Bill Mitchell — Elements in a strategy for the Left

Reuters reported (July 8, 2018) that the awful Madame Lagarde was in France last week lecturing people on how the “joint euro zone budget could be designed with conditions so that it does not become a no-strings transfer of rich countries’ cash to poorer members”. Meanwhile, Jürgen Habermas was lecturing all and sundry on how a “frightened retreat behind national borders cannot be the correct response to … the politically uncontrollable functional imperatives of a global capitalism that is being driven by unregulated financial markets” (Source). Meanwhile, in the UK, the ‘Remainers’ think staying in the corrupt EU is a good idea because the Tories are so incompetent and divided. The state of the world. Misperceptions, misinformation and just plain poor analysis. There are tremendous opportunities for the Left to make political gains. But if they don’t abandon the type of ideas and language that is exemplified by Habermas’s latest entreaty and if they don’t undermine the likes of Lagarde and the Remainers (the pan-Europe contingent) then they will, once again, miss the boat. 

In my recent book (with Thomas Fazi) – Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (Pluto Books, 2017) – a central organising concept is that a progressive future is only possible if progressive citizens do two things:

1. Learn how the monetary system operates and understand the capacity of the currency issuer and the opportunities and constraints that the government has.In other words, educate ourselves so that we have the capacity to refute the neoliberal lies that sustains the current system that has seen progressive outcomes diminish markedly.

2. Take control of the political process and expunge neoliberal factions from progressive political parties (like the Blairites in the British Labour Party, almost all the Australian Labor Party, the Wall-Street embedded elites in the US Democrats, much of the traditional machinery of the European Socialist parties etc).Reclaiming the state is about reclaiming the legislative and regulative capacity of the nation state so that it is directed at advancing well being for the many rather than the few, to steal Jeremy Corbyn’s so excellent catch-cry....

For those to whom MMT may be new, it is important to realize that the operational description of monetary systems, being purely descriptive, is value-neutral and doesn't favor any political point of view or value system. From the aspect of operational description, MMT simply sets forth the institutional arrangements of different monetary systems and explains the fiscal space that is avialable based on these arrangements, which are mostly legally established and therefore subject to the policy decisions of legislative bodies. Therefore, they can be changed by the same bodies that created them as well as interpreted by administrators, regulators and courts.

When the data is analyzed and explained with respect to economics, it gets interpreted in terms of assigning causation to various variables as well as in parametrizing models. Here there is disagreement among economists, which gives rise to competing theories, which can be evaluated by comparing model to data, both economic data and institutional arrangements.

For example, if a model presumed operations under a different monetary system than the current one it is unlikely to be a faithful model worth of trust in either forecasting or policymaking. In addition, if causation is improperly imputed, the model will not be representational of what it purports to represent.

MMT from the vantage of theory is a so-called Keynesian model since it prioritized full employment. In this sense, MMT theory is considered to be on the left side of the political spectrum.

Those who recognize the correctness of operational analysis of MMT may take any political position that is consistent with the principles of the operational description. Those that accept the theory as well are likely to fall on the left of the political spectrum in prioritizing full employment.

However, those who accept all the aspects of MMT as both an operational description and a macroeconomic theory can be properly categorized as being "MMT." Here, there is leeway in both how the theory can be used to formulate optimal policy in various countries, as well as in the strategy for presenting MMT as a macroeconomic paradigm or framework for policy formulation and arguing for policy options compatible with it.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Elements in a strategy for the Left
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Stuart Walton on the Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt school argued that reason is dangerous, mass culture deadening, and the Enlightenment a disaster. Were they right?...

... there is something that still resonates about the work of the Frankfurt School. The insight to which it called its readers to awaken was that human consciousness in the age of mass society was becoming wholly enclosed within the walls of an ideological fortress, caught in the endless circulations of capitalist exchange and those repetitive entertainments and distractions that were designed to obscure the truth. Nothing about the theory of the culture industry lacks traction in a world where the commodity form reigns supreme. Blockbuster CGI movies; the relentless extrusion of Greatest Hits CDs by the megastars of the recording industry; the all-encompassing mania for video gaming, in which mature adults have been co-opted into the shamelessly infantile principle of mindless play; the transmutation of collectivity into social media’s mere connectivity: these are the lineaments of a culture that is not the spontaneous production of free human beings, but rather something done to them in their unfreedom.

If organised forms of political resistance could be efficiently thwarted by such a system, often by subtle assimilation rather than outright suppression, the last barricade against it was the individual’s own refusal to think and respond in the prescribed ways. The hardest task facing any emancipatory politics today is to encourage people to think for themselves, in a way that transcends simple sloganising and the dictates of instrumental reason. True critical thinking requires not just a refusal to identify with the present structures of society and commercial culture, but a deep awareness of the historical tendencies that have brought about the current impasse, and of which all present experience is composed. That impulse, compared to the project of constructively helping the system out of its own periodic crises, retains the spark of a dissidence that might just, one day, throw it into the very crisis that would prompt a general, and genuine, liberation.

Aeon

Theory from the ruins
Stuart Walton

Daniel Little — Moral progress and critical realism

Critical realists share a rejection of the fact-value distinction as a fundamental criterion of scientific rationality -- and rightly so (link). They believe that social research and theorizing involve value commitments all the way down. Further, they commonly believe that good social science should lead to improvement in the world and in our system of moral judgments.

So far, so good. But some critical realists think that this points to "moral realism" as well as scientific realism. Moral realism maintains that there are objective and timeless answers to the questions, what is justice? what should we do? what rights do people have? Moral realists hold that the moral facts are out there and waiting for discovery; there is a domain of "moral facts" that ultimately goes beyond the limits of rational disagreement.

This impulse towards moral realism is a problem. Moral realism and scientific realism are not analogous. There is no philosophical or theological method that will resolve moral questions into an unquestionable foundation or set of universal moral truths. Neither Kantianism, nor Aristotelianism, nor utilitarianism, nor traditional religious systems have the capacity to establish universal and unquestionable moral conclusions. The impulse towards moral realism has the perilous possibility of morphing into a dogmatic view of morality that substitutes one's own convictions for eternal moral truths. In my view, this is farfetched and ultimately implies an unreflective dogmatism about values. Fortunately there is a better and more modest position available that drives from the same pragmatist origins that are inspiring other advances in critical realism....

Understanding Society
Moral progress and critical realism
Daniel Little | Chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Professor of Philosophy at UM-Dearborn and Professor of Sociology at UM-Ann Arbor

Eric Schliesser — The Failure of Human Rights and Democratic Faith

To understand the political background of the refugee crisis, we must turn our gaze elsewhere; in fact, in the opposite direction. The crisis at hand confronts us with a predicament of modern political thought — modern liberalism even. It is a problem that we have successfully repressed but that now returns with a vengeance, namely the inadequacy of the lingo of human rights.…

Foundations of liberal social and political theory.

Digressions&Impressions
The Failure of Human Rights and Democratic Faith
Eric Schliesser | Professor of Political Science, University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences