Exploring Marx's Capital (Historical Materialism Book Series) | AAAARG.ORG
Exploring Marx’s Capital (Historical Materialism Book Series) | AAAARG.ORG
This volume, originally published in French under the title Que faire du Capital?, offers a new interpretation of Marx’s great work. It shows how the novelty and lasting interest of Marx’s theory arises from the fact that, as against the project of a ‘pure’ economics, it is formulated in concepts that have simultaneously an economic and a political aspect, neither of these being separable from the other. Jacques Bidet conducts an unprecedented investigation of Marx’s work in the spirit of the history of science, exploring it as a process of theoretical development. Traditional exegesis reads the successive drafts of Capital as if they were complementary and mutually illuminated one another. In actual fact, like any scientist, Marx only wrote a new version in order to correct the previous one. He started from ideas borrowed from Ricardo and Hegel, and between one draft and the next it is possible to see these being eliminated and restructured.
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EU Should Admit Greece is Bankrupt | Christian Rickens
The unvarnished truth - the second Greek Bailout should not have happened.
The mistake isn’t the size, but the construction of the bailout package. It isn’t geared to the requirements of the people of Greece but to the needs of the international financial markets, meaning the banks.
How else can one explain the fact that around a quarter of the package won’t even arrive in Athens but will flow directly to the country’s international creditors? The holders of Greek government bonds are to get some €30 billion as an incentive to convert their old paper into new bonds. The aim is to keep alive the illusion that Greece isn’t bankrupt — after all, the creditors are voluntarily forgiving part of the debt. The financial sector is cleverly manipulating the fear that a Greek bankruptcy would trigger a fatal chain reaction.
That leaves €100 billion. But that too isn’t geared to what Greece needs in order to get back on its feet. It’s linked to an estimate of how much debt the Greek economy can bear without collapsing. International technocrats agree that with debts amounting to 120 percent of gross domestic product, the country can just about go on servicing its debt. That’s the level at which the cow can go on supplying milk without dying of exhaustion. So 120 percent became the goal.
Collaboration, with our European partners | Cunning Hired Knaves
The European project was supposed to be a bulwark against the dangers of fascist ambition, but now it is the instrument used to dismantle European democracy in the interest of the risk adverse looking for a steady income stream from the provision of the social net by those who cite the words and actions of old fascists while doing so.
The post Collaboration, with our European partners by Richard of Cunning Hired Knaves summed up in one sentence. For much better sentences and many more urgent points read the post.
On Sunday there were massive demonstrations throughout the Spanish state, with half a million people on the streets of Madrid and 450,000 in Barcelona, protesting against the labour ‘reform’ planned by the Partido Popular, the right-wing party that most closely represents the interests of the power elites that conserved their position when the transition from dictatorship to democracy was undertaken.
S.P.A.R.K. protest at cuts to lone parents, Dublin 18th February 2012
Many families were cut in the last budget but lone parent families were particularly hit by the Fine Gael/Labour Party government.
The key elements are that single parents can’t take advantage of training such as Community Employment (CE) Schemes and when the youngest child turns 7 years old, the parent is declassed as a lone parent but treated as an ordinary worker even though there are few affordable creche places. There is a bill coming up in March which will copper fasten some of the worst elements of government plans.
There is particular anger directed at the Labour Party because they are associated with women’s rights and a more progressive society.
Please share the link to this video
Exiting the euro | Michael Roberts
Michael Roberts argues that those in Greece who cite the example of Argentina when suggesting that Greece should leave the Euro are not necessarily looking at the whole picture. The situations are not the same, Roberts points out, citing Argentina’s former central bank governor at the time, Mario Blejer and his recent piece in the Financial Times. He also points to research based on the the experience of five recent devaluations of economies in crisis (including that of Argentina) which “shows that they lead to a 10-20% fall in real GDP and take five to ten years to recover to previous real GDP levels. But that is not to say that there is no alternative to “lowering wages, privatising the state sector, reducing taxes for the corporate sector (especially big business) and ‘deregulating’ labour markets i.e. the super-exploitation of the Greek people to raise profitability.”
But the left could also find an alternative policy to exiting the euro where Greece negotiates a full default on its debt to private and foreign bondholders; takes over the banks; and uses the savings from bond and interest repayments (€17-20bn a year) to start state directed investment in jobs, technology and funding small businesses, while staying in the euro to protect the savings of the people from destruction, keeping down inflation and avoiding a rise in foreign debt. The question of exiting the euro then becomes an issue for the Euro leaders to impose (and to be resisted by a campaign within Europe), not as the main policy plank of the left.
Corporate tax avoidance: where are the worst offenders?
This table comes via the Tax Justice Network (and Richard Murphy). It’s from a table produced by U.S. researcher Kimberly Clausing and as TJN notes “demonstrates which countries are working hardest to wage economic warfare on the United States (and, by extension, on other countries,) via the global tax system”.
Solidarity campaign to support the people of Greece
Mikis Theodorakis, famous Greek composer of Zorba’s Dance, and Manolis Glezos, veteran resistance fighter against the Nazi occupation, have issued a call for a European Front to defend the people of Greece and all those facing austerity. We have decided to support this call and work with trade unions, campaigns and parties across Europe to establish a European Solidarity Campaign to defend the people of Greece. We will organise solidarity and raise practical support for the people of Greece; they cannot be made to pay for a crisis for which they are not responsible.
Chris Dillow | Capitalism against freedom
[...]
During the Cold War, opponents of communism routinely, and not entirely wrongly, claimed to be champions of liberty. Freedom for capitalists and freedom of speech and thought go together, it was claimed. “Freedom is indivisible” wrote Bruce Winton Knight in 1952. “Economic freedom is…an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom“ wrote Milton Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom. And back in 1944 Friedrich Hayek complained that “We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past.”
Today, though, this seems wrong. Many threats to freedom come from capitalists. The story is no longer capitalism and freedom, but capitalism against freedom.
Ian Stewart | The mathematical equation that caused the banks to crash
In The Observer, Sunday 12 February 2012
Anyone who has followed the crisis will understand that the real economy of businesses and commodities is being upstaged by complicated financial instruments known as derivatives. These are not money or goods. They are investments in investments, bets about bets. Derivatives created a booming global economy, but they also led to turbulent markets, the credit crunch, the near collapse of the banking system and the economic slump. And it was the Black-Scholes equation that opened up the world of derivatives.
The equation itself wasn’t the real problem. It was useful, it was precise, and its limitations were clearly stated. It provided an industry-standard method to assess the likely value of a financial derivative. So derivatives could be traded before they matured. The formula was fine if you used it sensibly and abandoned it when market conditions weren’t appropriate. The trouble was its potential for abuse. It allowed derivatives to become commodities that could be traded in their own right. The financial sector called it the Midas Formula and saw it as a recipe for making everything turn to gold. But the markets forgot how the story of King Midas ended.
Greece: a Sisyphean task | Michael Roberts
In a Eurozone that is unwilling to share its surplus with weaker, hardest hit economies there is no other option for those economies but default. Despite the agreement of Greek politicians to shorten their political life and accept the deal all that they have done is simply postpone this eventuality once again. However, even that postponement might be shortened by the Greek elections in April where the smaller leftist parties outside the coalition currently have 40% of the vote. Or so says Michael Roberts:
Whatever the Greek coalition leaders agree to and try to implement, such is the weakness of Greek capitalism, it will not be able to meet its fiscal targets or get its debt down to reasonable levels. Before the end of the year, the Troika will have to report that Greece is not delivering. Then the EU leaders will have to decide whether they ‘let Greece go’ or not. The EU leaders have agreed to more money for Greece (or more accurately its bondholders and banks) in return for draconian cuts in living standards in order to provide more time to try and ‘ring-fence’ other vulnerable Eurozone states like Portugal and Ireland (where they are preparing extra funding). So when Greece goes down, it will not affect the rest (or so the EU leaders hope). Of course, the Greek people may force the issue earlier if they vote in an anti-Troika government in April.
As Greece stares into the abyss, Europe must choose | Maria Margaronis
Do we really want to live in an economic union that must destroy the future of millions in order to just tick along? Maria Margaronis points out that the situation in Greece today says little about Greece and everything about the EU.
The trouble with historical metaphors is that they can obscure the present: what’s really at stake here is not Greece’s identity but Europe’s. All eyes are fixed on Athens, but the way out of the crisis requires a choice about what kind of Europe we want. The one we have now, with its deep structural inequalities and its rigid adherence to a failed economic ideology, protects neither democracy nor human rights. Stiff-necked and punitive, it prefers to eat its children.
Comment by: Robert McCann
Dec 1st 2009 at 13:12
Of course Marx’s insight was his notion that the market system works to disguise relationships between human beings as relationships between things, commodities, maybe a house? And the etheral connections that we make with ‘this box made of bricks and things’ as illustrated by the dearth of ‘property pornography’(which I define as lurid or sensational material: see http://www.dictionary.com) on our TV’s and in our magazines is an example of this. Really it is us human beings who are seen, and sadly, see themselves as commodities. WE HUMANS HAVE BECOME PRODUCTS SUBJECT TO THE MARKET & GOVERNED BY THE WOKING OF THE MARKET.
And it is hard to argue that his insight has not been proven correct. We have been governed by the workings of the market in terms of our jobs our livelihoods, which in effect expanded with disasterous housing market.
Herbert Marcuse I think called our relationship with things like property ‘one dimensionality’ which basically states that the development of consumer based capatilism produces ‘one dimensionality’ – produces a false contentment and directs peoples energies and ambitions into objects (such as property) rather than towards relationships. In effect ‘binding’ them into the system by manipulating their desires.
My problem is that I like to be kissed when I’m being screwed and the purveyours of soft core property porn like Duncan Stewart and the more hard-core stuff that Kevin McCloud produces in shows like ‘Grand Designs’, have left us with that awful ‘morning after the night before’ feeling…like it woudn’t be so bad if our houses had been designed and built with care and attention to detail… and by this I mean witha sort of emotional feeling that really good design elicts. Devlopers emotional ‘kiss my a**e’ as DA out of ‘The Royal Family’ might say…
Our architectural profession also have a lot to answer for in this respect because they were either part of this horrible ‘Housing does Dallas’ movie or they stood on the side lines and watched us sink into low budget porn design.
Anyway enuff…
Comment by: donagh
Dec 1st 2009 at 18:12
Well, that is colourful Robert, and I don’t think you’re the first person to come up with the term property porn - although I think your enjoying the allusion a little too much.
However, this idea that ‘we humans have become…’ is a bit weak in my view. It’s not humans that have changed but capitalism that has remained the same. I think of that bit of Marx that you refer to when I hear people call for wage cuts to improve ‘competitiveness’, but claim that we can’t borrow to develop the economy and keep people in jobs because it would ’spook’ the market, which as far as I know is based on the exchange of goods:
Comment by: Robert McCann
Dec 2nd 2009 at 00:12
Hi Donagh…Rosie Millard former BBC arts pundit is credited with having coined the term ‘property porn’; “property porn is addictive”, she wrote in 2002, and so is internet pornography, believe me I know about these things…I had trouble a few years back explaining away a 70 euro internet phone bill for a phone call made to some-one in the Bahamas!!!???… the point is that I and indeed a lot of people have/are seeking the dopamine hit that TV property porn in its many forms provides…
And this reveals the serious side to addiction in any form…or rather the nature of human emotional needs.
The desire for shelter & security is one of our most basic human needs…and really I am attempting to argue that the issue of house and home is/should be a ‘rights based’ issue which of course is an anathema to the anglo-saxon free market system. This feeds into notions of ‘place’ and sustainability, notions that are, and will be, central to our well-being and in terms of how we care for each other. Our shelters, our homes and the way they have been designed and built, are in effect the mirror in which we see ourselves reflected, and the political ideologies that have shaped Ireland’s ‘obscene’ property market provide truly, an awful reflection.
The philospher Heidegger posited the notion that to ‘dwell is to inhabit the earth, it is to have a life that is habitual…’. In effect to dwell (in a house or in a nomads tent for that matter) is to have a way of life. Our very habitual way of life, the shape of our society, the houses we live in is a modern day version of the cultivation of our patch of the ground. And again it is in our homes, in our architecture, that we see ourselves as a society reflected…but again (taking from Heidegger) if our homes are no more than a collection of bricks and mortar, a commodity to be bought and sold, just like a packet of biscuits, then maybe we are faced with the thought as Heidegger stated,
“…the world is darkening. The essential elements of this darkening are: the destruction of the earth, the standardization of man, the pre-eminence of the mediocre…”
Now Heidegger might have had a bit of a soft spot for the national socialist regime in Germany the same one that vomited up Hitler, but I think he was on to something, and this leads me to your comment that ‘humans have not changed but capitalism has remained the same’. Im not so sure. Capitalism has surely changed from Adam Smiths notion: the ‘invisible hand’ of the free-market…sure we now live in a new age of economic socialism which in effect is a modified version of capitalism. the governments are propping up, or should I say screwing us ordinary folk, while kissing & cuddlling the banks to the tune of billions. Now call me naive but those billions could have given us all the free house of our choice…not everyone wants to live in a neo-mock-tudor-georgian-avant-garde-contempory glass-box house in Dalky so it would all balance itself out somehow. Housing for all should be free to all. Those who have built a big house or a small house, it dont matter, should be given the means to unburden themselves of the material cost of living in those houses. Just imagine all the worry that we have as a result of our addiction to property pornography will be gone in one fell swoop. Of course we would have lots of money to spend on lots other ’stuff’…so maybe this idea needs a bit more ‘teasing’ out…innuendo intentional…we could of course discuss Alfred Loos essay Ornament & Crime…
Cheers.
Robert.
Comment by: Conor McCabe
Dec 2nd 2009 at 08:12
‘Rosie Millard former BBC arts pundit is credited with having coined the term ‘property porn’
Mark Morris was using the term ‘property porn’ in film reviews for the guardian back in the 1990s.
In definition, he said ‘It’s the great fetish of our times: not sex, but places to live with enviable furniture.’ (2 May 1999)
And you get the feeling he didn’t invent it either.
Comment by: Robert
Dec 2nd 2009 at 12:12
Hi Connor…you correct I seem to recall now something about the Mark Morris comment on our fetish with furniture…this seems to reinforce the notion that we have got our relationships (material things vs people?) mixed up. Though I have to say that the Aston Martin James Bond was driving in his last adventure was pretty cool…or was it sexy?…take your pick. Or maybe it was just another ‘machine to drive in’ just like Le-Corb built houses as ‘machines to live in’?.