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Arabica Robusta

The Lost Science of Classical Political Economy | New Economic Perspectives - 0 views

  • The problem with this reactionary stance is that attempts to base economics on the “real” economy focusing on technology and universals are so materialistic as to be non-historical and lacking in the political element of property and finance.
  • A “real” economic analysis focusing on their common denominators would miss the distinct ways in which each accumulated wealth in the hands of (or under the management of) a ruling elite different modes of property and finance, and hence with what the classical economists came to classify as “unearned income.”
  • For classical and Progressive Era economists, the word “reform” meant taxing economic rent or minimizing it. Today it means giving away public enterprise to kleptocrats and political insiders, or simply for indebted governments to conduct a pre-bankruptcy sale of the public domain to buyers (who in turn buy on credit, subtracting their interest payments from their taxable income).
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  • The problem is not mathematics as such, but the junk economics and junk statistics used by the mathematicians who have captured the discipline of economics. For contrast, one need only turn to the 19th century’s rich toolbox of economic concepts developed to analyze today’s most pressing problems.
  • The overburden of public debt prompted Adam Smith to comment that year that no government ever had repaid its debts, and to propose means to keep it in check by freeing the American colonies that were a major source of conflict with France, for instance, and most of all, by paying for wars out of current taxation so that populations would feel their immediate cost rather than running into debt to international bankers such as the Dutch.
  • The early 19th-century French reformer St. Simon proposed that banks shift from making straight interest-bearing loans to “equity” loans, taking payment in dividends rather than stipulated interest charges so that debt service would be kept within the means to pay. (Islamic law already had banned interest.) This became the inspiration for the industrial banking policies developed in continental Europe later in the century. St. Simon influenced Marx, whose manuscript notes for what became Vol. III of Capital and Theories of Surplus Value collected what he read from Martin Luther to Richard Price on how debts multiplied by purely mathematical laws independently of the “real” economy¹s ability to produce a surplus. The classical concept of productive credit was to provide borrowers with the means to pay. Unproductive debts had to be paid out of revenue obtained elsewhere.
  • Interest paid by consumers was treated as a psychological choice, while industrial profit was treated as a return for the widening time it presumably took to produce capital-intensive goods and services. The ideas of “time preference” and the “roundabout” cycle of production were substituted for the simpler idea of charging a price for credit without any out-of-pocket cost or real risk undertaken by bankers. The world in which economic theorists operated was becoming increasingly speculative and hypothetical.
  • After the Napoleonic wars ended in 1815, Britain’s leading bank spokesman, David Ricardo, applied the concept of economic rent to the land in the process of arguing against the agricultural tariffs (the protectionist Corn Laws) in his 1817 Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. His treatment deftly sidestepped what had been the “original” discussion of rentier income squeezed out by the financial sector.
Arabica Robusta

The twilight of neoliberalism: can popular struggles create new worlds from below? | op... - 0 views

  • We Make Our Own History rethinks humanist Marxism as a theory of collective action, including the ways in which social movements from below can develop from localised struggles over individual issues to far-reaching projects for social change (a welfare state, an end to patriarchy, an ecologically sustainable society). It also looks at the history of movements from above – those which can draw on the resources of capital, the state or cultural power to impose themselves.
  • If the ideologists of neoliberalism want to present it as the natural order of humanity, a more sober historical assessment points out that it has lasted about as long as Keynesianism did before it – a few decades – and is just as vulnerable to the collapse of the alliances which sustain it.
  • The Latin American pink tide demonstrated US inability, for the first time in a century or more, to impose its will (in military, foreign policy or economic terms) on its Latin American “backyard”. The planned “long war on terror” is basically over, with the original strategy for a rolling series of attacks on rogue states buried in the sand and political support for US wars collapsing not only among US elites, but also their European and Arab allies under the impact of the anti-war movements of 2003 in particular. This has fed into a broader weakness in relation to control of the strategically crucial Middle East and North African region manifested in the “Arab Spring”, in particular events in Egypt, and subsequent failure to secure support for war in Syria. Meanwhile, the Wikileaks and Snowden affairs have highlighted the legitimacy crisis of the supposedly all-powerful surveillance state.
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  • All of this also dramatises the inability of neoliberal elites to offer any effective leadership, or to manage any strategy more complex than “hold on tight and cross your fingers”. The tentative criticisms of neoliberalism made at the start of the current crisis by isolated elite members have had no real implication beyond the narrowly technical (“quantitative easing”, and so on.) There is no significant dissent within elites – political and financial, or their allies in academia and journalism – about the proposal that the only way forward is more austerity, more neoliberalism, more privatisations.
  • We are increasingly in a zombie-like phase of capitalist development (Peck 2010b), in which elites are incapable of solving contradictions through new hegemonic projects. This signals the onset of the twilight of neoliberalism...
  • Many of these aspects of the crisis are closely associated with popular movements: Latin American struggles, revolts in the Arab world, the anti-war movement, protests against the security state, the global justice and anti-austerity movements, and ecological movements for climate justice. This does not mean, however, that movements will necessarily be the beneficiaries of the crisis: as our historical account shows, it is one thing to make a particular hegemonic alliance politically unsustainable but another thing altogether to be able to create a new alliance capable of charting a new direction.
  • These processes of external struggle, internal learning and alliance-building are what matter most, and there is no short-cut (in universities, parties or shouting at the computer screen) that can usefully avoid them.
  • any attempt to shortcircuit the slow development of popular agency, whether through opinion politics or intellectual critique which discuss structures in isolation from the kinds of agency which sustain them – and the kinds of agency needed to overcome them – is doomed to failure. The most effective orientation for change is one which starts from dialogue with practically situated struggles – those that people have to engage in to sustain their lives – and supports their extension in alliances across space but also across the social world, into far-reaching projects for change which are grounded in a wide range of different situations.
Arabica Robusta

Rebel Cities, Urban Resistance and Capitalism: a Conversation with David Harvey - 0 views

  • Now, the reason why Marx is important in all of this is because Marx had an acute understanding of how capital-accumulation works. He understood that this perpetual growth machine contains many internal contradictions. For example, one of the foundational contradictions Marx talks about is between use-value and exchange-value. You can see this worked out in the housing situation very clearly. What’s the use-value of a house? Well, it’s a form of shelter, a place of privacy, where one can create a family life. We can list a few other use-values of the house, but the house also has an exchange-value. Remember, when you rent the house, you’re simply renting the house for what it’s worth. But when you buy the house, you now view this home as a form of savings, and after a while, you use the house as a form of speculation.
  • Marx talks about this contradiction and it’s an important one. We must ask the question: What should we be doing with housing? What should we do with healthcare? What are we doing with education? Shouldn’t we promote the use-value of education? Or should we promote the exchange-value of these things? Why should life necessities be distributed through the exchange-value system? Obviously we should reject the exchange-value system, which is caught up in speculative activity, profiteering, and actually disrupts the ways in which we can acquire necessary products and services. Those are the kind of contradictions Marx was well aware of.
  • My interest in this derives from a very simple contradiction: We’re supposed to live under capitalism, and capitalism is supposed to be competitive so you would expect that capitalists and entrepreneurs would like competition. Well, it turns out that capitalists do everything they can to avoid competition. They love monopolies.
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  • How do you think protestors in today’s society can more effectively disrupt urban economies? Harvey: Hurricane Sandy really disrupted the lives of those living in New York City. So, I don’t see why organized social movements couldn’t disrupt life as usual in big cities and therefore cause damage to ruling-class interests. We have seen many historical examples of this. For example, in the 1960s, the disruptions that occurred in many cities in the United States caused massive disruptions to business. The political and business classes were quick to respond because of the level of disruption and destruction. I mention in the book the immigrant workers demonstrations in the spring of 2006. The demonstrations were in response to Congress attempting to criminalize illegal immigrants. Subsequently, people mobilized in places like Los Angeles and Chicago, and significantly disrupted city business.
  • Participatory budgeting is currently happening in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where the Workers Party developed a system through which local populations and assemblies decide what their tax money should be spent on. Thus, they hold popular assemblies, and so forth, which decide how to utilize public funds and services. Again, here’s a democratic reform that initially took place in Porto Alegre, but has since been passed along to European cities.
  • In Chapter Five, you write, “In the Marxist tradition, urban struggles are often ignored or dismissed as being devoid of revolutionary potential or significance.
  • I take it as symbolic importance that the first two acts of the Paris Commune were to abolish night work in the bakeries, a labor question, and to impose a moratorium on rent, an urban question.” Can you talk about the privileging of industrial workers in Marxist ideology? 
  • This idea of a vanguard struggle leading to a new society has been around for some time. However, what’s fascinating is the lack of alternatives to this vision, or at least variants of its intent and purpose. Of course, a lot of this comes from Marx’s Vol. I of Capital — emphasizing the factory worker. This idea that the vanguard workers party is going to take us to the new promise land of anti-capitalist, let’s call it ‘communist’ society has been persistent for over one hundred years. I’ve always felt that this is too limited a conception of who is the proletariat and who’s in the ‘vanguard.’ Also, I’ve always been interested in class-struggle dynamics and their relationships with urban social movements.
  • When you look at the wide range of urban social movements, you’ll find some are anti-capitalist and others are the opposite. But I would make the same remark about some forms of traditional union organizing. For example, there are some unions who look at organizing as a way to privilege the privileged workers of society. Of course I don’t like this idea. Then, there are others who are creating a more just and equitable world.
  • That way, in Gramsci’s thinking, they could get a better picture of what the entire working-class looks like, not just those who are organized in factories and so forth. Including people like the unemployed, temporary workers and all of the people you previously mentioned who were not in traditional industrial sector jobs. So, Gramsci proposed that these two kinds of political organizing methods should be intertwined in order to truly represent the proletariat. In essence, my thinking reflects Gramsci’s in this regard. How do we begin to care for all of the working people within a city? Who does this? Traditional unions tend not to do this.
  • an you talk about some of those cities, such as Al Alto, Bolivia? Also, I was in Madison, Wisconsin in 2011 during the labor protests, and I must say, it’s been interesting and utterly frustrating to experience the internal dynamics of the labor movement, and how it interacts with non- unionized workers and citizens. Unfortunately,  the union movement stifles serious dissent and resistance.
  • The reason I mentioned Trumka was because I think Trumka and many of those within the organized union movement understand that they can no longer go it alone; they require the help of the entire workforce, unionized or otherwise. This is always the challenge when organizing: How much support do we want from these large entities? And how much of what they’re doing is out of a true sense of solidarity? How much of it is for personal gain? My own experience in Baltimore, surrounding living wage campaigns, mirrors your experience to some extent. The unions were generally hostile to these campaigns and didn’t help, generally speaking. However, we did receive a lot of help from local unions.
  • There’s a moment in the film that’s somewhat funny: The guys can’t picket anymore because of the Taft-Hartley legislation, so the women take over the picketing because there’s nothing banning them from joining the protests. Then, the men have to take over the household jobs. Interestingly, the men quickly begin to understand why the women were asking for running water, and other things from their employer that would make daily life much easier.
Arabica Robusta

Neoliberalism and the revenge of the "social" | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • This also poses questions about the latest manifestation of ‘neoliberalism’. The fact that it is social media that is facilitating this new form of state power, that it is social networks that are the object of its gaze, may indicate that neoliberal government no longer places quite so much emphasis on the market, as a mechanism for organizing knowledge, regulating freedom and achieving transparency.
    • Arabica Robusta
       
      Has neoliberal governmentality ever really emphasized the market?  Below the ideological/depoliticized myths, neoliberalism has been about strong government "facilitation" of corporate neo-colonization.
  • States play an important role in making ‘society’ visible and measurable, through collecting and publishing large quantities of statistics. But the claim of social theorists and sociologists in the tradition of Emile Durkheim is that ‘society’ has some reality, over and above the particular statistics through which we come to know it.
  • The social hovers as a paradox, between a space of state coercion governed by law, and a space of market spontaneity governed by individual incentives and price. When acting socially we are both rule-bound and free at the same time. And it was precisely this mysterious and contradictory nature that led pioneering neoliberal thinkers, such as Friedrich Von Hayek, to pour scorn on the very idea. The term ‘social’, he argued, is a “weasel-word par excellence. Nobody knows what it actually means”.
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  • It’s important to stress – as Philip Mirowski does in his new book, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste – that neoliberals were never hostile to the state, which they understood as a necessary source of coercion, for the purposes of preventing political upheaval.
    • Arabica Robusta
       
      "Preventing political upheaval."  The mask slips.  States are there to keep the hoi polloi in line while the "technocrats" expertly run the market system.
  • Hayek would be distressed to know that in recent years, there has been an explosion of new types of accounting, governance and policy intervention which come dressed in the rhetoric of the ‘social’. Social enterprise, social media, social indicators, social impact bonds, social neuroscience.
  • I would suggest that, lying between these two interpretations, is a third option: that neoliberalism is being reinvented in ways that incorporate social logic, as a means of resisting critique and delaying crisis.
  • Without other people to guide and support them, provide norms and examples, they start to behave in ways that are self-destructive and destabilizing. This is the central insight of behavioural and happiness economics, which are achieving growing influence in policy-making circles right now.
  • The ‘social’ is brought back in as a way of providing support, such that individuals can continue to live the self-reliant, risk-aware, healthy lifestyles that neoliberalism requires of them.
  • At present, the digital tools used to analyse social life are in their infancy, and are largely attracting interest from marketing firms. But new techno-utopian policy visions, of ‘smart cities’ and digital tracking of health behaviours, look set to make pattern recognition and relationship management a key purpose of government. This represents the coming of what Geoff Mulgan has termed the ‘relational state’, or what I have previously described as ‘neocommunitarianism’
    • Arabica Robusta
       
      Also known as panoptical surveillance.
  • But this misses the logic of the emerging technical apparatus of government. Where neoliberalism integrates the logic of the social, it is precisely relationships between actors that are being observed and measured, and not the actors themselves. It is in correlations and patterns where value lies in a 21st century Big Data society, and not in the properties or preference of individuals, as was the case in a 20th century statistical and market society. And it is in the identification of hitherto invisible relationships that networked digital media holds out promise for security agencies. There is nothing innocent about meta-data.
  • In an effort to stave off their opponents, political movements can often end up stealing their clothes. Britain’s Labour Party arguably delivered a better version of Thatcherism than the Conservative Party was ever able to.
  • Neoliberalism’s abiding passion was always to destroy socialism, but in practice it may have ended up with far more of the technocratic elements of ‘actually existing’ state socialism than its ideologues could ever imagine (as I discuss here). When one considers our current predicament, in which our social and private lives are subjected to relentless quantification and optimization, the following prediction looks prescient: “the whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory”. This was in fact expressed as an optimistic vision of what a good society might look like in the future. And the visionary was none other than Vladimir Lenin.
Arabica Robusta

David Harvey Reviews Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century - 0 views

  • He demolishes the widely-held view that free market capitalism spreads the wealth around and that it is the great bulwark for the defense of individual liberties and freedoms. Free-market capitalism, in the absence of any major redistributive interventions on the part of the state, Piketty shows, produces anti-democratic oligarchies.
  • What Piketty does show statistically (and we should be indebted to him and his colleagues for this) is that capital has tended throughout its history to produce ever-greater levels of inequality. This is, for many of us, hardly news. It was, moreover, exactly Marx’s theoretical conclusion in Volume One of his version of Capital. Piketty fails to note this, which is not surprising since he has since claimed, in the face of accusations in the right wing press that he is a Marxist in disguise, not to have read Marx’s Capital.
  • What Piketty does show statistically (and we should be indebted to him and his colleagues for this) is that capital has tended throughout its history to produce ever-greater levels of inequality. This is, for many of us, hardly news. It was, moreover, exactly Marx’s theoretical conclusion in Volume One of his version of Capital. Piketty fails to note this, which is not surprising since he has since claimed, in the face of accusations in the right wing press that he is a Marxist in disguise, not to have read Marx’s Capital.
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  • And he gives a thoughtful defense of inheritance taxes, progressive taxation and a global wealth tax as possible (though almost certainly not politically viable) antidotes to the further concentration of wealth and power.
  • The law is the law and that is that. Marx would obviously have attributed the existence of such a law to the imbalance of power between capital and labor. And that explanation still holds water.
  • As Alan Budd, an economic advisor to Margaret Thatcher confessed in an unguarded moment, anti-inflation policies of the 1980s turned out to be “a very good way to raise unemployment, and raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes…what was engineered there in Marxist terms was a crisis of capitalism which recreated a reserve army of labour and has allowed capitalists to make high profits ever since.”
  • “All told,” he writes, “over the period 1932-1980, nearly half a century, the top federal income tax in the United States averaged 81 percent.” And this did not in any way dampen growth (another piece of Piketty’s evidence that rebuts right wing beliefs).
  • After 1980 top tax rates came down and capital gains – a major source of income for the ultra-wealthy – were taxed at a much lower rate in the US, hugely boosting the flow of wealth to the top one percent. But the impact on growth, Piketty shows, was negligible. So “trickle down” of benefits from the rich to the rest (another right wing favorite belief) does not work. None of this was dictated by any mathematical law. It was all about politics.
  • Piketty’s formulation of the mathematical law disguises more than it reveals about the class politics involved. As Warren Buffett has noted, “sure there is class war, and it is my class, the rich, who are making it and we are winning.” One key measure of their victory is the growing disparities in wealth and income of the top one percent relative to everyone else.
  • The whole of neo-classical economic thought (which is the basis of Piketty’s thinking) is founded on a tautology. The rate of return on capital depends crucially on the rate of growth because capital is valued by way of that which it produces and not by what went into its production. Its value is heavily influenced by speculative conditions and can be seriously warped by the famous “irrational exuberance” that Greenspan spotted as characteristic of stock and housing markets. If we subtract housing and real estate – to say nothing of the value of the art collections of the hedge funders – from the definition of capital (and the rationale for their inclusion is rather weak) then Piketty’s explanation for increasing disparities in wealth and income would fall flat on its face, though his descriptions of the state of past and present inequalities would still stand.
  • Restricting the supply of capital to new investment (a phenomena we are now witnessing) ensures a high rate of return on that capital which is in circulation. The creation of such artificial scarcity is not only what the oil companies do to ensure their high rate of return: it is what all capital does when given the chance. This is what underpins the tendency for the rate of return on capital (no matter how it is defined and measured) to always exceed the rate of growth of income. This is how capital ensures its own reproduction, no matter how uncomfortable the consequences are for the rest of us. And this is how the capitalist class lives
Arabica Robusta

Benjamin Kunkel reviews 'Capital in the 21st Century' by Thomas Piketty, tran... - 0 views

  • Piketty wants to recover the scope of political economy without forfeiting the quantitative rigour of contemporary economics. He has hitched his orthodox training to a Marxian research programme: to explain the course of capitalism since the French and Industrial Revolutions, no less, and to glimpse its future itinerary, with special reference to inequalities of income and wealth.
  • Although he declines to say what distinguishes capitalism proper from its predecessors, Piketty proposes that two fundamental laws govern it. The first co-ordinates ‘the three most important concepts for analysing the capitalist system’. The capital/income ratio is society’s total capital as a multiple of total annual income; the rate of return – not quite the same as the rate of profit, as we will see – is the annual income from capital as a percentage of its size; and the share of capital income is the portion of total output flowing to owners relative to the trickle, in per capita terms, irrigating the lives of workers.
  • What drives the polarisation? Piketty’s ‘second fundamental law of capitalism’ promises more analytic power than the first. It states that the capital/income ratio grows according to the divergence between the rate of return or savings rate (for Piketty, these are effectively the same) and the overall growth rate of the economy.
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  • This is the triumph of Capital in the 21st Century: nothing about the book is more impressive than the range and richness of its statistical information. (Piketty excuses the inaccuracy of Kuznets’s theory on the basis of the incomplete data, going back only a few decades, at his disposal.)
  • One merit of the book is that it both insists on the importance of data and, at least where modern societies are concerned, highlights the uncertainties involved in its collection.
  • On the one hand, the law is indisputable: if capital grows faster than output, the proportion of wealth to income necessarily rises. Only a dip in the rate of return, broader capital ownership, or the destruction of capital might retard or reverse the process. But what does the formula explain?
  • The exceptional character of the period between the First World War and the 1973-74 recession becomes the more striking when Piketty emphasises that his second law of capitalism held long before capitalism: ‘The inequality r>g has clearly been true throughout most of human history, right up to the eve of World War One, and it will probably be true again in the 21st century.’ In a chart graphing the rate of return against ‘the growth rate, at the world level, of world output from Antiquity to 2100’, r hovers between 4 and 5 per cent until 1820, by which time the Industrial Revolution has spread beyond England. It plummets nearly as low as 1 per cent around the outbreak of the First World War, and then undertakes a steep climb throughout the 20th century before adjusting to a moderate slope that stretches up to and past our time into the indefinite and enduringly capitalist future. Across the same stretch of history, the global growth rate g ascends a gentle gradient until the mid-18th century, after which new summits beckon.
  • Piketty’s theoretical troubles may start with his definition of capital as wealth in general.
  • In his conclusion Piketty promotes r>g to the status of ‘the central contradiction of capitalism’. The phrase is meant to evoke Marx and the theory to better him.
  • At a distance Piketty’s central contradiction resembles Marx’s. Here too capital, ‘more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labour’, overaccumulates relative to labour. But at least in formal terms, Marx’s theory is clearly superior. It proposes a genuine contradiction – capital accumulation undermines itself – and entails a mechanism specific to capitalism: the drive for profits through the exploitation of wage labour. Piketty’s r>g is not, by contrast, the ‘fundamental logical contradiction’ that he claims. Capital accumulation, left to outrun economic growth indefinitely, would create ‘an endless inegalitarian spiral’ threatening less to profitability than ‘to democratic societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based’.
  • Large fortunes would come to represent recent entrepreneurial feats more than the dumb luck of inheritance, and revenue from the tax could address public purposes neglected by private investors. Piketty hazards his ‘utopian idea’ as contemporary societies approach what he sees as a fork in the road. One way leads to concentrations of wealth incompatible with liberal democracy, the other to a redomesticated capitalism supporting ‘a social state for the 21st century’.
  • A recent study calculated that in the US the top 10 per cent of the income distribution enjoys an effect on political outcomes 15 times that of the remaining 90 per cent. Other countries are plutocratic to similar degrees. How are the executive committees of the ruling class in countries across the world to act in concert to impose Piketty’s tax on just this class?
  • But even without it, a rising capital/income ratio would no longer automatically deepen inequality. The notion of such a revolution – first in one country, then gatheringly international but not yet universal – is fanciful right now. But is it more so than a global capital tax requiring the co-ordination of virtually all nations? The longer global capitalism goes unreformed the more likely nations and regions are to reject it.
  • Piketty, ‘vaccinated for life against the conventional but lazy rhetoric of anticapitalism’ by the fall of the Berlin Wall, might consider such speculations an ideological relapse. He wants his tax on capital to ‘promote the general interest over private interests while preserving economic openness and the forces of competition’, and has said in interviews that the indispensable role of markets in complex economies justifies the persistence of capitalism.
  • Visions of a postcapitalist future, from Alec Nove’s Economics of Feasible Socialism (1983) to David Schweickart’s After Capitalism (2002), have more often been forms of market socialism. (Schweickart folds ‘a capital assets tax’ much like Piketty’s into a comprehensive transitional programme.) The private accumulation of capital would no longer drive the economy, even as the market still facilitated much private consumption and guided much public investment. Piketty might reject the idea in any or all varieties. For now he shows no awareness of it. The blindspot isn’t surprising in a writer who has boasted to the American press, perhaps not entirely disingenuously, of his unfamiliarity with Marx’s writing, and who in his book excuses his indifference to Marxist work generally by complaining that ‘one sometimes has the impression’ in reading Sartre, Althusser or Badiou that ‘questions of capital and class inequality are only of moderate interest to them.’ He would have done better to consult historians and economists than philosophers.
  • But the familiar equation of markets with capitalism lacks a historical or theoretical basis. It ignores the extensive markets in many precapitalist societies and the strong element of monopoly and state interference with markets throughout the history of capitalism.
  • Piketty’s appetite for and command over data, for one thing, are worth emulating. And surely if intelligent economists start reckoning with Marxian thought not as a historical curio but as a long and living tradition, they won’t simply ratify propositions about which Marxists don’t agree themselves. Investigated rather than ignored, Marxist ideas would be variously confirmed, refined or rejected. For the moment, however, mainstream economists, including the hero of the hour, seem reluctant to press their discoveries beyond the borders of the respectable. Their journalistic counterparts are if anything more timid.
  • The book is more exciting considered as a failure than as a triumph. Piketty has bid a lingering goodbye to the latter-day marginalism of mainstream economics but has not yet arrived at the reconstructed political economy foreseen at the outset. His theoretical reach fumbles where his statistical grasp is sure, and he leaves intact the questions of economic value, distributive justice and capitalist dynamics that he raises.
Arabica Robusta

Financialisation, politics & the future of socialism: A conversation in Seattle with Ca... - 0 views

  • What’s that new paradigm? We can’t go back to old-style communism–for instance, Stalinism. Absolutely not. I would be the first one to object…Let me put it very succinctly to you: I would be in the gulag under that regime. People like me would be in the gulag and people like Hillary Clinton would be in the Politburo.
Arabica Robusta

Neoliberalism has hijacked our vocabulary | Doreen Massey | Comment is free | guardian.... - 0 views

  • The message underlying this use of the term customer for so many different kinds of human activity is that in all almost all our daily activities we are operating as consumers in a market – and this truth has been brought in not by chance but through managerial instruction and the thoroughgoing renaming of institutional practices. The mandatory exercise of "free choice" – of a GP, of a hospital, of schools for one's children – then becomes also a lesson in social identity, affirming on each occasion our consumer identity.
  • Another word that reinforces neoliberal common sense is "growth", currently deemed to be the entire aim of our economy.
  • Instead of an unrelenting quest for growth, might we not ask the question, in the end: "What is an economy for?", "What do we want it to provide?"
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  • Where only transactions for money are recognised as belonging to "the economy", the vast amount of unpaid labour – as conducted for instance in families and local areas – goes uncounted and unvalued. We need to question that familiar categorisation of the economy as a space into which people enter in order to reluctantly undertake unwelcome and unpleasing "work", in return for material rewards which they can use for consuming.
  • Above all, we need to bring economic vocabulary back into political contention, and to question the very way we think about the economy in the first place. For something new to be imagined, let alone to be born, our current economic "common sense" needs to be challenged root and branch.
Arabica Robusta

UnderstandingSociety: Methodological individualism today - 0 views

  • The elementary unit of social life is the individual human action. To explain social institutions and social change is to show how they arise as the result of the actions and interaction of individuals.
  • It appears to be a version of the physicist’s preference for reduction to ensembles of simple homogeneous "atoms" transported to the social and behavioral sciences. This demand for reduction might take the form of conceptual reduction or compositional reduction. The latter takes the form of demonstrations of how higher level properties are made up of lower level systems. The conceptual reduction program didn't work out well, any more than Carnap's phenomenological physics did.
  • In addition to this bias derived from positivist philosophy of science, there was also a political subtext in some formulations of the theory in the 1950s. Karl Popper and JWN Watkins advocated for MI because they thought this methodology was less conducive to the "collectivist" theories of Marx and the socialists. If collectivities don't exist, then collectivism is foolish.
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  • Another phase of thinking was more ontological than conceptual. These thinkers wanted to make it clear that social things, causes, and structures depended on the activities of individuals and nothing else.
  • There is one aspect of the tradition that I haven't mentioned yet: the idea that we can carve out the individual as separate from and prior to the social -- a view sometimes referred to as "atomistic".
  • In my view, the only claims about methodological individualism that seem unequivocally plausible today are the ontological requirements -- the various formulations of the notion that social things are composed of the actions and thoughts of individuals and nothing else. This implies as well that the supervenience claim and the microfoundations claim are plausible as well.
Arabica Robusta

Britain's Brezhnev-style capitalism | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • Wandering around Stratford Westfield the other day, I had a similar but more pessimistic thought: maybe capitalism is gradually morphing into the 'actually existing' state socialism of the old Eastern Bloc.
  • Yet Suzi reported that, while Westfield Stratford had duly delivered its promised 8,000 jobs, Peckham Rye Lane's local market was already a source of 13,000, via a far greater number of businesses. This is aside from the webs of social networks that accompany an 'embedded' market economy, in contrast to identikit businesses that are taking over most highstreets. The notion that in an age of shrinking social security, policy-makers might view such a street as anything other than an irreplaceable socio-economic benefit is just bizarre. Why such government suspicion of the market?
  • My feeling is (and I discuss this in a book I'm just finishing) that neoliberalism has entered a post-critical, repetitive phase, in which certain things have to be spoken - delivery, efficiency, security, competitiveness - but in order to hold the edifice together, rather than to reveal anything as objectively 'delivered', 'efficient', 'secure' or 'competitive. Political systems which do not create space for critique encounter this need for mandatory repetition immediately, as occurred to state socialism.
Arabica Robusta

The slow death of neoliberalism - 0 views

  • Although the purity of Hayek’s vision was inevitably polluted by the messy reality of politics, the new era ushered in by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan treated free markets, governed by the magic of price, as the basis for the moral and economic logic of state and society
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