By celebrating pure capitalism, such arguments can criticize the economic crisis without sounding anticapitalist. They reaffirm their loyalty to capitalism in the abstract even as they attack its concrete here and now. The trick is to identify the present system and its enduring, deep crisis as anything but capitalist.
This is fantasy. Impure capitalism is the only kind we have ever had....Truthout | Op-Ed
"Pure" Capitalism Is Pure Fantasy
Richard D Wolff | Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst and currently Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. He also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan.
6 comments:
Such a totally inept commie analysis. Wolff teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan. The Brecht Forum is an independent Marxist educational and cultural center in New York City, named after German writer Bertold Brecht. Bertold Brecht was invited to live and work in the DDR in 1949. He retained his Austrian nationality (granted in 1950) and overseas bank accounts from which he received valuable hard currency remittances. The copyrights on his writings were held by a Swiss company. At the time he drove a pre-war DKW car—a rare luxury in the austere divided capital [finally, an appropriate use of the term “austere”].
Though he was never a member of the Communist Party, Brecht had been deeply schooled in Marxism by the dissident communist Karl Korsch. Korsch's version of the Marxist dialectic influenced Brecht greatly, both his aesthetic theory and theatrical practice. Brecht received the Stalin Peace Prize in 1954. Brecht supported the measures taken by the East German government against the Uprising of 1953 in East Germany, which included the use of Soviet military force. In a letter from the day of the uprising to SED First Secretary Walter Ulbricht, Brecht wrote that: "History will pay its respects to the revolutionary impatience of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. The great discussion [exchange] with the masses about the speed of socialist construction will lead to a viewing and safeguarding of the socialist achievements. At this moment I must assure you of my allegiance to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany."
Such an appropriate analysis from the people who brought us “The Economics of Control”.
Bob I think you'll find that Richard Wolff and Abba Lerner are different people. Lerner wrote "The Economics of Control", not Richard Wolff, whilst Wolff wrote the article linked to above, not Abba Lerner. As far as I'm aware Bertold Brecht and Abba Lerner are also different individuals.
Simple things like this seem to get you very confused for some reason, don't they?
Our economic system should be called "Debtism" since debt is what it is based on.
If we had true capitalism and not a government-backed counterfeiting cartel, the banking system, then it is likely that most purely private money would be Equity (common stock, "shares") since business would not have the option of financing with stolen purchasing power. And, btw, isn't "Equity" another word for "Capital?"
The implicit social contract
"Our economic system should be called "Debtism" since debt is what it is based on."
Consumer debt has been used (through housing and automobiles mainly) to stimulate economic activity but the system does not depend on consumer debt…the system is dependent on public spending.
Household debt is a system that enables purchases of necessities (such as housing) the cost of which exceeds incomes several-fold.
Implicit in the act of incurring debt is the belief that over time incomes will be stable.
Without stable levels of income across the board the debt circuit will fail (delinquencies will rise above a safe threshold, which can then lead to cascading member bank failures and so on).
The debt circuit can't provide for stable incomes because only a portion of income is the result of spending from private debt expansion.
Thus the debt circuit is not self-sustainable because the level of debt possible is a function of the ratio of debt service to income…income can't increase as fast as debt expansion…the curves intersect at the point where debt service = income.
This is an impossible situation that would never be reached because the system would fail well below that threshold.
Consumer debt was a very small piece of the pie until the decline in labor share and rise of personal debt through the introduction of credit cards. It increased as the financial cycle went through its stages and lending standards were greatly relaxed, leading to the housing bubble, where people were using houses as ATMs. This may turn out to be a blip on the screen.
The bulk of private debt is traditionally investment and residential housing is booked as investment.
"The bulk of private debt is traditionally investment and residential housing is booked as investment."
True that we've traditionally looked at it that way.
Currently, much of that so-called investment has become a net liability, and it's a waiting game to see if it becomes an investment again within many peoples lifetimes.
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