“The linguistic construction of post-capitalist hegemony opens a space for the engendering of the public sphere”. Sounds ominous and deep. Sounds knowledgeable. Then what about the next sentence: “The illusion of praxis carries with it the discourse of the public sphere.” amd the next: “The emergence of normative value(s) opens a space for the ideology of the public sphere.” I could write a whole essay about that topic in the style that typified the so-called post-modernist explosion in social sciences in the 1970s and beyond. Aah, Pomo, the nonsensical shift in literary endeavour that has set the Left back as much as the embrace of Monetarism and, more generally, neo-liberalism.
This blog continues to add to the material we are working on as part of my next book (with co-author, Italian journalist Thomas Fazi), which traces the way the Left fell prey to what we call the globalisation myth and formed the view that the state has become powerless (or severely constrained) in the face of the transnational movements of goods and services and capital flows. This material will be part of the final section of the book, which we are sort of calling a ‘Progressive Manifesto’, designed to guide policy design and policy choices for progressive governments. We also hope that the ‘Manifesto’ will empower community groups by demonstrating that the TINA mantra, where these alleged goals of the amorphous global financial markets are prioritised over real goals like full employment, renewable energy and revitalised manufacturing sectors is bereft and a range of policy options, now taboo in this neo-liberal world are available. The book will be published in 2017 by Pluto Books, London.
This blog examines the way the Left became entranced with post-modernism and fell into the trap of disappearing into crevices of meaningless at the expense of a focus on class struggle and a coherent critique of capitalism. We argue that critique is an essential part of the revitalisation of the Left political struggle against neo-liberalism and the restoration of the Left as a political force.I added some paragraphing based on topic sentences for ease of reading.
Neoliberals have yet to find an answer to this worldwide sea change. As long as leftists dismiss the phenomenon as nothing more than sheer racism and stupidity, they will continue to evade potential answers. Working class people from Pennsylvania to Paris are hurting due to unprecedented upward wealth redistribution, shrinking jobs in both skilled and unskilled labor, soaring costs of living, college tuition, kabuki bureaucracy and collective trauma from the Wars on Drugs and Terror. Voters aren’t stupid; they’re getting tired of the platitudes, plundering and plutocracy of the Global Gilded Age. If the status quo doesn’t come up with any solutions, the populace will seek them elsewhere…
Well, that’s a heavy title. I’m not going to say the last word about it in a blog post, but I would like to make a fairly simple observation: for at least a century, defenders of capitalism have argued that the two are inextricably connected. If you like modernity you have to like capitalism, and if you get rid of capitalism you will lose modernity with it. By modernity I mean a way of life that is science-based, rational and skeptical, technologically innovative, liberal, cosmopolitan and adapted to markets.
The traditional response of the left was to argue that modernity under capitalism is flawed and that a better, socialist modernity is possible. In other words, it rejected the identity and saw modernity as bigger than any particular version of it.
That position has been complicated by the collapse of traditional models of socialism that do seem to fail the modernization test: they were clunky and inefficient, closed to the outside instead of open, stultifying instead of dynamic. Now, I can already hear the cries of paleo-socialists in my ear: No! Socialism didn’t fail in Russia/China/Cuba/wherever; it was encircled by the forces of capital and betrayed from within. I don’t agree, but I won’t debate it here; my only point is that most of the left is not paleo-socialist, so they’ve had to figure out what it means to be left wing and anti-capitalist in a world in which capitalism and modernity (in their eyes) largely coincide.…Econospeak
Prologue: In 2004 I wrote Brazil and Lula: Year Zero (Edifurb: Blumenau, Sao Paolo 2005), in which I presented my analysis of the Lula-Workers Party (PT) regime in Brazil undergoing a Grand Transformation with the first stage represented by the PT’s incorporation into a government apparatus led by of bankers and exporters (the agro-mineral elite).
Excellent analysis of why and how the Left failed after taking power based on huge public support.Two year earlier, my colleague, Henry Veltmeyer, and I had published Cardoso’s Brazil: A Land for Sale (Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham MD 2003) where we described how President Cardoso had sold off the major public resources, banks, petroleum and iron resources to foreign capital for rock bottom prices. The 2002 election of President Lula DaSilva of the Workers’ Party did not reverse Cardoso’s sell-out. Indeed, Lula accepted his predecessor’s neo-liberal policies - embellished them - and set about forging an alliance between the Workers’ Party and the economic elites, replacing Cardoso’s Party! For the next few years, we were attacked by the Left academic and pundit world for having dared to advance such a critique on their ‘worker president’! The consequences of what we had described as the PT’s pact with the Right are clear to everyone today: Brazil is enmeshed in swindles, scandals and coups.…
The Left believed in the myth of democratic capitalism. They had faith that their negotiations with the business elites would increase social welfare. They operated on a platform of gradual accommodation of class interests leading to multi-class alliances and strategic conciliation between business and labor.
The historical lesson has proven otherwise - again. Business and the capitalist elite make clear, tactical short-term agreements in order to prepare a strategic counter-offensive. Their patient long-term strategy was to mobilize their class allies and overturn the electoral process - at the ripe moment.…
Victorious capital and empire neatly ended this charade of ‘market democracy’. The retreating Left parties begged for a reprieve via parliamentary vote and ended with a decisive defeat… bleating their last whimper as the door slammed shut…
Capitalists have never and will never recognize weak popular opposition. The capitalist political elite will always choose power and wealth over social democracy. The Left, in retreat, isolated and expelled from the corridors of power, now face retribution from the most corrupt and treacherous of their ‘former allies’.Never trust a snake not to bite you.
They usher in a lost generation.
Financial Times journalist Wolfgang Münchau’s article (April 24, 2016) – The revenge of globalisation’s losers – rehearses a common theme, and one which those on the Left have become intoxicated with (not implicating the journalist among them). The problem is that the basic tenet is incorrect and by failing to separate the process of globalisation (integrated multinational supply chains and global capital flows) from what we might call economic neo-liberalism, the Left leave themselves exposed and too ready to accept notions that the capacity of the state has become compromised and economic policy is constrained by global capital. This is a further part in my current series that will form the thrust of my next book (coming out later this year). I have broken sequence a bit with today’s blog given I have been tracing the lead up to the British decision to call in the IMF in 1976. More instalments in that sequence will come next week as I do some more thinking and research – I am trawling through hundreds of documents at present (which is fun but time consuming). But today picks up on Wolfgang Münchau’s article from the weekend and fits nicely into the overall theme of the series. It also keeps me from talking about deflation in Australia (yes, announced today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics) as the Federal government keeps raving on about cutting its fiscal deficit (statement next Tuesday). I will write about those dreaded topics in due course.…Bill Mitchell – billy blog
All this makes me suspect that those leftists who try to intellectualize neoliberalism and who talk of a “neoliberal project” are giving it too much credit - sometimes verging dangerously towards conspiracy theories. Maybe there’s less here than meets the eye. Perhaps neoliberalism is simply what we get when the boss class exercises power over the state.Right, but the left wants to avoid Marxist terms, so most "serious" people on the left avoid them.
Some years ago (June 27, 2007), Harvard economist Dani Rodrik outlined what he called his “impossibility theorem”, which said that “democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full”. In his brief article – The inescapable trilemma of the world economy – he made the case that “deep economic integration required we eliminate all transaction costs … in … cross-border dealings” and that “Nation-states are a fundamental source of such transaction costs”. Ergo, if you want ‘deep’ integration then the Nation-state has to surrender. His “trilemma” guides his view of how the “international economic system” should be reformed. He think that if “want more globalization, we must either give up some democracy or some national sovereignty”. This view has been adopted by political parties as if the conceptual framework is in some way binding. The trilemma has been skillfully sold as a narrative by right-wing think tanks and others who serve the interests of capital. The so-called progressive politicians have fallen into the trap and have shifted their political parties closer and closer to their right-wing opponents, such that now it is hard to distinguish between the major parties in most nations. The reality is that while the impossibility theorem beguiles the Left – its applicability as a binding constraint on government is limited. It is as vapid as the statements made by these career politicians on both sides of politics that they serve the people.…Another post we have been waiting for.
The GFC clearly, in my view, demonstrated that the political positions held by both the left- and right-wing governments in the West with respect to economic policy were untenable. Both sides of politics in each major and country adopted versions of market liberalism where the overlap was more dominant than the differences. While the left maintained some emphasis on social policy and the right maintained an emphasis on individual freedom (which was more about corporate freedom than anything), the fact remains that these differences were blurred by the dominance of the free market approach in each of their platforms. It is ironic, that as a consequence of the GFC, the bureaucratic state is more dominant now than it was, especially in the European Union where the political and technical elite interacts with the so-called market to create what has been called the democratic deficit. We now have technocrats in the European bureaucracy, in the IMF, in the World Bank and other multilateral organisations who contrive to implement policies which have allowed the benefits of economic activity to be increasingly diverted to beneficiaries who are at the top end of the income and wealth distribution. Today’s blog continues reporting some of the research I’ve been doing for my next book on the demise of the Left and the subjugation of public purpose in the name of austerity. It seems that we have concentrated on fiscal austerity but the general notion of austerity, which is now the centrepiece of political positions in most advanced countries, goes well beyond just fiscal policy. The response to the recent events in Paris demonstrate how far the state is willing to centralise authoritative controls on the rights of their citizens.…Connecting the dots between economics and politics in Europe.
An interview with Greek MP Costas Lapavitsas on Popular Unity and the case for a progressive Grexit.
Costas Lapavitsas has been vindicated — not that there’s much comfort in that.
From the beginning he argued that Greece leaving the eurozone was the only way Syriza could carry out its election program. The Syriza leadership instead stuck to their “good euro” policy, with disastrous results. The party recently split, with Lapavitsas and other members of Syriza’s parliamentary group, along with a coalition from across the Greek left forming Popular Unity to contest in the elections later this month.
In the conversation below, building on his March interview with Jacobin, Lapavitsas looks back at the tumultuous events of the past year, evaluates Popular Unity’s prospects going forward, and discusses what a Grexit from below would look like.Also discusses Corbyn.
Introduction: Rightwing politics now dominate the globe. Broadly speaking, the Right can be divided into a US-centered rightwing bloc and a variety of anti-US rightwing regimes and social forces.
The US-centered rightwing includes absolutist monarchies, like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States and Jordan; neoliberal electoral regimes and opposition parties in the European Union and Latin America and the military dictatorships of North and Sub-Sahara Africa and Thailand. Finally, there are US-armed and trained terrorists operating in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen – which make up a kind of extra-parliamentary US-centered political force.
Israel is a special case of a rightwing regime, allied with the US, which acts more independently to pursue its own colonial priorities and hegemonic ambitions.
The anti-US rightwing includes capitalist China and Russia; the nationalist, Islamist and secular republics of Iran, Syria and Lebanon; and the armed and civilian Islamist mass movements of the Middle East, East and West Africa and South and Southeast Asia.
Leftwing governments and movements, faced with the competing and conflicting rightwing power centers, find themselves having to operate precariously in the interstices of global politics, attempting to play-off one or the other. These include the center-left regimes and movements in Latin America; anti-capitalist opposition parties and trade unions in the EU; nationalist-democratic movements and trade unions in North and South Africa; nationalist and populist movements in South Asia; and a broad array of academic leftists and intellectuals throughout the globe who have little or no direct impact on the direction of world politics. A number of supposedly ‘Left’ regimes have capitulated to the US-EU bloc, namely Syriza in Greece and the Workers Party of Brazil.
In sum, the major conflicts in the world are found between competing capitalist centers; between rising (China and Russia) and established capitalist blocs (US and EU); between financial centers (US-England) and primary export states (Africa, Asia and Latin America); between dominant Judaic/Christian and emerging Islamist states; and between imperialist states and occupied colonized nations. We will explore the nature of each form of right-wing conflict.
Yanis Varoufakis is in the process of becoming an important figure in Greek political life and beyond. In the break-up process affecting Syriza, which seems now well underway [1], he will be called to play a major role, together with the former Minister of energy, Panayiotis Lafazanis, and the President of the Parliament, Mrs Zoe Kostantopoulou. But Yanis Varoufakis has also indubitably become a major figure for the Left which is critical of the Euro and someone who will be an important factor in the political reconfigurations which are in the offing. There are good reasons for this.….What future for Varoufakis?
There's a common theme here. It's centrist utopianism - the idea that moderate and feasible tweaks within capitalism can generate big improvements.…
I say all this as a counterweight to a longstanding prejudice - that centrists and moderates are realistic and hard-headed whilst we leftists are utopian dreamers. Of course, this accusation applies to some on the left - anything is true of someone - but for me the opposite is the case. I'm a Marxist because I'm a pessimist. It is those who think that (actually-existing) capitalism is easily reformable so that inefficiencies and injustices can be eliminated who seem to me to be the dreamers.…Stumbling and Mumbling
A pre-revolutionary fervour is sweeping Europe.I'm betting the Right to win this, not the Left. There is no Left. It's a myth. The Right is real and they have the swastika tattoos to prove it. Just (half) kidding.
“The atmosphere is a little similar to the time after 1968 in Europe. I can feel, maybe not a revolutionary mood, but something like widespread impatience”.
These were the words of European council president Donald Tusk, 48 hours after Greece’s paymasters imposed the most punishing bail-out measures ever forced on a debtor nation in the eurozone’s 15-year history.
“I am really afraid of this ideological or political contagion”
Donald Tusk
A former Polish prime minister and a politician not prone to hyperbole, Tusk’s comments revealed Brussels’ fears of a bubbling rebellion across the continent.
“When impatience becomes not an individual but a social experience of feeling, this is the introduction for revolutions” said Tusk.
“I am really afraid of this ideological or political contagion.”….
I note the calls for more discussion on the trap that the ‘left’ has made for itself by buying into the globalisation/political capture myth. As I have noted previously, I am currently researching a new book on this topic which might appear in 2016 but more likely early 2017, such is the delays in publishing. My current research is focusing on the 1960s and 1970s.
I am exploring the deep infighting within the French state between the ‘Keynesians’ in the planning ministry and the ‘Monetarists’ in the finance ministry, which shaped the way the French ‘left’ dealt with issues of monetary integration and the like. I am also tracing the evolution of ‘left’ macroeconomic thinking, or rather, the absence of it, in the late 1960s as the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system collapsed and fiat currency freedom was taken up by governments around the world.
In 1973, after several years of work, American sociologist James O’Connor published his book “The Fiscal Crisis of the State”, which was considered by many on the ‘left’ to explain why the Keynesian policy era had failed. This book and the derivative literature that followed it was extremely influential among ‘left’ scholars and effectively negated their capacity to challenge, what by the mid-1970s, was becoming the Monetarist resurgence. We can trace back the failure of the ‘left’ to fight against austerity to this period. This is just part of the work I am doing on this topic at present.…
O’Connor was offering what he called the “sociological foundations if state finances” to distinguish his work from what he called the “theoretical bankrupcty … with the mainstream of Western economic thought”.
He considered that “Particular expenditures and programs and the budget as a whole are explicable only in terms of power relationships within the private economy”.
In other words, his theoretical framework was “drawn from Marxist economics and adapted to the problem of budgetary analysis”.
To begin with, he is “first premise is that the capitalistic state must try to fulfil two basic and often mutually contradictory functions – accumulation and legitimization“.
O’Connor thus transcended the ideas of Marx and Keynes, who saw crises in the economy as a systemic failure to produce sufficient spending to underpin the current rate of capital formation and resulting output, O’Connor placed the source of the capitalist crises directly within these contradictory aims of the state.But...
It appears that O’Connor didn’t grasp the significance of what happened in August 1971 and proceeded as if nothing significant had changed.,,,
The main point of the blog is that by adopting the mainstream view that a currency-issuing government (in the era of fiat currencies) was financially constrained and could not run continuous fiscal deficits he failed to create a new theory of the state fiscal relations that would underpin a coherent and powerful ‘left’ narrative.Bill Mitchell – billy blog
