There appears to be a small subset of Internet Marxists – emphasis on the words small subset – who embrace Neoclassical or Austrian ideas. Take, for instance, the Freshwater Say’s Law Internet Marxists, who maintain that the state is powerless to do anything to alter the level of capitalist production and employment. In the end, the state will supposedly drag down capitalists under the weight of its own “unproductive” activity or bring on a Fiscal Crisis of the State. This will be the day on which the issuer of the currency somehow runs out of its own currency.…heteconomist
Internet Marxists Who Are More Neoclassical than Austrian
Peter Cooper
9 comments:
http://markwadsworth.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/the-professors-new-clothes.html?m=1
I'd be interested to know your thoughts on this Tom.
In a previous era when stocks were held for dividend yield and reasonable expectation of modest appreciation based on real growth rather than short term changes in market capitalization based on hope (and a lot of hype) aka the greater fool theory. Not gonna happen. change in price in the secondary market was probably informational. Now I find that questionable. However, the authors of the paper claim that prices in secondary markets do
There are three ways to "make money."
1. Income.
2. Rent. interest and dividends
3. Asset appreciation. Presently this is the preferred way because it is where the big money comes fast and there is a lot of room to maneuver. Moreover, asset valuation has become disconnected from making stuff. Work is less and less a part of the process as technology takes over. A lot of asset valuation is based on the "promise" of technology and gaining and maintaining market share. So now a lot of price is in the sizzle rather than the steak.
Change in price in the secondary market was probably informational previously and had a bearing on efficiency. Now I find that less likely since valuation in equities markets are no longer as closely connected to the fundamentals as previously. Asset prices seem to have taken on a life of their own so that now there is less connection between the financial and non-financial.
Previously, the non-financial led the financial whereas now the relationship has been reversed. People judge an economy by how well the equity market is doing rather than actual production. So we have the curious situation in the US and UK where FIRE is increasing its share of GDP and manufacturing is decreasing. This raises the question of whether this is actual growth the illusion of growth.
I don't see now this is positively impacting either efficiency or effectiveness. I get the impression instead that developed countries are maxing out and turning to finance as an alternative to non-financial growth to keep the game going. The real game is investing in (and controlling) emerging economies that are actually growing. Hence, neo-imperialism and neocolonialism.
Michael Hudson has written a lot on this.
" I get the impression instead that developed countries are maxing out and turning to finance as an alternative to non-financial growth to keep the game going"
Finance is a way of creating monetary velocity in the financial circuit that keeps GDP growing even though the operation of the real circuit has stagnated.
We know, for example, that pensions are a complete waste of time and are far more efficiently provided by a simple basic income after some arbitrary retirement date that society finds acceptable. (You don't want the productive economy resenting pensioners). Yet you have basic income adherents who also are huge fans of private pension provision - with all the paradox of thrift, asset price bubble issues and staff inefficiency (corporate pensions are there to stop staff moving to better jobs) that causes.
It's almost like they have huge private pension pots themselves they are rather more protective of than their plan for others would suggest...
It may be that the problem is with the accounting, which handles things that can be valued far more effectively than the value in services, which is in people's heads and not on the balance sheet.
I'm not an economist, but when people say that finance makes money out of money, rather than out of things, like manufacturing and services, I wonder where the money actually comes from? It's got to be from the ordinary people doing the work. In other words, as finance blows itself up into ever bigger bubbles this has to be really just rent extraction, with ever cleverer ways of screwing everyone else. In the UK property prices keep going up faster than wages, but how do people keep managing to find the money? They must be living out of the dustbins by now.
In the UK a group of Marxist became out and out libertarians while still calling themselves to be Marxists. They came to believe that the absolute liberty of the individual was Marxist. And these crazy people managed to infiltrate much the British establishment, even though their definition of liberty even extended into believing that child poon should be legalised.
From George Monbiot of the Guardian.
One of strangest aspects of modern politics is the dominance of former left-wingers who have swung to the right. The “neo-cons” pretty well run the White House and the Pentagon, the Labour party and key departments of the British government. But there is a group which has travelled even further, from the most distant fringes of the left to the extremities of the pro-corporate libertarian right. While its politics have swung around 180 degrees, its tactics – entering organisations and taking them over – appear unchanged. Research published for the first time today suggests that the members of this group have colonised a crucial section of the British establishment.
The organisation began in the late 1970s as a Trotskyist splinter called the Revolutionary Communist party. It immediately set out to destroy competing oppositionist movements. When nurses and cleaners marched for better pay, it picketed their demonstrations.(1) It moved into the gay rights group Outrage and sought to shut it down.(2) It tried to disrupt the miners’ strike,(3) undermined the Anti-Nazi League (4) and nearly destroyed the radical Polytechnic of North London.(5) On at least two occasions RCP activists physically attacked members of opposing factions.(6)
In 1988, it set up a magazine called Living Marxism, later LM. By this time, the organisation, led by the academic Frank Furedi, the journalist Mick Hume and the teacher Claire Fox, had moved overtly to the far right. LM described its mission as promoting a “confident individualism” without social constraint.(7) It campaigned against gun control,(8) against banning tobacco advertising (9) and child pornography,(10)and in favour of global warming,(11) human cloning and freedom for corporations.
Neil we need to keep coming with bullshit jobs, sometimes negative value added jobs (like most finance nowadays) because higher productivity and automation...
Is a failure of system autoregulation and lack of social intelligence again, the same as everything else that is creating chaos. Apes in societies of billions, our brains haven't evolved for that task...
" I wonder where the money actually comes from? It's got to be from the ordinary people doing the work."
Not really.
The financial circuit funds itself, and nudges the real circuit along in a very weak interaction that is akin to an electrical induction circuit.
The financial circuit is your toothbrush charger and the real circuit is the toothbrush.
If you leave the toothbrush off the charger, the charger continues to get warm - because it is doing work within its own circuitry. The magnetic field that charges the toothbrush is largely a side effect of that work.
So when the financial circuit injects money into the real circuit via a leveraged operation in a pension fund, it gets the money back via pension contributions from the plebs.
nivekvb,
The philosophy behind that ideological transformation may be humanism. The far left is inherently humanist. The RCP group, as evidenced by the contributors at Spiked! magazine are extreme humanist and transhumanist. Within socialist circles they are considered trolls.
Apes in societies of billions, our brains haven't evolved for that task...
As I keep saying, it is a matter of the level of collective consciousness.
Humanity is running ahead of itself owing to asymmetries.
While there is a strong pull forward to developing a more advance level of collective consciousness, there is also huge drag. That's just how dialectical processes work, and history is dialectical and cyclical rather than progressive and linear. It's the evolution of complexity, in which emergence results in opportunity and also challenge.
Presently power is exceeding the ability of control systems to direct it efficiently, effectively and safely for common purpose.
Perhaps one reason for former rabid leftist to swing far right is realization that the present level of collective consciousness is nto sufficiently advanced to support their vision, so they remains radical but swing in the other direction, where they believe correctly that collective consciousness is sufficiently low for them to be successful in attaining the power they crave.
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