Monday, July 18, 2022

Bill Mitchell — The global poly crisis is the culmination of the absurdity of neoliberalism

We are used to segmenting destructive episodes as crises – the Mexican debt crisis in 1982, which gave way to the Latin American debt crisis in the 1980s, the East Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, then the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 and beyond, then the pandemic crisis since 2020. Meanwhile, firefighters are dealing with major fires from Portugal, France to Crete; Britain is about to experience 40 degrees Centigrade; Australia is dealing with a sequence of massive floods; corporations are gouging profits and pushing inflation, which is provoking policy makers to take it out on the most disadvantaged in our societies, with no logical link between the policy and the perceived problem, other than deep recessions stop the gouging; nations considered to be ‘middle income and rising’ are now lining up behind Sri Lanka to see who will be the next to basically collapse into anarchy, unable to feed its population; housing shortages are causing havoc almost everywhere; the quality of employment has declined dramatically (job security, worker agency, etc) and the trade unions are a pale imitation of what they used to be; politicians are more self-serving than ever; and people are still dying in the thousands everyday from the pandemic but our leaders insist we are now ‘living’ with Covid (more like dying with it). The reality is that all these events are linked and part of what some might call a poly crisis. Capitalism has failed and the institutions we created to tame the raw-profit greed of capital – the state, trade unions, etc – have also been compromised to such a degree that they, either are no longer effective or work as agents of capital rather than mediating the labour-capital conflict. A poly crisis requires fundamental change. But, such is the dominance of the mainstream, which has created this crisis, that all we get is more of the same. That means the ultimate solutions will be more painful and destructive and lead to conflagration as this period of human civilisation collapses.

The poly crisis has been driven by a planned strategy by capital to increase its power and ability to reap more real income from the distribution system.…
Bill Mitchell – billy blog
The global poly crisis is the culmination of the absurdity of neoliberalism
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

4 comments:

Peter Pan said...

Sour grapes.
You couldn't educate the masses, who are sheep, and your so-called "experts", who are in positions of power and within the bureaucracy, are not any brighter.

Capitalism has a ways to go, until we consume the remaining fossil fuels, uranium, thorium and whatever else provides abundant energy.

The end of abundance spells the end of civilization as we know it. Better get used to poly crisis.

Footsoldier said...

But privatisation is so much more efficient


The free market will save us lol.


https://the-blindspot.com/altif-transcripts-englands-water-companies-are-up-schitts-creek-again/


As long as the world burns all They are bothered about is low taxes, birth control and Jesus.

Peter Pan said...

They're just biding their time until they get to the pearly gates and slip Saint Peter a bribe.

Matt Franko said...

“ We should not be creating unemployment deliberately.”

Bill predicting unemployment from current monetary policy…