Bill Mitchell — Parents are advance secret agents for the class society

Dutch economist Jan Pen wrote in his 1971 book – Income Distribution – that “Parents are advanced secret agents of the class society”, which told us emphatically that it was crucial that public policy target disadvantaged children in low-income neighbourhoods at an early age if we were going to change the patterns of social and income mobility. The message from Pen was that the damage was done by the time the child reached their teenage years. While the later stages of Capitalism has found new ways to reinforce the elites which support the continuation of its exploitation and surplus labour appropriation (for example, deregulation, suppression of trade unions, real wage suppression, fiscal austerity), it remains that class differentials, which have always restricted upward mobility and ensured income inequality and access to political influence persist, are still well defined and functional. This was highlighted in a new report published by the the American Economic Policy Institute (EPI) – Early Education Gaps by Social Class and Race Start U.S. Children Out on Unequal Footing (June 17, 2015). Not much has changed it seems for decades.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Parents are advance secret agents for the class society
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

William I. Robinson — Global capitalism and 21st century fascism

The crisis of global capitalism is unprecedented, given its magnitude, its global reach, the extent of ecological degradation and social deterioration, and the scale of the means of violence. We truly face a crisis of humanity. The stakes have never been higher; our very survival is at risk. We have entered into a period of great upheavals and uncertainties, of momentous changes, fraught with dangers - if also opportunities. 

I want to discuss here the crisis of global capitalism and the notion of distinct political responses to the crisis, with a focus on the far-right response and the danger of what I refer to as 21st century fascism, particularly in the United States.

Facing the crisis calls for an analysis of the capitalist system, which has undergone restructuring and transformation in recent decades. The current moment involves a qualitatively new transnational or global phase of world capitalism that can be traced back to the 1970s, and is characterised by the rise of truly transnational capital and a transnational capitalist class, or TCC. Transnational capital has been able to break free of nation-state constraints to accumulation beyond the previous epoch, and with it, to shift the correlation of class and social forces worldwide sharply in its favour - and to undercut the strength of popular and working class movements around the world, in the wake of the global rebellions of the 1960s and the 1970s.

Emergent transnational capital underwent a major expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, involving hyper-accumulation through new technologies such as computers and informatics, through neo-liberal policies, and through new modalities of mobilising and exploiting the global labour force - including a massive new round of primitive accumulation, uprooting, and displacing hundreds of millions of people - especially in the third world countryside, who have become internal and transnational migrants.

We face a system that is now much more integrated, and dominant groups that have accumulated an extraordinary amount of transnational power and control over global resources and institutions....

Al Jazeera
Global capitalism and 21st century fascism
William I. Robinson | Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara
(h/t Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism)

"Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." The American Empire turning out to be the Evil Empire? The evidence is in.

Roger Erickson — Evolutionary scientist looks at employment and social structure

Roger Erickson Says [at moslereconomics.com]:
April 9th, 2012 at 8:48 am

the Upper Looting Class doesn’t want staff, they want serfs

see: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-09/worker-shortage-dogs-trail-king-as-s-d-jobs-go-begging.html

this is all about disparity; we’ll see if “flat” population structure outdoes class-segregated populations; they always have in the past; 

so far, the path to fastest adaptive rate has been to maximize flexibility/agility/diversity in the smallest population (i.e., no class barriers);

having less agile lower-classes on hand looks convenient one day, but is a non-scalable burden the next day;

in any adaptive race, you’ll see a large spectrum of options tried, but the weight of model-species evidence indicates that there’s a sweet spot with tolerance limits:

“species able to increase group agility (aka diversity/flexibility) while controlling the inter-dependency-costs that come with population size … inevitably outdo competitors”

that’s basically why eukaryotes outdo prokaryotes, (diploid vs haploid)

& why social species outdo solitary species (diverse teams able to rapidly combine team-behaviors greater than the sum of visible member properties)

& why democracies outdo monarchies/aristocracies;

& why “flat” organizations outdo hierarchical ones.

It’s odd to see a conservative political movement develop in parallel to the “flat” organizational structure of industries like Intel (not to mention within our supposed Democracy). It’s as though business & public purpose have temporarily separated, and must re-connect.