critiquing the Austrian positions in the socialist planning debates are still worthy of consideration.

William Kapp was a critic of market liberalism whose book the Social Costs of Private Enterprise prefigured a lot of critiques of laissez-faire markets that later ecological economists like Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly (who were not exactly "anti-market" but whose critiques do underline how the neoclassical idealization of markets is not... ideal) would make more famous. Kapp focuses on the non-monetary and unmonetizable effects of private enterprise, which by definition can not enter into the strictly monetary accounting that informs the decision-making of any commercial enterprise, and which empirically cut against the pretensions of theoretical/rationalistic market liberal utopias.

The Parecon guys, Robin Hahnel and Michel Albert, provide both an institutional framework for planning and several critiques of market liberalism which are applicable to market socialism and market anarchism. Robin Hahnel's Milton's Myths series on socialisteconomist is really good and intended for a popular audience. Pat Devine is a thinker of a similar type who is less of a marginalist, unfortunately I can't name any essays or books of his off the top of my head, but he seems of interest.

Paul Mattick's "Limits of the Mixed Economy" I think would be relevant to Keynesian and post-Keynesian policy recommendations, since Keynesianism is of enduring interest to social democrats. I've never finished it though, so I don't really know. I do know it's talked about a lot in that way. Would be interesting to come back to that book some day myself.

As far as mutualism goes, I think Marx's critique of Proudhon's mutualism and similar schemes in the Poverty of Philosophy is definitive, even if Marx was not entirely honest w/r/t his object of critique. Engels's additions to this critique in his late prefaces to the Poverty of Philosophy and his debates with German Proudhonists over the housing question provide a sound enough basis for rejecting those kinds of schemes in favor of common ownership (i.e. communism).

With regards to C4SS, it's harder to say, b/c C4SS's moment seems to have passed, their moment was not that long in the first place, and they've always been defined politically more by their break from right-wing libertarianism than their antagonism to, say, Marxists, who are antagonistic intellectually but don't really have neo-mutualists on their radar, or anarchist-communists, who either just side with the Marxists, gesture vaguely in the direction of "the commons", or otherwise don't care enough about the topic to argue about it. As such I don't think C4SS itself has ever been singled out by anyone in an important way, but insofar as market anarchism is just market liberalism taken to its logical conclusions, critiques of the latter apply just as much to the former, and the sources above all provide compelling arguments against market liberalism and in favor of socialist planning.

Groups like C4SS thrived (relatively - C4SS has never had that large of a following) in a political atmosphere where the word "socialism" was still a very dirty one, where there was a lot of enthusiasm around p2p filesharing networks and p2p networks in general, where the overarching political consensus was that there was no alternative to markets and commerce, and where acephalous and amorphous political movements (that were seemingly structurally analogous to markets) had not yet exposed their limitations but seemed to be a genuine threat to state power (and not just a particular state power, but state power in general). Under those conditions, where leftists felt embarrassed to be proponents of what in the popular imagination had just been discredited with the fall of the Soviet bloc, C4SS style p2p utopianism was something you could gesture vaguely towards as an alternative, since those p2p schemes avoided the "centralized," "monolithic," and "sclerotic" epithets so often applied to central planning regimes, and fit well within the American political imaginary which has long treated decentralization as a virtue (the list of American endorsers of decentralism includes such diverse names as Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, John C. Calhoun, Lysander Spooner, George Wallace, Murray Bookchin and Bob Black). That atmosphere has given way to one where the left once again favors more traditionally structured organizations, especially after the fizzle-out of the 2020 uprisings and the abject failure that was decentralist-anarchist (non-/anti-)leadership in places like Seattle and Portland, which resulted in no lasting victories and which frankly embarrassed the anarchist movement in North America (reminiscent of the numerous embarrassments for anarchists recounted in Engels's the Bakuninists at Work). There are still true believers, but right-wing libertarianism no longer funnels people in their direction as much now that the Libertarian Party has more or less successfully been merged into the network of miscellaneous reactionary movements. Self-identifying "left-libertarians" seem to me to be an increasingly rare breed.

Genuine market liberalism is also increasingly unpopular on the left and right. Liberals under Biden have embraced "industrial policy" which is ill-defined but seems to involve the state playing an active role in economic development, especially fostering domestic industries to reduce dependence on what the state identifies as its foreign rivals. Given how the libertarian movement continues to shed a lot of its left-wing cultural sympathies (not that there aren't holdouts), an SEK3 type is hard to imagine emerging from today's libertarian milieu, especially the libertarians below the age of 25.

I guess shameless self-promotion here for my own article for a "Mutual Exchange" series where I critiqued anarchist decentralism and the "decentralization/centralization" dichotomy that C4SS-ites are so endeared to: https://c4ss.org/content/53124

I know I've gone off a bit here, so I'll stop pontificating, but I hope this is helpful to anyone who's interested in these debates or in a potentially unreliable narrative developed primarily through online interactions.

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butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway · 1 year

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Anarchist Book Club Presents:

David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years

Introduction

What follows are a series of brief reflections (part of a much broader work in progress) on debt, credit, and virtual money: topics that are, obviously, of rather pressing concern for many at the current time.

There seems little doubt that history, widely rumored to have come to an end a few years ago, has gone into overdrive of late, and is in the process of spitting us into a new political and economic landscape whose contours no one understands. Everyone agrees something has just ended but no one is quite sure what. Neoliberalism? Postmodernism? American hegemony? The rule of finance capital? Capitalism itself (unlikely for the time being)? It’s even more difficult to predict what’s about to be thrown at us, let alone what shape the forces of resistance to it are likely to take. Some new form of green capitalism? Knowledge Keynesianism? Chinese-style industrial authoritarianism? ‘Progressive’ imperialism?

At moments of transformation, one of the few things one can say for certain is that we don’t really know how much our own actions can affect the outcome, but we would be very foolish to assume that they cannot.

Historical action tends to be narrative in form. In order to be able to make an intervention in history (arguably, in order to act decisively in any circumstances), one has to be able to cast oneself in some sort of story — though, speaking as someone who has actually had the opportunity to be in the middle of one or two world historical events, I can also attest that one in that situation is almost never quite certain what sort of drama it really is, since there are usually several alternatives battling it out, and that the question is not entirely resolved until everything is over (and never completely resolved even then). But I think there’s something that comes before even that. When one is first trying to assess a historical situation, having no real idea where one stands, trying to place oneself in a much larger stream of history so as to be able to start to think about what the problem even is, then usually it’s less a matter of placing oneself in a story than of figuring out the larger rhythmic structure, the ebb and flow of historical movements. Is what is happening around me the result of a generational political realignment, a movement of capitalism’s boom or bust cycle, the beginning or result of a new wave of struggles, the inevitable unfolding of a Kondratieff B curve? Or is it all these things? How do all these rhythms weave in and out of each other? Is there one core rhythm pushing the others along? How do they sit inside one another, syncopate, concatenate, harmonise, clash?

Let me briefly lay out what might be at stake here. I’ll focus here on cycles of capitalism, secondarily on war. This is because I don’t like capitalism and think that it’s rapidly destroying the planet, and that if we are going to survive as a species, we’re really going to have to come up with something else. I also don’t like war, both for all the obvious reasons, but also, because it strikes me as one of the main ways capitalism has managed to perpetuate itself. So in picking through possible theories of historical cycles, this is what I have had primarily in mind. Even here there are any number of possibilities. Here are a few:

Are we seeing an alternation between periods of peace and massive global warfare? In the late 19th century, for example, war between major industrial powers seemed to be a thing of the past, and this was accompanied by vast growth of both trade, and revolutionary internationalism (of broadly anarchist inspiration). 1914 marked a kind of reaction, a shift to 70 years mainly concerned with fighting, or planning for, world wars. The moment the Cold War ended, the pattern of the 1890s seemed to be repeating itself, and the reaction was predictable.

Or could one look at brief cycles — sub-cycles perhaps? This is particularly clear in the US, where one can see a continual alternation, since WWII, between periods of relative peace and democratic mobilisation immediately followed by a ratcheting up of international conflict: the civil rights movement followed by Vietnam, for example; the anti-nuclear movement of the ’70s followed by Reagan’s proxy wars and abandonment of détente; the global justice movement followed by the War on Terror.

Or should we be looking at financialisation? Are we dealing with Fernand Braudel or Giovanni Arrighi’s alternation between hegemonic powers (Genoa/ Venice, Holland, England, USA), which start as centers for commercial and industrial capital, later turn into centers of finance capital, and then collapse?

If so, then the question is of shifting hegemonies to East Asia, and whether (as Wallerstein for instance has recently been predicting) the US will gradually shift into the role of military enforcer for East Asian capital, provoking a realignment between Russia and the EU. Or, in fact, if all bets are off because the whole system is about to shift since, as Wallerstein also suggests, we are entering into an even more profound, 500-year cycle shift in the nature of the world-system itself?

Are we dealing with a global movement, as some autonomists (for example, the Midnight Notes collective) propose, of waves of popular struggle, as capitalism reaches a point of saturation and collapse — a crisis of inclusion as it were?

According to this version, the period from 1945 to perhaps 1975 was marked by a tacit deal with elements of the North Atlantic male working class, who were offered guaranteed good jobs and social security in exchange for political loyalty. The problem for capital was that more and more people demanded in on the deal: people in the Third World, excluded minorities in the North, and, finally, women. At this point the system broke, the oil shock and recession of the ’70s became a way of declaring that all deals were off: such groups could have political rights but these would no longer have any economic consequences.

Then, the argument goes, a new cycle began in which workers tried — or were encouraged — to buy into capitalism itself, whether in the form of micro-credit, stock options, mortgage refinancing, or 401ks. It’s this movement that seems to have hit its limit now, since, contrary to much heady rhetoric, capitalism is not and can never be a democratic system that provides equal opportunities to everyone, and the moment there’s a serious attempt to include the bulk of the population even in one country (the US) into the deal, the whole thing collapses into energy crisis and global recession all over again.

None of these are necessarily mutually exclusive but they have very different strategic implications. Much rests on which factor one happens to decide is the driving force: the internal dynamics of capitalism, the rise and fall of empires, the challenge of popular resistance? But when it comes to reading the rhythms in this way, the current moment still throws up unusual difficulties. There is a widespread sense that we are heading towards some kind of fundamental rupture, that old rhythms can no longer be counted on to repeat themselves, that we might be entering a new sort of time. Wallerstein says so much explicitly: if everything were going the way it generally has tended to go, for the last 500 years, East Asia would emerge as the new center of capitalist dominance. Problem is we may be coming to the end of a 500 year cycle and moving into a world that works on entirely different principles (subtext: capitalism itself may be coming to an end). In which case, who knows? Similarly, cycles of militarism cannot continue in the same form in a world where major military powers are capable of extinguishing all life on earth, with all-out war between them therefore impossible. Then there’s the factor of imminent ecological catastrophe.

One could make the argument, of course, that history is such that we always feel we’re at the edge of something. It’s always a crisis, there’s no particular reason to assume that this time it’s true. Historically, it has been a peculiar feature of capitalism that it seems to feel the need to constantly throw up spectres of its own demise. For most of the 19th century, and well into the 20th, most capitalists operated under the very strong suspicion that they might shortly end up hanging from trees — or, if they weren’t going to be strung up in an apocalyptic Socialist Revolution, witness some similar apocalyptic collapse into degenerate barbarism. One of the most disturbing features of capitalism, in fact, is not just that it constantly generates apocalyptic fantasies, but that it actually produces the physical means to make apocalyptic fantasies come true. For example, in the ’50s, once the destruction of capitalism from within could no longer be plausibly imagined, along came the spectre of nuclear war. In this case, the bombs were quite real. And once the prospect of anyone using those bombs (at least in such numbers as to destroy the planet) became increasingly implausible, with the end of the Cold War, we were suddenly greeted by the prospect of global warming.

It would be interesting to reflect at length on capitalism and its time horizons: what is it about this economic system that it seems to want to wipe out the prospect of its own eternity? On the one hand, capitalism being based on a logic of perpetual growth, one might argue that it is, by definition, not eternal, and can only recognise itself as such. But at other times those who embrace capitalism seem to want to think of it as having been around forever, or at least 5 thousand years, and stubbornly insist it will continue to exist 5 thousand years into the future. At yet other times it seems like a historical blip, an insanely powerful engine of accumulation that exploded around 1500, or maybe 1750, which couldn’t possibly be maintained without some sort of apocalyptic collapse. Perhaps the apparent tangle of contradictions is the result of a need to balance the short term perspectives needed by short term profit-seekers, managers, and CEOs, with the broader strategic perspectives of those actually running the system, which are of necessity more political. The result is a clash of narratives. Or maybe it’s the fact that whenever capitalism does see itself as eternal, it tends to lead to a spiraling of debt. Actually, the relations between debt bubbles and apocalypse are complicated and would be difficult (though fascinating) to disentangle, but I would suggest this much. The financialisation of capital has lead to a situation where something like 97 to 98 percent of the money in the total ‘economy’ of wealthy countries like the US or UK is debt. That is to say, it is money whose value rests not on something that actually exists in the present (bauxite, sculptures, peaches, software), but something that might exist at some point in the future. ‘Abstract’ money is not an idea, it’s a promise — a promise of something concrete that will exist at some time in the future, future profits extracted from future resources, future labour of miners, artists, fruit-pickers, web designers, not yet born. At the point where the imaginary future economy is 50 to 100 times larger than the current ‘real’ one, something has got to give. But the bursting of bubbles often leaves no future to imagine at all, except of catastrophe, because the creation of bubbles is made possible by the destruction of any ability to imagine alternative futures. It’s only once one cannot imagine that we are moving towards any sort of new future society, that the world will never be fundamentally different, that there’s nothing left to imagine but more and more future money.

It might be interesting, as I say, to try to disentangle the shifting historical relations between war, the development of ‘security’ apparatuses designed above all to strangle dreams of alternative futures, speculative bubbles, class struggle, and history of the capitalist Future, which seems to veer back and forth between utopia and cataclysm. These are not, however, precisely the questions that I’m asking here. I want, rather, to look at questions of debt from a different, and much longer term, historical perspective. Doing so provides a picture much less bleak and depressing than one might think, since the history of debt is not only a history of slavery, oppression, and bitter social struggles — which, of course, it certainly is, since debt is surely the most effective means ever created for taking relations that are founded on violence and oppression and making them seem right and moral to all concerned — but also of credit, honour, trust, and mutual commitment. Debt has been for the last 5 thousand years the fulcrum not only of forms of oppression but of popular struggle. Debt crises are periodic and become the stuff of uprisings, mobilisations and revolutions, but also, as a result, reflections on what human beings actually do owe each other, on the moral basis of human society, and on the nature of time, labour, value, creativity and violence.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-debt-the-first-five-thousand-years

#literature #book club #anarchist #david graeber #debt: the first 5000 years

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ciswomenofficial · 5 months

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Serious work to improve the rights of queer and trans people grows out of the barrel of a gun. Maybe a literal gun, maybe a riot, or maybe the gun of a bourgeoisie police officer in the case of liberal reform, but it’s all possible because of guns. Our society would collapse if there were no violence in it. All societies existing in present conditions do so because of violence.

If you want gay liberation, women’s liberation, or trans liberation, than you will have to do the kind of reforming of the economy that is not possible under the gun of the bourgeoisie police officer. The most you can achieve without restructuring the economy into a socialist economy and cultural revolution is the liberation of the gay settler or the gay middle class. If we want a total emancipation of the whole gay people, we need to navigate it though the primary contradiction: ultimately class, but in a colonial context racialized class.

And the anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggle in America has always at its best been armed and militant. Even Martin Luther Kings famous non-violent direct actions were attended by individuals wielding shotguns for self defence, to say nothing of the SNCC members who kept guns around their homes, the panthers, Malcom X, the American Indian Movement and many others among the chief forces and most politically advanced members of the colonized masses in that era. the anti- colonial struggle globally has also been armed and militant at its best; they fought a bloody war in Algeria, Nelson Mandela did bombings in South Africa, China valiantly fought off the Japanese invaders and the comparators who profited from American and European business interests. Even the first anti-colonial war of the modern era in Haiti was fought violently. Every slave revolt was fought through violence. Back in America some of those slave revolts (the ones happening domestically) and the fight fought by John Brown (supported by black anti-slavery activists such as Harriet Tubman) both drove the nation forward to the violent civil war that abolished slavery. The history of opposition to colonialism is bloody, and so it must be.

The idea that we must not give them resistance, the idea that resistance is what they want and makes us look bad is an ahistorical idea. No amount of hand-holding, or satire has ever defeated oppressors. Do you think there was no satire against the nazis? People didn’t take the nazis seriously enough because they were hypocritical and held probably false views. That did not stop them from taking over the Weimar government and declaring themselves the new German reich. No, the nazis were stopped by war. Civil war, international war, that is the most reliable way of stopping one’s enemies. Can we vote against the problem? Well, male Gen zers are—in general—turning to the right wing, and Trump is becoming more and more appealing to a lot of people while the democrats are losing ground by their own incompetence. Voting will not win is the issue any time soon—just as attempts at voting did not matter in the Weimar Republic and did not stop the nazis.

The force of fascism in society is not driven by poll numbers. Nor have other developments: Keynesian policies are popular in America, FDR is upheld as one of the greatest presidents, and yet his popular Keynesian reforms been being dismantled by neoliberal reforms since the Carter administration. No Democratic Party led government has reversed this purposed “Reganomics” as some erroneously call it. That is because these policies are driven by the historical changes in economic realities driven by the contradictions in capitalist economics. So is rising fascism. Rosa Luxembourg once said that either socialism will triumph or barbarism shall. The people of Germany chose nazi barbarism in the decades after that. We have two choices in the present: continue with capitalism and colonialism and fall into our own period of barbarism, or fight against them and prevent and defeat barbarism. Perhaps it will be a Keynesian barbarism and will not be barbaric to you personally. That does not seem as likely at the moment, when Bernie sanders campaign has failed so spectacularly, driven in part by Democratic Party scheming towards its emerging left wing. What is more likely is that we will be the subject of fascist barbarism.

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communistkenobi · 2 years

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hey, how would you explain neoliberalism to a baby poli sci major? i’ve always struggled with understanding the term because i haven’t been assigned anything to read about it yet

yeah no worries it’s a complicated concept! when people use the word they’re generally referring to one of two things - the process of neoliberalism itself, or the cultural/societal response to, and reinforcement of, neoliberalism as a way of thinking about the world. Sorry this is gonna be long lol but neoliberalism is a weird term that describes a bunch of complicated things that I think are best explained with examples and a bit of history.

the most useful definition of neoliberalism I’ve heard is that it’s an economic process whereby you privatise the public sphere; the free market is offered as the solution to various social problems. Before I describe it more in detail there is a bit of policy history that is important to know. It obviously didn’t arise out of nowhere; neoliberalism is a response to the post-WWII social welfare policies (sometimes referred to as the Keynesian welfare state) where a lot of stuff was nationalised, meaning that that service is now administered by the national (or sometimes regional) government. I’m Canadian so I’m not as familiar with US policy history, but this is when Canada nationalised its healthcare system for example, and iirc this is also around the same time when we got a national pension fund. Social housing (ie housing that isn’t sold on a market) and other social goods were also offered to people at low or no cost (payment for these services coming from taxes). Basically think of like, what if education, healthcare, and housing were offered to you as a public utility and not a product that is bought and sold to each individual person on a private market. This wasn’t universal by any means, like private housing and other privatised services were still dominant, but (again, at least in Canada) things like social housing were much more normalised and weren’t considered to be “housing for poor people” like it is now.

so that’s the policy stage on which neoliberalism arrives. the neoliberal “turn” in western states happened sometime between the late 1960s-90s depending on what country you’re looking at. This meant that a lot of things became privatised again. The process of doing this is usually to first decentralise or “download” the service to smaller regional or local governments (this is why today, cities each have things like their own separate housing policies), reducing federal/national funding streams to those social programs, and then finally defunding them completely. This is also coupled with lowering taxes and flattening progressive tax rates (im not a tax person so this is very simplified, but this means everyone pays similar amounts of taxes as opposed to being taxed relative to your income - this had the almost immediate effect of widening economic inequality). Because cities and states/provinces have less money than the national government, and because they were now receiving even less money due to lower taxes and reduced national funding, it’s a lot harder to run these programs, and so usually they eventually stop paying for them too, or they’ll partner with non-profits or charities who then administer those services (or they’ll sell them to private companies to run). This is why today, non-profits and other charitable organisations have such a large presence in providing services like homeless shelters, addiction recovery, mental health services, disability services, social services for other marginalised groups, etc. they effectively replace “the public realm” by administering basic social utilities to people, except now they’re not run by a single government, they’re run by individual charities with their own funding streams, standards of care, and policies.

And this had a huge effect on the way people think about themselves and other people! More and more aspects of your life were now framed as products you could choose to either buy or not buy. Social services are very often discussed as parts of the government that aren’t “profitable”, the obvious implication being that profit is the primary motive to offering, like, public transit, as opposed it being a public good that helps society function better by letting people move around more freely. You’ll also see these services framed as “handouts” for lazy people who don’t work hard - again, framing basic aspects of everyday life as things you must earn by constant participation in the market, first as a worker and then as a consumer. This is partially a neoliberal conception of public life.

I’ve seen it argued (by Greg Suttor if you want a specific citation lol) that ideologically, neoliberalism is about hiding the presence of the state from people. Society needs things like roads and water and housing and food and education and medical care to run effectively, but running them as a utility is expensive, and it’s basically become a unanimous agreement between all major political parties that spending money on government services is bad (for lots of complicated reasons, one of them being that capitalist interests are fundamentally opposed to paying for services that don’t generate profit), so instead you hand the responsibility off to private companies to do it, who then run it not as a utility for the benefit of the public but as a way for them to make money, turning the utility into a product. This doesn’t make the problem of, say, every person in your country needing a house go away, but now the burden is on each individual to access or not access that via the private market, and that access is dictated by the amount of money you have. It’s a way of de-collectivising mass social needs, and as a consequence it encourages people to think of themselves as individuals disconnected from a larger whole.

A good example to illustrate the cultural effects of neoliberalism is the rise of the concept of self-care, which is essentially pathologising and marketising leisure time - you work hard, you have a bad mental health day, you deserve to treat yourself by buying an expensive coffee, or a new hat, or going to the movies after work. The act of self care allows you to “responsibly” spend your money on things that aren’t absolutely necessary (like food, rent, and clothing) by framing those purchases as a mental health support. And I’m not criticising this rationalisation people do btw, I also do this lol, but this example illustrates that people have such deep anxiety on spending money on “frivolous” things that you need to justify a starbucks latte as a thing that will improve your mental health (+ therefore make you more productive at work).

Anyway this has gotten away from me a bit but I hope that’s helpful lol. I’m not a political theory person so this explanation is policy heavy, not because that’s the only thing that is important but because that is the part I’m most familiar with. Neoliberalism is something that has been happening for decades by now and is very mature. It’s a particular way of conceptualising state responsibility as limited and narrow - public needs are to be handled by the market, and the state handles things like police and border security (notably the only two ‘public services’ that have seen any substantial increase in funding). It’s also a way of understanding the world as a series of private individual interactions between a consumer and the market, often framed as democratic (“the freer the market, the freer the people”, “vote with your dollar”, etc), but what’s on the market are basic necessities you need to stay alive, so “not voting” is not really an option.

#asks

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arizonaconservativegal · 1 year

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Rep. Jim Jordan responds after Biden says he will hire more Dreamers to curb inflation: 'Hire Americans'

Lawrence Richard

Wed, December 21, 2022 at 5:26 AM EST

The Biden administration is looking to employ more migrants in the coming year to help bolster the economy, but a Republican lawmaker suggested President Biden look at hiring another group of people first: Americans.

While unemployment continues to fall in the post-pandemic months, millions of Americans remain unemployed, and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, took to Twitter Tuesday to call on President Biden and senior administration officials to consider first putting them to work.

"Why not just hire AMERICANS looking for jobs?" the Ohio Republican asked in a tweet, responding to a report of the Biden administration’s new plan.

On Tuesday, Axios reported President Biden was looking to tackle immigration reform in the coming year and to negotiate with a Republican majority in the House of Representatives.

EL PASO DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY AS US-MEXICO BORDER CROSSINGS SURGE: 'NOT SAFE'

His plan, according to the report, will include the hiring of more so-called "Dreamers," or "lawfully present" recipients of the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program or Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act.

READ ON THE FOX NEWS APP

DEMOCRATS FIRE UP PUSH FOR DACA AMNESTY IN LAME DUCK SESSION BEFORE GOP TAKES HOUSE

These people are eligible for work authorization in the U.S. as they wait for permanent residency.

According to the report, the Biden administration is looking to tackle two problems with one solution: As up to 14,000 migrants are expected to cross the border daily when Title 42 ends, the Biden administration is looking to get them into the workforce to lower inflation.

NEWSOM SAYS CALIFORNIA ABOUT TO ‘BREAK’ AMID FLOOD OF ILLEGAL MIGRANTS WHEN TITLE 42 EXPIRES

Immigration reform is "harder in the divided Congress, but it's so clearly necessary in light of what we're seeing in the job market," Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in a statement to Axios. "The thing that's underpinning inflation still — that’s driving inflation still — is this tight labor market."

"Immigration is a lever," she added. "We're down a million immigrants a year. That's a workforce that we need."

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

The upcoming Speaker of the House, likely Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., will determine the legislative agenda and will be responsible for taking up immigration reform — or not.

Title 42 is set to expire on Wednesday, Dec. 2

All I want for Christmas is for Keynesians to finally learn that you can't spend your way into prosperity and economic stability

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capitalism-is-parasitism · 11 days

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Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is a distinct ideology, named by its leading thinkers in 1938. Its development was funded, from the 1940s onwards, by some of the richest people on Earth. They built its infrastructure of persuasion until, in the late 1970s, when Keynesianism ran into trouble, it could occupy the ideological vacuum.

Neoliberalism is the means by which capital seeks to solve its biggest problem – a problem called democracy. Unlike laissez-faire economics or classical liberalism, which prevailed before most adults had the vote, neoliberalism uses the state in coherent and repeatable ways to impose its unpopular policies. The state is the force behind market forces, the whip enforcing “economic freedom”.

Neoliberalism’s greatest triumph is to persuade us that, in Margaret Thatcher’s words, “there is no alternative”. In reality, the doctrine is an alternative to the much better lives we might have led. In the new book I’ve written with the film-maker Peter Hutchison, The Invisible Doctrine, we seek to drag this ideology and its disastrous impacts into the light and show how it can be overthrown to fulfil the promise of a better world.

#neoliberalism #george monbiot #mental health

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testbank-zone · 1 month

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Test Bank For Macroeconomics 12th Edition By David Colander

Table of Contents PART I: INTRODUCTION: THINKING LIKE AN ECONOMIST Chapter 1: Economics and Economic Reasoning Chapter 2: The Production Possibility Model, Trade, and Globalization Appendix: Graphish: The Language of Graphs Chapter 3: Economic Institutions Appendix: The History of Economic Systems Chapter 4: Supply and Demand Chapter 5: Using Supply and Demand Appendix: Algebraic Representation of Supply, Demand, and Equilibrium PART II: MACROECONOMICS MACROECONOMIC BASICS Chapter 6: Economic Growth, Business Cycles, and Unemployment Chapter 7: Measuring and Describing the Aggregate Economy POLICY MODELS Chapter 8: The Keynesian Short-Run Policy Model: Demand-Side Policies Chapter 8W: The Multiplier Model Chapter 9: The Classical Long-Run Policy Model: Growth and Supply-Side Policies FINANCE, MONEY, AND THE ECONOMY Chapter 10: The Financial Sector and the Economy Appendix: A Closer Look at Financial Assets and Liabilities Chapter 11: Conventional Monetary Policy Chapter 12: Financial Crises, Regulation, and the Crypto Challenge TAXES, BUDGETS, AND FISCAL POLICY Chapter 13: Deficits and Debt: The Austerity Debate Chapter 14: The Fiscal Policy Dilemma MACROECONOMIC PROBLEMS Chapter 15: Jobs and Unemployment Chapter 16: Inflation, Deflation, and Macro Policy INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC POLICY ISSUES Chapter 17: Comparative Advantage, Exchange Rates, and Globalization Chapter 18: International Trade Policy INTERNATIONAL MACROECONOMIC POLICY ISSUES Chapter 19: International Financial Policy Appendix: History of Exchange Rate Systems Chapter 20: Macro Policy in a Global Setting Chapter 21: Structural Stagnation, Globalization and the Post-COVID Blues Chapter 22: Macro Policy in Developing Countries

Test Bank For Macroeconomics 12th Edition By David Colander

Read the full article

#TestBankForMacroeconomics12th

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cicaklah · 1 year

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I posted 1,297 times in 2022

That's 37 more posts than 2021!

427 posts created (33%)

870 posts reblogged (67%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@stickthisbig

@bourbonpowered

@sixohsixoheightfourtwo

@cicaklah

@llywela13

I tagged 1,226 of my posts in 2022

Only 5% of my posts had no tags

#hitman - 208 posts

#oxventure - 126 posts

#meme me - 121 posts

#oxventure in the dark - 68 posts

#fic writing problems - 60 posts

#fic meme - 40 posts

#mergo - 39 posts

#cicak does an art - 26 posts

#star trek - 25 posts

#needle felting - 24 posts

Longest Tag: 131 characters

#because for all she says she loves me and respects me and is proud of me she also loves being horrible to me so she can feel better

My Top Posts in 2022:

Dob, do you have any fatal allergies? As your fiance, I think I should know. Just in case.

Just your friendly neighborhood queen of thieves

See the full post

63 notes - Posted May 26, 2022

Being an economist on main again, soz...

The main difference between the schools of macro is: do individual changes make differences at the macro level? Or do only governments really make a difference at macro?

So yeah there's some more of why the uks economy kind of exploded this week.

88 notes - Posted October 2, 2022

See the full post

95 notes - Posted September 5, 2022

See the full post

118 notes - Posted May 28, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

I love a Tory leadership contest, it's such a carnival of dickheads who absolutely believe in themselves being exposed to the oxygen of press attention for the first time, and they mostly act like those deep sea creatures that explode when brought to the surface.

409 notes - Posted July 7, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #mostly posting because all my katie pearlhead posts in one place #and tumblr keeps hiding them from me #anyway a great year to hang out with youlot

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thepowerisyouth · 3 months

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How do I explain to capitalism that I am an informed customer who can very well tell that I am not going to finish a whole box salad in 4 days, and that I am also informed enough to grab the less expired one at the back, which I KNOW would be less wasteful for me to grab the less expired one, since I know I cannot finish that older salad in time

When I worked in produce we threw out old bagged salads all the damn time & it was because everyone knew to reach in the back and grab the newest one.

An inherently wasteful feature of capitalism is not understanding its audience and adapting. Capitalism hasnt realized yet that it has outpriced people from buying its own products by making it more expensive to have a family sized household, LIKE MAKING $ PER UNIT PRICES NOT EVEN SO A PERSON FACES AN INCENTIVE DEBATE ABOUT 2 DIFFERENT FORMS OF WASTE

God capitalism is a literal financial bubble doomed to fail hard.

Which is a good & bad thing. Looking back most social welfare programs are instituted during a depression, in a concept known as "Keynesian Economics"

I just think its really important we all stop accepting bandaid issues to the unnaturally extreme, manic/depressive cycling of capitalism

If my previous argument wasnt quite enough to convince anyone, let me add in the issue of OVERSUPPLY, which is being grossly ramped up in a situation like this, where Kroger does not know why the produce clerks throw away bag salads. They just see loss figures from thrown away goods & sales figures and keep ordering from producers in excess

Lastly. Lastly. Last part of this long rant.

COMPANIES ONLY POST THEFT FROM CUSTOMERS, THEFT FROM EMPLOYEES, AND LOSS OF EXPIRED GOODS IN ONE SINGLE FIGURE KNOWN AS "SHRINKAGE"

And every argument against corporate theft I see online reports only the $ figure of shrinkage as proof.

This is a big deal. I'm pointing out that the oversupply problem is being blame-shifted to theft, which just isn't true at all

"Bubble"

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ma1up891186 · 8 months

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KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS

The central tenet of this school of thought is that government intervention can stabilize the economy.

Circa 1930. John Maynard Keynes (British Economist) spearheaded this movement.

THE REVOLUTIONARY IDEA

Inadequate demand leads to prolonged periods of high unemployment. An economies output of goods and services is the sum of consumption, investment, government purchases and net exports. There are three tenets: 1. Aggregate demand is influenced by public and private economic decisions. Keynesian economics supports a mixed economy guided mainly by the private sector but partly operated by the government. 2. Prices, and especially wages, respond slowly to changes in supply and demand 3. Changes in aggregate demand, whether anticipated or unanticipated, have their greatest short-run effect on real output and employment, not on prices. Keynesians believe that, because prices are somewhat rigid, fluctuations in any component of spending—consumption, investment, or government expenditures—cause output to change. If government spending increases, for example, and all other spending components remain constant, then output will increase.

These are the findings of Keynes' books The general Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), and Treatise on Money.

A key quote from his works was surrounding the argument that governments should solve problems in the short run rather than wait for market forces to fix things over the long run, because "In the long run we are all dead."

Post 1970's, many advanced economies suffered stagflation, a term many of my peers will be familiar with (in the years 2022-23, we have experienced one of the worst examples of this phenomenon thanks to the Russian-Ukraine war, cost of living crisis, mild market collapse following the event of NFT's and digital currency like bitcoin.) Keynesian economics had no response for stagflation, which gave an opportunity for Monetarism to gain popularity, as they doubted that governments had the fiscal responsibility, policy or ability to be able to regulate the business cycle.

"If you were going to turn to only one economist to understand the problems facing the economy, there is little doubt that the economist would be John Maynard Keynes. Although Keynes died more than a half-century ago, his diagnosis of recessions and depressions remains the foundation of modern macroeconomics. Keynes wrote, ‘Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slave of some defunct economist.’ In 2008, no defunct economist is more prominent than Keynes himself." Gregory Mankiw, (Harvard) New York Times, 2008

#research #Keynesian Economics #economics #economy #Caity explains

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