Bill Mitchell — Be careful not to get ahead of ourselves – hard-edged class struggle will be necessary

It is Wednesday and just a collection of snippets today. I am trying to finish a major piece of work and so that is what I am mostly doing today. And learning to program Geojson formats in R, so I can overcome the decision by Google to abandon their fusion table facility, which my research centre has relied on for some years to display map layers. And I have some press interviews to deal with. But today we consider the claim by the Financial Times editorial the other day that “Radical reforms are required to forge a society that will work for all”. It was an extraordinary statement from an institution like the FT to make for a start. But it reflects the desperation that is abroad right now – across all our nations – as the virus/lockdown story continues to worsen and the uncertainty grows. But I also think we should be careful not to adopt the view that everything is going to change as a result of this crisis. The elites are a plucky bunch, not the least because they have money and can buy military capacity. Changing the essential nature of neoliberalism, even if what has been displayed by all the state intervention in the last few months exposes all the myths that have been used to hide that essential nature, is harder than we might imagine. I think hard-edged class struggle is needed rather than middle-class talkfests that outline the latest gee-whiz reform proposals. The latter has been the story of the Europhile progressives for two decades or so as the Eurozone mess has unfolded. It hasn’t got them very far....

Bill goes there.

Many progressives erroneously think that now is the time for neoliberalism to collapse and social democracy to rise from it ashes. The really is that genuine and lasting reform cannot come from tweaking the existing system. The problem is with the design of the system based on key assumptions of economic liberalism ("capitalism") that are incompatible with social and political liberalism (democracy as governance of, by, and for the people, which is inherently "socialistic"). 

Here I define "capitalism" to mean a system that favors capital accumulation because "growth," and "socialism" as a system that favors welfare over growth. The elite and their cronies and minions favor the former, of course, and they aren't going to accept an overhaul of the system that favors their individual and class interests. And the way the system operates, they hold the reins of power. This is not only a national issue but also one that impacts the existing world order in terms of who makes the rules and how.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Be careful not to get ahead of ourselves – hard-edged class struggle will be necessary

Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

See also

Modern capitalism societies are built on a dichotomy: in the political space decisions are (to be) made on an equal basis with everybody having the same say and with the structure of power being flat; in the economic space the power is held by the owners of capital, the decisions are dictatorial, and the structure of power is hierarchical. The dichotomy was always a complex balancing act: at times, the political principles of nominal equality tended to intrude into the economic space and to limit the power of owners: trade unions, ability to sue companies, regulations regarding discrimination, hiring and firing. At other times, it was the economic sphere that invaded the political: the wealthy were able to buy politicians and impose the laws they liked.

The entire history of capitalism can be readily understood as the struggle between these two principles: is the democratic principle “exported” from politics to rule in economics too, or is the hierarchical principle of company organization to invade the political sphere. Social democracy was essentially the former; neoliberalism was the latter.

Global Inequality
Trump as the ultimate triumph of neoliberalism
Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-economic Inequality, senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

also

US motto: "My way or you will be destroyed." ROW: "Nuts to you." Collision course.

Tax Research UK
Trump’s world view has to be consigned to history: we need a new world order
Richard Murphy | Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London; Director of Tax Research UK; non-executive director of Cambridge Econometrics, and a member of the Progressive Economy Forum

Lars P. Syll — On the non-neutrality of money

One of Keynes’s central tenets — in clear contradistinction to the beliefs of mainstream economists — is that there is no strong automatic tendency for economies to move toward full employment levels in monetary economies.

Money doesn’t matter in mainstream macroeconomic models. That’s true. But in the real world in which we happen to live, money does certainly matter. Money is not neutral and money matters in both the short run and the long run....

"New Keynesianism" isn't Keynesian. It is bastard Keynesianism if it is Keynesian at all. Paul Krugman self-identifies as "neoclassical," in accepting neutrality of money, banks as only intermediaries, equilibrium, and rational maximization. So do many if not most other Democratic Party economics heavyweights and advisors. Time for them to step aside and make room for the new wave. We don't have time to wait for funerals.

Lars P. Syll’s Blog
On the non-neutrality of money
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

Bill Mitchell — The central bank independence myth continues

One of the enduring myths that mainstream macroeconomists and the politicians that rely on their lies to depoliticise their own unpopular actions continue to propagate is that of ‘central bank independence’. This is the claim that macroeconomic policy making improved in the ‘neoliberal’ era following the emergence of Monetarism because monetary policy was firmly in the hands of technocratic bankers who were not part of the political cycle. As such, they could make decisions based on fundamentals rather than the requirements of the political cycle. The corollary was that vote-greedy politicians, who operate on short-term political cycles, would be willing to compromise the ‘longer-term’ health of the economy to splurge on populist programs that might increase their chances of re-election. As a result of the mismatch between the political cycle and the, longer, economic cycle, the neoliberal solution was to make monetary policy independent of the political cycle. Except, of course, it didn’t and cannot. The latest scaremongering about the ‘loss’ of central bank independence was published in the UK Guardian last week (February 28, 2020) – From the Fed to Bank of England, central banks must up their game. The author is a former deputy governor of the Bank of England Board and former director general of the CBI. The interesting point about the article was not the further elaboration of the myth, but, rather, his assessment that the chances of reforming the European Union treaties in any direction “are vanishingly small”. Read: zero. From the mouth of the elites. I hope our Europhile Left colleagues absorbed that bit, at least....

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
The central bank independence myth continues
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

After Neoliberalism — Ganesh Sitaraman

The last 10 years have seen the collapse of neoliberalism. The question now is, what comes next?

For 40 years, we have lived in a neoliberal era, an era defined in public policy by deregulation, liberalization, privatization, and austerity. Starting with the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions, neoliberal ideas spread to capture the center and even the left, ultimately becoming the reigning policy consensus by the mid-1990s.
But over the last decade, that neoliberal consensus has collapsed. We can now see that its results were disastrous....

The central question of our time is what comes after neoliberalism. New political paradigms emerge in response to the challenges and failures of the preceding era, and today, four possibilities for the future are emerging.

• The first possibility is reformed neoliberalism.…
• The second possibility is nationalist populism, which combines ethnic, religious, or cultural nationalism with economic populism.…
• The third possibility, which many refer to as authoritarianism, has gotten the most attention.… The better term for this third future is “nationalist oligarchy,” and Trumpism is its American variant..…
• The final possibility is that a new era of democracy will follow the age of neoliberalism.…

The neoliberal era has put us in this moment of crisis, and the central battle of our time is now between nationalist oligarchy and democracy. The fight for a great democracy will require boldness and creativity, courage and resolve. If we want to save democracy, we will first need to achieve democracy.

Insightful.

The Nation
After Neoliberalism
Ganesh Sitaraman | professor of law at Vanderbilt Law School

Why There Is No “Crisis of Capitalism” — Branko Milanovic

Western dissatisfaction with globalization is wrongly diagnosed as dissatisfaction with capitalism, when in fact it is the product of the uneven distribution of the gains from globalization....

ProMarket — The blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Why There Is No “Crisis of Capitalism”

Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-economic Inequality, senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Varieties of neoliberalism — Diane Coyle

I’ve polished off Angus Burgin’s The Great Persuasion, recommended to me by a colleague after Daniel Stedman-Jones’s Masters of the Universecropped up in conversation. I read the latter when it came out in 2012. It made a strong impression on me with its account of the way the creation of the climate of ideas conducive to Thatcherism and Reaganism came about as a conscious long-term project on the part of a number of free market think tanks on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as some leading economists....

The Enlightened Economist

Varieties of neoliberalism
Diane Coyle | freelance economist and a former advisor to the UK Treasury, member of the UK Competition Commission, and acting Chairman of the BBC Trust, the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation

Assetisation and the end times of neoliberalism — Richard Murphy

Capitalism is about capitalizing whatever can be capitalized into an asset on a balance sheet.

And it can be said that the creation of these 'assets' is now the focus of modern capitalism.

This then defines modern capitalism as a mechanism for rent extraction, and not profit-making.

And what that means is that value creation has ceased to be what markets are about.

No wonder we are in the end-times for neoliberalism.

Tax Research UK

Assetisation and the end times of neoliberalism
Richard Murphy | Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London; Director of Tax Research UK; non-executive director of Cambridge Econometrics, and a member of the Progressive Economy Forum

Michael Hudson — Note to China

How not be to taken over by the Empire. Although Michael Hudson doesn't mention in this post, this is a goal of the trade war as well as the economic war that the US is waging worldwide to cement permanent US global hegemony.

Michael Hudson — On Finance, Real Estate And The Powers Of Neoliberalism
Note to China
Michael Hudson | President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Guest Professor at Peking University

See also

IMMR CoffeeHouse Discussion Forum # 8Full Transcript (EDITED VERSION)Thurs. Dec. 19, 2019

Michael Hudson on how debt money has pushed the US and European economies to their financial limit. Followed by an open discussion forum.

Democratizing Money – a discussion

Neoliberalism: Are We Sure That's the Right Word?: Talking to Noah Smith —Brad DeLong

Defining "neoliberalism" as social democracy lite. This not The Onion.

Grasping Reality
Neoliberalism: Are We Sure That's the Right Word?: Talking to Noah Smith
Brad DeLong | Professor of Economics, UCAL Berkeley

The Collapse of Neoliberalism — Ganesh Sitaraman

The long-dominant ideology brought us forever wars, the Great Recession, and extreme inequality. Good riddance.

Useful summary.

The New Republic
The Collapse of Neoliberalism
Ganesh Sitaraman, Professor at Vanderbilt Law School and the author of The Great Democracy: How to Fix Our Politics, Unrig the Economy, and Unite America
.

Bill Mitchell— Free flows of capital do not increase output but do increase inequality

There was an IMF paper released in April 2018 – The Aggregate and Distributional Effects of Financial Globalization: Evidence from Macro and Sectoral Data – that had a long title but a fairly succinct message. It indicates that the IMF is still in a sort of schizoid process where the evidential base has built up so against the political voice and practice that the IMF has indulged itself as a front-line neoliberal attack dog that elements in its research division are breaking ranks and revealing interesting information. In part, the Brexit debate in Britain has been characterised by economists supporting the Remain argument claiming that free capital flows within Europe (and Britain) are the vehicle for strong output growth and better living standards. They claim that when Britain leaves the EU global capital flows will be more restricted in and out of Britain and that will be damaging. It is really just a rehearsal of the standard mainstream economic claims found in monetary, trade and macroeconomics textbooks. What the IMF paper does is provide what they call a “fresh look at the at the aggregate and distributional effects of policies to liberalize international capital flows” and the researchers find that, “financial globalization … have led on average to limited output gains while contributing to significant increases in inequality”. That is, the pie hasn’t really grown much as a result of all these free trade moves but a growing share is being taken by an increasingly wealthier few. And workers are the losers....

Bill Mitchell – billy blog

Free flows of capital do not increase output but do increase inequality
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Romaric Godin — Social crises, crises of Democracy, neoliberalism in crisis

The connection could well be found in the great crisis the world entered in 2007–2008. Beyond what most observers remember—the “Great Crash” that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008—the crisis is much deeper and persists to the present day. Because it is not a simple financial or economic crisis: it is rather the crisis of a mode of managing capitalism; that is, neoliberalism, which is based on putting the state at the service of capital, the financialization of the economy, and the commodification of society.

Like the crises of the 1930s or 1970s, the current crisis profoundly challenges the contemporary functioning of capitalism. Such crises are often long and accompanied by periods of unrest. As the historian Adam Tooze has shown in The Deluge (2014), the disruption of capitalism began not with the 1929 crash but rather during the World War I and was not actually resolved until after World War II. As for neoliberalism, it only came fully into being in the 1990s, 20 years after the previous paradigm had gone into crisis.

Even today’s crisis has been prolonged and deepened as neoliberalism struggles to avert its own demise. But in seeking to survive, it is pushing the world into the abyss. Of course, neoliberalism survived the shock of 2008 and even emerged from 2010 strong enough to present “solutions” such as global fiscal austerity and “structural reforms” aimed at destroying any remaining protection for workers and the most precarious. But by seeking to remain dominant, neoliberalism has further deepened its own crisis....

Even if growth-rate differentials should bring emerging economies in closer sync with those of so-called advanced countries and thus reduce inequalities at the global level, inequalities within nations are widening more than ever. This was the conclusion reached by the economist Branko Milanović in Global Inequalities (2016), who foresaw the return of the question of social class. Thus it is a resurgence of class struggle that we are now witnessing at the global level....

Neoliberalism is helpless. Locked in its logic of extractivism and fictional growth, it clutches onto phantoms: the “trickle-down theory,” the Laffer curve, or the Coase Theorem, which holds that issues of distributive justice must be kept separate from economic reality. It does so thanks to another of its salient features: the “management” of democracy, whereby the economic sphere must not be subjected to democratic decision-making but must be preserved from the “”feelings” of the crowd or, to use President Emmanuel Macron’s notorious phrase, “unfortunate passions” (passions tristes). But such segregation is less and less possible as inequalities deepen and the climate crisis becomes more acute. After five decades of managed democracy, people are demanding that their own emergencies be addressed instead of those of “markets” or “investors.”

The current crisis of neoliberalism has three aspects: an ecological crisis, a social crisis, and a democratic crisis. The current economic system is unable to respond to these three profound sources of discontent. Faced with an ecological emergency, it puts forward market solutions and fiscal repression of consumption by the weakest. In the face of social and democratic demands, its response is indifference. In fact, responding to such demands would require a profound change in the economic paradigm.…

Addressing the climate crisis would require a complete reorientation of investments and an end to basing the economy solely on real estate and financial bubbles. This would imply a complete overhaul of the monetary system. The seeds of such a transformation are shown in the Green New Deal that has been proposed in the United States, which has struck fear among neoliberal economists, because if the legislation is enacted the climate transition would no longer entail weakening the working class but acting in concert with them. By ensuring a massive redistribution of resources to the detriment of the richest, the more modest classes could achieve better livelihoods without destroying the planet. Finally, greater popular participation could assure that such decisions are not made for the benefit of the richest and for capital, but in the common interest. This is exactly what neoliberalism has always rejected: this ability of democracy to “change the economic deal”—precisely what the world needs today....

Second leg down? And is that a good thing, sweeping out the old and preparing for the new. Or are are looking at a replay of the French Revolution, with blood in the streets? Or a fascistic crackdown?

These are just a few excerpts. The whole post is reading in full. This is the overarching social, political and economic issue of our times that is taking place in a historical dialectic dominated by a conflict among traditionalism, liberalism, fascism, and communism, all of which include a range of variety and which may overlap each other as well. Quite a mix.

Dollars & Sense
Social crises, crises of Democracy, neoliberalism in crisis

Romaric Godin

The original version of this article in French appeared in Mediapart (mediapart.fr) on October 21, 2019. It was translated by Fred Murphy.

Bill Mitchell — Data suggests a unilateral Greek exit would have been much better than their colonial future under the Troika

Yesterday (November 26, 2019), the news came out from the Hellenic Minister of Finance that Greece had completed its latest repayment of 2.7 billion euros to the IMF early (Source). They owed around 9 billion euros to the IMF. Greece had to go ‘cap-in-hand’ to its “European creditors” to gain permission to make the payment early, which they claim saves them crippling interest rate payments. The loans were locked in at 4.9 per cent per annum – usury rates by any definition. Celebration seems to be the message from the neoliberals. But, from my reckoning, the disaster for Greece continues. On September 30, 2019, the IMF European Director Poul Thomsem gave an extraordinary (for its shameless arrogance) speech on Greece at the London School of Economics. Entitled – The IMF and the Greek Crisis: Myths and Realities– Thomson admitted that the IMF had revised its date at which they think Greece will finally get back (in GDP per capita terms) to the pre-crisis level. When they devised these usury loan packages, they claimed that “it would take Greece 8 years to return to pre-crisis level”. Now, they have revised that projection to 2034 – yes, you read that correctly – a generation of waste and foregone opportunities. When you look at their own scenarios for a unilateral exit in 2012, it becomes obvious (and I have said this all along) that exit could not have been worse than what the Greek people are enduring and will endure for an entire generation.

By way of background, recall that Thomsen was the IMF’s architect of Greece’s original bailout....

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Data suggests a unilateral Greek exit would have been much better than their colonial future under the Troika
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Bill Mitchell – Invoking neoliberal framing and language is a failing progressive strategy (British Labour

Over the years it’s been clear to me that we live in a fictional world when it comes to economic matters. The mainstream has created this world that bears little relationship to reality and which serves the interests of a few at the expense of the majority. But the way in which this fiction is inculcated in the framing and language of our public debates leads the majority to think that the conduct of economic policy is somehow in their best interests, even if, at times, governments claim we have to swallow a bitter pill in order to get well again. The bitter pill always punishes the lower to middle-income groups, rarely the top-end-of-town. The fiction is so deeply ingrained that even progressive political campaigns are framed within it. I have railed against that all my career because I cannot align a belief that democratic choice requires accurate information with the reality that we make these choices in a fog of fiction. I have always considered the role of the progressive forces in politics, as a matter of priority, should be to be the agents of education, so that these democratic choices reflect our realities. I have never supported so-called ‘progressive’ parties that choose, for ‘political’ purposes, to lie to the electorates by adopting neoliberal framing and language as a way of minimising any difficulties that might arise, initially, from the dissonance that accompanies exposure to the truth, after years of believing in lies. It seems that the British Labour Party continues to promote a false narrative to support and otherwise stellar plan for national renewal. But, as history tells us, a plan built on false financial foundations, falters when circumstances change and the false foundations become the issue rather than the plan....

Digging the grave you have been consigned to deeper. How dumb is that!

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Invoking neoliberal framing and language is a failing progressive strategy (British Labour)
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Michael Roberts — The economics of modern imperialism

G Carchedi and I have been working on some new empirical work, trying to gauge which countries are the imperialist ones and how much value they are able to extract from the dominated or periphery (we prefer those names rather than ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’, which is too geographical). We emphasise that we are looking at the economic foundations of imperialism, not the political aspects or the superstructure if you like, ie the political control by imperialist countries over the periphery, or military might or interventions etc. Direct political control through colonies has mostly disappeared (although not completely); so imperialism operates mainly through economic control now (while throwing in the occasional coup or proxy war). After all, that is the aim of the imperialist powers: to appropriate as much value and resources from the dominated as possible. In that sense, the economic determines the political.

If we focus on the transfer of value from the periphery to the imperialist economies, there are several ways that this is achieved. There is value transfer through unequal exchange in international trade; through global value chain flows (transfer pricing) within multi-nationals; through factor income flows (debt interest, equity profits and property rents); through seignorage (ie control of the money supply: dollar is king) and through capital flows (foreign direct investment inflows and portfolio flows. ie buying and selling financial assets).

So which are the imperialist countries? Carchedi and I define them as those countries which get a long-term appropriation of value from subaltern countries. And this is achieved by the appropriation of surplus value by high technology companies (and countries) from low technology companies (countries). So imperialist countries can be defined as those with a persistently large number of companies as measured by their high national average organic composition of capital (OCC) and whose average technological development is higher than the national average of other countries....

Imperialism has always been about imperialist countries having high-value technology exploiting countries with low-value technology, first, as sources for resources and secondly as markets for commodities produced by high-value technology. This was the model of the British Empire, for example. Along with that, the imperial core prevented the colonial periphery from developing  and deploying high-value technology to compete with the core.

The question before us is to what degree this model persists after the transition from the colonial period to the neoliberal period. That is to say, to what degree does neoliberalism imply neo-imperialism and neocolonialism. How would that be measured?

Now in the 21st century, the US is worried that its technology ‘monopoly’ may be threatened by China’s move up the value-added ladder. This is the real reason for the current trade war....

Michael Roberts Blog — blogging from a marxist economist
The economics of modern imperialism
Michael Roberts

Hedge fund titan Ray Dalio: Trickle-down economy 'not working' — Brittany De Lea

“This set of circumstances is unsustainable and certainly can no longer be pushed as it has been pushed since 2008. That is why I believe that the world is approaching a big paradigm shift,” Dalio wrote.

Governments are also battling large deficits, while pension and health care liabilities are increasing. The latter circumstance, he says, will result in an escalation of the wealth gap battle as the government decides whether to cut benefits, raise taxes or print money to address it.

This is far from the first time Dalio has sounded the alarm bells about either the U.S. or the global economies. In May, for example, he said a shift toward an economic theory backed by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – modern monetary theory (MMT) – was “inevitable” as the Federal Reserve eventually looks to ease monetary policy when interest rates are zero percent. MMT refers to the idea that if a government controls its own currency, there is no need to worry about balancing the budget. Therefore the government, not the central bank, can control the economy through fiscal policies, like spending and taxing.

Fox Business

Hedge fund titan Ray Dalio: Trickle-down economy 'not working'

Brittany De Lea | FOXBusiness

Here is Ray Dalio's post at his blog at LinkedIn. You may need to sign up to read.

The World Has Gone Mad and the System Is Broken — 5 Nov 2019

Shoring up capitalism — Chris Dillow

This is a good analysis of the political economy of capitalism in general and as it applies specifically to the UK now. The links are important in developing the nuance.

Stumbling and Mumbling
Shoring up capitalism
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

The ‘War’ for the Future of Middle East — Alastair Crooke

 

Backgrounder. Alastair Crooke also touches on Latin America and the declining prospects of neoliberalism as inequality and social unrest increase.

Strategic Culture Foundation
The ‘War’ for the Future of Middle East
Alastair Crooke | founder and director of the Conflicts Forum, and former British diplomat and senior figure in British intelligence and in European Union diplomacy

The End of Neoliberalism and the Rebirth of History — Joseph E. Stiglitz

For 40 years, elites in rich and poor countries alike promised that neoliberal policies would lead to faster economic growth, and that the benefits would trickle down so that everyone, including the poorest, would be better off. Now that the evidence is in, is it any wonder that trust in elites and confidence in democracy have plummeted?...

Trickle down or pissing on?

I am not sure about his blanket recommendation to restore Enlightenment values. Enlightenment values led to bourgeois liberalism in which economic liberalism dominates social and political liberalism. Neoliberalism was simply the extension of bourgeois liberalism globally though yet an other empire in thin disguise.

Bourgeois liberalism prioritizes economic liberalism over social and political liberalism based on the assumption that the former is a necessary condition for the latter two. The outcome of this is capitalism, which encompasses free markets, free trade and free capital flows, as the driver of the system. The term "capitalism" reveals that this assumes that capital will be favored over the other factors — labor, that is, people, and land, that is, the environment. The outcome was predictable unless one was wearing blinders. 

So-called democracy was a casually, even though the "democracy" of the Enlightenment was not actually government of the people, by the people and for the people, but rather representative "democracy" in which class structure, power, and wealth are determinative. That's what "bourgeois liberalism" means. Enlightenment thinkers were fearful of "the rabble" and "mob-rule," after. 

This view has persisted. John Maynard Keynes was a proponent of it, for example. See Bruce Bartlett, "Keynes Was Really a Conservative." 

“The class war,” said Keynes, “will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.”

This attitude is reflected presently in the resistance of the bipartisan Establishment that holds the reins of power jointly, passing them among themselves over election cycle, to the rising tide of populism that seeks to unseat them. This is also the attitude of the "deep state" that is now opposing populist-elected President Donald Trump in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.

As far as Enlightenment values go, the American founding fathers, held up as the epitome of Enlightnment values, saw now problem with including slavery in the US Constitution, and Thomas Jefferson, not only a slave owner but also a slave breeder, saw no contradiction in penning, "All men are created equal..." in the Declaration of Independence. George Orwell would later lampoon this sentiment with, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others," in his satirical allegory Animal Farm.

We don't need a return to Enlightenment values that were flawed from the beginning and now represent that Western values that the Empire and its vassals are trying to impose through neoliberalism. We need to revisit those values in terms of the 21st century. The 18th century is long past. It was an advance at the time, but looking back to it is not the way forward now.

Project Syndicate
The End of Neoliberalism and the Rebirth of History

Joseph E. Stiglitz | University Professor at Columbia University, co-winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize, former chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and former Chief Economist of the World Bank

Neoliberalism Tells Us We’re Selfish Souls – How Can We Promote Other Identities? — Christine Berry

At the simplest level, "it's the incentives, stupid."

And incentives reflect underlying values and value structure that shape interests and the their pursuit.

Foundationally, it about the level of collective consciousness. Want to change social behavior for the "better"? Raise the level of collective consciousness. But what are the criteria of "better"? How can they be determined – instrumentally by outcomes, deontologically on the basis of universally applicable rules), virtue based on character, or simply constructed institutionally through the historical dialectic, or some combination thereof? How would a combination be arrived at – theoretically, practically, or through emergence? How objective can a conclusion regarding this be?

The current dialectic between "capitalism" and "socialism" is about individuality versus community. This leads to various paradoxes of liberalism, such as freedom versus responsibility, individual liberty versus social order, homo economicus versus homo socialis.

This is reflected in part in the current dialectic between liberalism and traditionalism that dominates the world stage now that fascism and communism have more or less taken a back seat but not disappeared either, with nationalism and populism rising, and China still a communist country even though no longer Maoist.

Each of these political systems and theories on which they are based contains a kernel of truth. The challenge is harmonizing them in terms what is valuable while losing what is not, especially when what is not dominates.

This is not something that is going to be figured out intellectually and then imposed. It is going to develop organically on the field of history, where the future is uncertain. It is subject to emergence since societies are complex adaptive system. However, the unfolding of history is also path-dependent and constrained by "endowments."

Open Democracy
Neoliberalism Tells Us We’re Selfish Souls – How Can We Promote Other Identities?
Christine Berry, freelance researcher and writer was previously Director of Policy and Government for the New Economics Foundation

ht Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism.