I spoke at a conference in Glasgow in September on Reinventing the Economy. Anatole Kaletsky, author of Capitalism 4.0, chaired the session I spoke in. His introductory talk is, I think, worth thinking both for his brief and effective destruction of the language of much of current economics but also for the offer of the idea that economic crises should create new insights into economic thinking, matched by the question, where is ours?
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It’s early days yet. Three left-leaning bloggers, Jayne Linney, Mike (Vox Political) Sivier and Kitty Sue Jones all had their Twitter accounts suspended last night. I know Sue’s was suspended after a complaint it was spam, nonsense of course. There may have been more accounts suspended and I don’t know of them yet.
This felt very much to me like a dry run, preparation for taking left-supporting accounts down, shutting out left voices, so there’s only the TINA narrative left being discussed. I don’t think people realise how dirty this next election, assuming it happens, is going to get. You have to remember we’re dealing with the City here and they’ve been killing people to get to profit for centuries. They’ve always been covert before but they’re going for broke now and coming out into the open. The gloves aren’t off yet but they’re coming off.
I doubt any new economics will emerge till the existing paradigm collapses. I know a lot of people are terrified by the thought of social collapse but it’s in that environment we’ll have the opportunity to fashion the new economics, one more favourable for the broader mass of humanity than what we’ve had imposed on us for the last few centuries.
Bring it! ๐
I agree with Bill, above-the neo-lib agenda ‘ain’t going anytime soon’. According to Thom Hartmann, we’ve got another 30 years of an eighty-year cycle of ‘great forgetting’ to run before we realise it was all a terrible mistake. I imagine it will be social upheaval and/or undeniable environmental disaster (fracking is exponentially increasing this now).
Kaletsky is right to remind us of keynes’ inspired words; Wittgenstein referred to it as being ‘bewitched by language.’
Richard-is the rest of Anton’s talk available?
That was it
The edit cut him off harshly
I Think the next election will be one of the dirtiest since the 19th century. It may be trivial but the Daily Mail had lead story about Miliband giving money to a beggar-and commented -he doubled back when he saw there were photographers , only gave two pence, some said ‘man of the people,eh?’ Drip by drip character assassination. Not quite in the league of the Zinoviev letter of 1924 but give them time.
Bill, there springs to mind the old adage “Be careful what you wish for; you may get it”. Basically you’re arguing for another version of the capitalist “creative destruction” claim (which itself is really a capitalist reading of the Marxist tenet “exploding contradictions”) trusting that something better can be fashioned out of the total collapse (and it WILL be such a collapse, possibly leading, as I’ve said before, to a sort of “Blade Runner” x “Soylent Green”).
Franklyn, I simply don’t trust the master puppeteers NOT to have fixed it all in advance, so that they remain safe and secure, while the 99% toil outside, and I think your fears about pre-emptive strikes against dissonant (i.e. not singing the neo-liberal TINA paeans) voices such as those you’ve mentioned above leads me to believe the puppeteers HAVE stitched up the game already.
More and more I feel that only REAL struggle, and potentially armed struggle (HOW I HATE the idea, since the thuggish scum ALWAYS rise to the top in any violent upheaval), started NOW, ahead of the General Election, will serve the need. The “gagging law” has already been used to silence voices, and Theresa May is now bringing in legislation that will effectively demonize and class as “terrorist” any dissident voices.
Two overriding ironies present themselves: 1) the lib-Dems joined the Coalition to great trumpetings of def3ending liberties against an illiberal Labour administration – justifiably so, for the last Labour Government DID have an illiberal track record – ID cards and 42 day detention for example. But the Lib-Dems have done NOTHING to impede the vastly more illiberal measures of this incipiently Fascist administration – secret Courts, the demolition of Legal Aid and of access to justice and retrospective legislation to allow IDS’s illegalities to be legalized.
The second, and larger irony – displayed implicitly in your post – is that of the different attitude to planning and intervention by Left and Right. The Left believes in Government intervention to address market failures and societal injustices, where the Right believes the market will deal with everything.
However, the Left ALSO believes in the inevitability of history, and big societal movements, and so has tended NOT to intervene to speed up, or assist, those forces: in other words, it has eschewed POLITICAL planning; economic planning/management OK, political planning/management a big NO, No, and leave it to “impersonal forces”.
The Right, by contrast, has believed – AND practised – political planning with a vengeance, which is why the psychopathic Republicans seem set to capture the US Senate, and so the whole of Congress this week, DESPITE the lunacy, and proven impractibility and incompetence of their theories and practices. Equally, here in the UK, I am convinced that the Right saw how close the working class (a term I am happy to use, meaning all those who have no control over the economy and societal wealth, other than their own contribution in the form of work and payment of tax) how close that class was to REALL:Y taking charge (think the Portuguese revolution, and our own NUM in 1974) devised in 1975, when Thatcher became Tory Leader, a long-term plan, the final fruits of which are only now being delivered, to TOTALLY unpick the WHOLE of the post-WW2 Atlee settlement, and return us all to the situation AT LEAST pre WW2, but preferably earlier still – pre WW1, or better still pre-Napoleonic Wars, when belonging to a Union was illegal, and could result in transportation to Australia.
The bastards are nearly there, with their preposterous proposal to demand 50% turn-outs in Union Ballots – a percentage NOT achieved in the London Mayoral Election, which only had a 38% turnout (See Another Angry Voice at http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/tory-trade-union-turnout-boris.html)
Bill, I truly FEAR for the future – the neo-feudal state is not coming towards us, it’s GALLOPING towards us.
Andrew -I fear for the future (and I have a son)-we are clearly moving towards Lang’s Metropolis (mutatis mutandis of course).
The lie of efficient markets (think of how much RD big pharma does compared to Government funded research!) has brainwashed so many under the age of 45 and the consummate victory of a media that has created mass narcolepsy and zombification which must be the final trump card of neoliberalism.
We now face an election where parties like Greens can’t even get properly aired with an undemocratic voting system and a choice of three neo-liberal parties that cannot be separated by the width of nano particles.
Andrew, the feudal state is here and now -I for one can taste it!
Fear is appropriate
Instead of the ‘armed struggle’ you propose (with echoes from NI) why not form yourself a political party, produce a manifesto, stand in the elections and then, once in power, change things in line with the manifesto?
UKIP managed to do half of it, so surely you can?
Rolf, you must forgive my finding this tendentious. First of all, I am one individual, a nearly 70-year old man: how on earth am I going to be able to take the route you propose?
Secondly, I proposed REAL struggle now, in the form of civil disobedience, demos, strikes, and the willingness to go to prison, as in the casecof the heroic Revd Paul Nicholson of Taxpayers against Poverty, but only feared this might develop into armed struggle.
Thirdly, your proposal lacks practicality on three grounds: time (the General Election is only 6 months away); hegemonic opposition (the media, dominated as it is by supporters of standard “given” thinking, greet every banality and lunacy of Cameron and Farage as on a par with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and every VALID critique of hegemony as the ravings of a demoniac; effectiveness (it was the Poll Tax riots of 1990 that did for Thatcher, whereas the electorate has shown itself completely disenchanted with ALL standard politics and politicians, and are clearly interested in direct action. Turning up as YET another set of suits would be just a turn-off, something Farage has grasped, with his “hale and hearty bloke in the pub” character that he plays.)
So can we get real?
Without backing that couldn’t happen and you won’t get backing for going against the current status quo. Look at what’s happening to the Greens, who actively promote banking reform as a party, they’re being frozen out of the national televised debate, while UKIP, since you bring them up, are even more Tory than the Tories.
Andrew
I agree
Richard
Richard, In 2009, my late colleague ended his presentation to the opening plenary of a conference on Economics for Ecology with these words “What is not guesswork is that the broken โ again โ capitalist system, be it traditional economics theories in the West or hybrid communism/capitalism in China, is sitting in a world where the existence of human beings is at grave risk, and it’s no longer alarmist to say so.
The question at hand is what to do next, and how to do it. We all get to invent whatever new economics system that comes next, because we must.”
It was back in 1996 that he’s delivered he position paper on people-centered economics to Bill Clinton as a member of the steering group on the Committee to Re-Elect the President, the core argument was a critque of market fundamentalism beginning in 1971. He proposed a model in which people come before shareholder returns.
Last week Blueprint for Business (#B4Biz14) discussed this very subject. Meanwhile the concept of people-centred economics is being promoted at the EU, Cooperative Europe and Fair Trade UK. Most people don’t get to hear about it because of the controlling nature of these think tanks. – we don”t all get to invent, because we can’t.
http://www.slideshare.net/JeffMowatt/principles-of-people-centeredeconomics
Andrew Dickie
All your response really says is that:
– the electorate don’t seem to want to vote for my proposals
– I can’t form a political party to advance these ideas
– therefore, voting will not deliver what I want
– so lets all take direct action
– this will get what I want regardless of the opinion of the majority (who are clearly wrong)
However, there is absolutely no evidence that the electorate ‘are clearly interested in direct action’
I presume you know how absurd your comment is in a historical context Rolf
Civil disobedience has always involved small proportions of populations but only ever happens in the face of widespread impression of injustice
Peaceful disobedience has always been an appropriate method of challenging the capture if processes by elites, even within supposed democracies. INeed, without the possibility of peaceful civil disobedience democracy ceases to exist
Your arguments do therefore make no sense
In 2004, We made a warning about rising inequality. saying:
“While the vast majority of people in poverty suffer quietly and with little protest, it is not safe to assume that everyone will react the same way. When in defence of family and friends, it is completely predictable that it should be only a matter of time until uprisings become sufficient to imperil an entire nation or region of the world. People with nothing have nothing to lose. Poverty was therefore deemed not only a moral catastrophe but also a time bomb waiting to explode”
By chance, we would find ourselves in the middle of one of these uprisings later that year , when Ukraine’s Orange Revolution kicked off. I wrote that the revolution would not be noticed, because it took a violent conflict for the world to pay any attention.
http://www.p-ced.com/1/node/353