2 Ingelesez: Estatua “As the currency issuer it is still very powerful. It just serves the interests of a different cohort now relative to the cohort it served during the full employment period that followed the Second World War. In doing so, it has shifted from being a mediator of class conflict to serving the interests of capital in its battle to appropriate ever increasing shares of real income from labour. That is a wholly different narrative to the one that emerges when globalisation is conflated with neo-liberalism – as if they are parts of the same process.”

Ikus Mitchell-en ondoko lanak:

1. Friday lay day – The Stability Pact didn’t mean much anyway, did it?
2. European Left face a Dystopia of their own making
3. The Eurozone Groupthink and Denial continues …
4. Mitterrand’s turn to austerity was an ideological choice not an inevitability
5. The origins of the ‘leftist’ failure to oppose austerity
6. The European Project is dead
7. The Italian left should hang their heads in shame
8. On the trail of inflation and the fears of the same ….

3 Ingelesez: “… globalisation has not rendered the nation state impotent. The thesis, (…), is that the nation state has just changed its role and now uses its power to advance more narrow interests than previously.”

4 Ingelesez: “There is also a crucial difference between globalisation (by which I mean the growth of transnational corporations and international supply chains) and the neo-liberal ideology (by which I mean the dominance of free market economics, the demonisation of government intervention, the demands to eliminate the welfare state and the widespread deregulation of financial and labour markets).”

5 Ingelesez: “Those two developments are separable and distinct although the latter certainly reinforces the threats imposed on nation states by the former.”

6 Ingelesez: “… the ‘Left’ has conflated the two developments and falsely concludes that globalisation is tantamount to the demise of the nation-state. It isn’t.”

7 Ingelesez: “The general population lives in smoke haze of half-truths, misperceptions and outright lies, all driven by some fear of loss that is whipped up daily in the media...”

8 Ingelesez: “Democracies can choose whether to allow the nation-state, by which I mean the currency-issuing government, to use its capacities in many different ways and to serve any number of competing interests.

In the full employment era, it was obvious that the state acted as a mediator in the conflict over the distribution of national income between labour and capital. The assumption was that without regulative oversight, safety nets (welfare states), and direct public employment, capitalism would be too unstable to deliver sustained improvements in material living standards.

However, that role began to change in the mid-1970s, as the ‘free market’ ideology started to seep out of the academic halls into broader society. This was an explicit, and, as we now understand, well-funded campaign in the service of capital.”

9 Ingelesez: “… signing up to these so-called ‘free trade agreements’ and creating tax havens for TNCs and deregulating labour markets to allow the TNCs to increase their profit rates at the expense of the local population reflected a policy choice made by the state to favour capital.”

10 Ingelesez: “There was nothing inevitable about that at all and it was not dictated by the increased global nature of production and supply.

If the Communitarian sentiment that prevailed after the Second World War had not have been corrupted by the monied interests of capital, states could have rejected the demands by corporations, for example, to have so-called ‘investor-state dispute settlement’ mechanisms included in these agreements and governments could have insisted on the priority of the national laws.”

11 Ingelesez: “The era of mass consumption after the Second World War diverted attention of workers from the production process to the shopping centre, which took over where religion left off. There was an abundance of mass produced goods like never before and the new consumption boom also meant that the distribution of national income had to shift so that workers could purchase the ever-growing flow of goods (and then services) into the shops.”

12 Ingelesez: “… the financial deregulation began and capital had yet to discover that it could have it both ways: it could suppress real wages growth and still realise the surplus value on the ever-increasing volume of output it was producing by simply loading households up with debt.

The financial engineers would come along a little later to facilitate that new era of financial capital. But during the full employment era, capitalism was forced to share the spoils more evenly and mass consumption and real wages growth was the manifestation of that accommodation.”

13 Ingelesez: “The neo-liberal era thus extended the ‘religion of mass consumption’ – and exploited exactly the same motivations that Marx considers led people to engage in religion in his time – “Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again.””

14 Ingelesez: “The unemployed were constructed as indolent dolts (unskilled) who were not prepared to put their ‘shoulder against the wheel’ like the rest of us employed workers. They were also reluctant to work because states subsidised their sloth through income support schemes.

These ideas came straight out of the mainstream economics textbooks, which preached the market-based dogma that was as far removed from reality as one could imagine.

Mass unemployment was no longer considered to be a systemic failure of the system to create enough jobs due to spending failure. It had become an individual phenomenon where the unemployed were the culprits and the state should do everything it could to avoid providing incentives to these ‘bludgers’ to continue their wayward and parasitic behaviour.”

15 Ingelesez: “The pre-Great Depression belief that unemployment was also generated by excessive real wages was also brought back into the narrative as if it was an eternal law or truth. Governments were also implicated through their interference into the market via minimum wage dictates.”

16 Ingelesez: “We hardly noticed that our real wages growth had stalled because at the same time our credit cards appeared with generous limits and banks opened up their loan desks (we didn’t know they were securitising our mortgages).

The credit boom driven by aggressive financial engineering allowed economic growth to continue. It was like the game ‘pass the parcel’ – it was always going to blow up but for any particular individual there was time to enjoy the game and pile up the debts on the credit card.

This was mass consumption with all the vacuousness that Riesman had identified in 1950 [David Riesman published his book – The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character] still present but, now, with a ticking time bomb, which was hidden from our view and understanding.”