RSS
RADHIKA DESAI: Hello and welcome to the 20th Geopolitical Economy Hour, the show that examines the fast-changing political and geopolitical economy of our time. I’m Radhika Desai.
MICHAEL HUDSON: And I’m Michael Hudson.
RADHIKA DESAI: Well, it’s happening again. Reports of the death of neoliberalism are once again proliferating. Just take a look at the UK Guardian. In the UK Guardian website, there’s a whole series of stories, whether neoliberalism is dying, the rise and fall of neoliberalism. Biden just declared the death of neoliberalism. Is neoliberalism finally over? Is neoliberalism finally dead? Is the neoliberal era over yet? And of course, there are also contrary views. The National Institutes of Health say neoliberalism is not dead. And there is also a very interesting story in the Jacobin, which says the rumors are false. Neoliberalism is alive and well.
Well, this is not the first time that the death of neoliberalism has been announced. I remember back at the end of the 1980s, the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs were inflicted upon third world country after third world country, each followed in short order by IMF riots against critical food and fuel subsidies being reversed, social spending being cut, joblessness rising, thanks to the recessions induced by these very programs.
And a World Bank report at the end of this period, essentially admitted that the neoliberal recipe was certainly not working in restoring productive dynamism to any economy upon which it had been inflicted. I also remember the death of neoliberalism being announced after the 1997-98 East Asian financial crisis, when the so-called “Committee to Save the World”, as Time Magazine called it, a committee allegedly consisting of Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, and Rahm Emanuel, who were allegedly saving the world economy from a neoliberalism induced meltdown.
After the 2008 financial crisis, practically everyone was talking about the return of Keynes, the end of neoliberalism, the return of the state, while Alan Greenspan was admitting before a congressional committee that he had been partially wrong about his free market approach to banking, that the crisis had left him in a state of shocked disbelief. He said, I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I have been very distressed by this fact. And he said further, I made a mistake in presuming that the self interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the funds.
However, even after this massive sort of watershed event, the real story that emerged from it was, as the title of one book about the subject had it, the strange non-death of neoliberalism. And today we have Bidenomics being hailed as the final slayer of the dragon of neoliberalism. Clinton’s Labor Secretary Robert Wright, for instance, thinks that Biden is about to alter the structure of the U.S. economy in ways that help the vast majority and that voters will give Biden another term and reward Democrats with both houses of Congress because it will have transformed the economy in favor of the 90 percent and of workers and unions.
And yet other columnists are praising the same actions of the Biden administration and the same legislative actions as the best business opportunity ever. So even after all these crises, neoliberalism seems to be, if not alive and kicking, at least leading a zombie existence and refuses to die. So today we want to talk about neoliberalism, what it is, where it came from, and why it seems not to die. And what will happen if it dies, and other such questions. So Michael, I’m sure you want to get in here and say something. Please go ahead.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you’ve just made the point that neoliberalism wants to make itself invisible. It’s like the devil. If there a devil, the devil wants to say he doesn’t exist. Neoliberalism says inequality doesn’t exist, exploitation doesn’t exist, and everything is quite fair.
And what it really wants to make invisible or actually disappear in reality is the government. Neoliberalism advocates an economy without government regulation, with no social protection against fraud or exploitation or predatory impoverishment, no usury laws. They’re against consumer protection. They’re against the ability of debtors to use bankruptcy, which is why Biden made sure that students could not wipe out their student loans through bankruptcy, to free themselves from debt.
So neoliberalism, basically, it’s a dynamic of economic polarization. Neoliberalism is a way in which they can justify why the economy is getting more and more unequal, as if this is a perfectly natural thing, a survival of the fittest, and is really a road to efficiency. And in that sense, neoliberalism is a point—this requires a point of view. It’s an ideology. You could almost say it’s the new religion because it’s a new moral value.
Instead of religion saying we’re for mutual aid and we want to uplift the population as a whole, neoliberalism is saying greed is good, Ayn Rand is good, we want to be free from government, free from government regulation, so the rich can do whatever they want to get rich. And if they do get rich, it’s because they’re productive, not because there’s any exploitation. So neoliberalism is really a cloak of invisibility for all of the problems that we’re seeing today.
RADHIKA DESAI: Well, I mean, this is really interesting, isn’t it? Because there’s just so much smoke and mirrors about it, and there’s even smoke and mirrors about the whole question of invisibility, etc. So on the one hand, of course, we know that in the neoliberal era, markets are imposed on, essentially, the ordinary people, on workers, therefore are forced to compete with one another, especially with the attack on unions and so on and so forth.
But meanwhile, as we have seen, after four decades of neoliberalism, it has often entailed socialism for the rich and competition and neoliberalism for the poor, so the rich get bailed out. So in that sense, I think it’s really worth unpacking this a little bit more. Because on the one hand, you’re right, of course, that they kind of, you know, the other part of smoke and mirrors is that neoliberalism claims that it’s about having no government intervention whatsoever. But in reality, the neoliberal period has seen an enormous amount of government intervention.
If you look at practically any country, including the United States, the onset of the neoliberal era has seen only a slight reduction in the role of the state in the economy, and in many cases, hardly anything, any at all. So in that sense, it hasn’t been about markets. Secondly, you know, on the one hand, they want to say, oh, well, you know, we are doing nothing, the state is doing nothing, this is just the outcome of the market.
On the other hand, neoliberalism has also announced itself. So for example, you know, Mrs. Thatcher is very famous for having said, I think sometime in the 70s, before she became a prime minister, she was very aware, she said the other side have an ideology, we need to have one too. So in that sense, neoliberalism was very much a sort of a counter to the sort of center left ideology, whether you call it Keynesianism or welfarism or what have you. So it was very conscious of being an alternative point of view, which was coming to the fore.
But I think, really, to me, one of the key issues about neoliberalism is that it advertises itself as being all about free markets and competition. But in reality, when you look at it, it’s historically been about preserving the power of big monopoly capital. That’s what it’s been about above all else.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the key trick word there is market, and especially free market. And what neoliberalism claims is a market or a free market is exactly the opposite of everything that the classical economists, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, even Marx, talked about what a free market is. Any market is shaped by the social institutions. A market is shaped by the tax laws, by the criminal laws, by all sorts of government regulations. There’s no such thing as a market without government. And if you do get rid of a government shaping the market, then what you have is the wealthy people shaping the market.
Well, what did Adam Smith mean by a free market in the whole 19th century? It was a market free from the legacy of feudalism. We’ve talked about this before. A market without a landlord class that was taking money in their sleep to make money without working. A market free of monopolies. That’s what Adam Smith criticized. He wanted to get rid of landlords and monopolies. And that’s what the entire 19th century was about in describing value and price theory.
Classical economics of free markets looked at any market in terms of value and price theory. Value was the socially necessary cost of production. Value was the cost of producing something. But market prices could be way above this cost, such as, and that was economic rent. Rent was the excess of price over and above the actual value. For instance, if you’re charging someone for the use of land for housing, the land doesn’t have a cost. That’s just there. There’s a legal privilege to privatize and appropriate the land and add the costs. The same thing for monopolies. A monopoly is just the legal right to charge whatever you want and have prices far in excess of the cost of production. So that was a free market.
What neoliberalism has done is erased the whole history of economic language and economic terminology and replaced it with saying a free market is a market free for the rent seekers, a market free for landlords to charge whatever they want for rent without any regulation, free for monopolists to be able to charge whatever the market would bear. And if people are willing to pay $10,000 a year, $20,000 for health care, that’s what the market would bear, your money or your life. That basically is the neoliberal slogan.
And in order to do this concept of their kind of a market, a rentier market, they have to erase the whole history of economic thought and even economic history to say, what happens when there’s a market like this? Well, you look at the Roman Empire and when it collapsed, that’s what happened when you had an oligarchy like this. So neoliberalism in that sense, it’s a market, but it’s an oligarchic market, not a democratic market.
RADHIKA DESAI: And you know, you make a very good point, Michael. So I just want to say two things. First of all, you make a very good point. What are prices? Prices are really based on the value of things, which is based on the cost of production of that thing. But in reality, of course, market prices can be, as you put it, way above that. But I would say something else. I would say that in addition to that, market prices for the vast majority of producers are often below their cost. That is to say, they suffer. So workers get market prices for their labor below their cost. Peasants and small producers and mom and pop store owners and business owners get prices that are often way below their production costs and so on. So really, as you rightly say, it’s an oligarchic, it encourages an oligarchic form of production. But I also, so that’s my first point.
But I wanted to take the conversation further also on another point you made. And that is that, you know, you said that neoliberalism is really about erasing the entire tradition of solid economic discourse that was carried on up until the late 19th century. So what happened in the late 19th century? This is very important.
In the late 19th century, on the one hand, Marx and Engels brought the tradition of classical political economy of which Adam Smith or Ricardo were such a big part. They brought it to its culmination by resolving so many of its unresolved problems. What exactly was value? What was surplus value? Where did it come from? How was it that the same amount of capital deployed in different proportions between capital and labor, you know, was it supposed to yield equal rates of profit? Et cetera. All of these were really interesting questions.
Marx and Engels, with their ability to think through all these questions in a dialectical manner, they resolved these problems. And the result was a huge indictment of capitalism. And in fact, even under Ricardo, sorry, please go ahead, Michael, I’ll continue.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Before you go on to that, your point about labor at less than its cost of production, that’s very important because if labor is paid less than its cost of living, it’s forced into debt. And that’s the important thing. Not only is what the rentier class, the landlords and monopolists charge over the cost of production to get a free lunch, but if labor is less than the cost of production, it’s driven into debt, and it’s driven into debt to the creditor class, and this debt becomes a wedge that polarizes the economy. So the market there polarizes.
RADHIKA DESAI: Absolutely. And I would say that even more, I mean, labor, yes, of course, if there is anybody who is going to give them any credit in the first place, because that’s not always been the case. But I would also say that this has historically applied to peasants and small producers of every variety. And that’s why peasants have this constant cycle of debt that they are in, because their products never bring in the kind of return that is necessary.
But to return to the point about what happened in the late 19th century. So, you know, if Marx and Engels brought neoclassical economics to a culmination, Ricardo, even before Marx and Engels, Ricardo’s insistence that all value originated in labor was itself the basis of the various currents of Ricardian socialism. So this type of thinking, economic thinking, which was very good and solid, was already giving rise to anti-capitalist currents, even before Marx. Once Marx comes around, things are going downhill very rapidly. And that’s when you get a completely different way of thinking, making its appearance in the form of neoclassical economics.
And it’s important to remember that neoclassical economics, which emerged in the 1870s, of course, there were some sort of socialistic elements of neoclassical economics. We’ll leave those aside. But on the whole, it was a complete commitment to free market thinking, particularly in its Austrian version. And that free market economics has been developed, and it survived throughout the Keynesian period. And almost 100 years after it was first born, it finally achieved the influence that it did with the election of governments like Thatcher and Reagan and so on, and has been afflicting our world for the last 40 years.
So neoliberalism, it’s very important to remember, is essentially this extreme free market version of neoclassical economics. And it essentially erases all these questions. For example, neoclassical economics does not recognize anything like value. It does not talk about production, but about markets and exchange. It doesn’t talk about values, but it talks about prices. It does not think of capitalism as a historically specific way of organizing society. It thinks that it’s been around since Lucy, it’s been around since the earliest days of humankind. So in all of these ways, neoclassical economics represents a deterioration in economic thinking.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, that means that neoliberalism really should be called anti-liberalism. Because if liberalism was the classical idea of free markets, free of rent and interest and monopoly rent, then the justification of all these is that the market should include rent as being productive. Then this is the opposite.
And so neoliberalism, it’s an anti-social philosophy. That’s what the Austrians were. They said, we have a definition of markets that doesn’t have society at all. As you mentioned, Margaret Thatcher said, there’s no such thing as society. So you have a neoliberal view of society as well as markets without government, without anything that is subsidized, without any social feeling. It’s all individualism. As if you can make the whole society with individualism, there is no public infrastructure because any infrastructure is privatized. There is no public credit and money creation because all money creation, instead of being a public utility, it’s all privatized. And that lets the bankers create the money. The bankers receive the interest on loans of this money. The bankers lend to the landlord class to buy real estate and oil wells and mines and extract economic rent.
So the Austrian economics is really a rationale of fighting back, saying we’re against any reform that is going to make the government the recipient of natural resource rent and land rent and income. It should all go to the wealthy class. That was sort of the last attempt to sort of fight against the whole of free market liberalism that was occurring.
And it was not only Austria, it was in the United States by John Bates Clark saying there is no such thing as unearned income. Everybody earns whatever they want. The landlord earns the rent and the crook earns what he can take.
RADHIKA DESAI: Well, this is exactly, you know, and you know, this is another way in which neoclassical economics, which is the basis of neoliberalism, is different from the tradition of classical political economy, because you see, there was a sense in which in classical political economy, whether they although they didn’t use the term or Karl Polanyi used the term, apparently he got it from from (unclear), the term I’m talking about is fictitious commodities, but they knew that land. labor and money were not commodities, although they were treated in capitalism as if they were commodities. And this led to a whole range of difficulties and problems that Polanyi talked about in great detail.
What’s really interesting, and many people think that what Polanyi said has nothing to do with Marx or with the traditional classical political economy, but it does for the very simple reason that the awareness that land, labor and money were not commodities was reflected in classical political economy by the simple point that all the entire tradition of classical political economy from Smith to Ricardo to Marx, they are all concerned about finding the special laws through which the rent of land, the wages of labor and the interest of money are set. They knew that they are not commodities, so their prices are not set like all the other commodities. There are special laws that determine the wages of labor, the rent of land and the interest of money. So in that sense, they were very aware of this. So this is a very, very different thing.
And so in classical political economy, as you say, all incomes are earned incomes because there is really no question. They don’t really understand the difference between earned income and unearned income. This is the key point. And of course, they even sort of laugh at Polanyi for even using a term like classical political economy. But fundamentally, I also want to say that neoliberal economics, neoclassical free market economics is essentially bad faith economics because it emerges in the 1870s and develops over the next many decades, precisely during the decades when capitalism in its homelands was becoming monopoly capitalism. Precisely at that time, they are celebrating free markets and competition, precisely that which is being erased, in fact.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, that’s what de-industrialized the United States, not recognizing the difference between earned and unearned income. You have exactly what’s happened really since the 1980s, since Ronald Reagan here and Thatcher’s there. So you could say that this view of the world leads to not curing the problems, not freeing society from the rentier and creditor interests, but it ends up by you de-industrialize.
The neoliberals agree with Marx that the profits are all made out of employing labor and charging more for what labor produces than what it costs to employ it. But instead of what Marx said, well, let’s raise the price of labor so that labor gets to buy and receive what it produces, the neoliberals say we have to lower the price of labor. It’s an anti-labor strategy.
And this is why under the Clinton administration in the 1990s, America said, how do we lower the price of American labor to increase profits here? Well, we’ll shift labor to China, to Asia, to where labor has paid lower wages and therefore we’ll put American labor in competition with Asian labor and we’ve de-industrialized. All that was the result of following the neoliberal game plan of how to get rich and meaning how to get rich if you’re one of the 1%, not the 99%.
RADHIKA DESAI: No, exactly. And there’s another way in which, so the first point like I’m saying is that just when capitalism is shifting to becoming monopoly capitalism, that’s when they suddenly start talking about competition because the fact is the competition and is the only way in which capitalism can be justified because the idea is that competition imposes upon the capitalists themselves a certain type of discipline that forces them to be more productive. So, and therefore it develops the forces of production, however, brutally and chaotically it may do so, at least it does that.
But once capitalism arrives at the monopoly phase, Marx was very clear at this point, it was ripe for transition to socialism. So think about it. Neoliberalism emerges as an ideology to defend capitalism at that point in historical time when the bell was already tolling for it. In that sense, neoliberalism has been fighting a rear guard battle for all these decades.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, it’s an attack on industrial capitalism. A neoliberalism isn’t the result of industrial capitalism. Industrial capitalism wanted to lower the price of labor by having the government provide most of the living costs of labor. The government would provide healthcare, not the workers that corporations would have to pay high enough salaries to afford healthcare, education, and basic needs. So Marx had believed that neoliberalism would fade away because neoliberalism was a defense of the landlord interests and the feudal interests.
You talked about monopoly capitalism. There were always monopolies in the sense of natural monopolies, such as transportation, communications, and neoliberalism wants to privatize these monopolies to take them out of state hands where the government would provide natural monopoly services, transportation, water supply, healthcare, at cost or at a subsidized price. By monopolizing them, you create an enormous source of revenue. Basically it’s rent revenue, and most neoliberal wealth is not made by industrial production. Neoliberal wealth is made by taking assets from the public domain, especially monopolies, especially the transportation system, especially the electrical system, especially the communication system. They privatize healthcare. They privatize education. All of this is taken away from the government.
So you had two competing philosophies leading up to the years just before World War I. You have industrial capitalism evolving into socialism saying we want to have the government provide basic needs of labor so that we don’t have to pay the costs and we can compete with countries that privatize all these services. And then you had the Austrian-American, the privatizers wanting to fight back and saying we want to get rid of government and prevent them from doing this. We want the economy to be free for the privatizers to grab Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan style.
RADHIKA DESAI: But if I may, Michael, you’re absolutely right, of course, that there are natural monopolies, but I think that there are two different types of monopolies and I’m talking about them both, of course, but I think it’s important to distinguish between the two.
The first is, of course, the natural monopolies. Land is a natural monopoly. Moneymaking is a natural monopoly, et cetera. That is to say the creation of money is a natural monopoly of the state and so on. I mean, there are many, as you say, transportation, blah, blah, and so on. All of these things are true.
What Marx, however, is talking about when he talks about the capitalism arriving at the monopoly phase is that the unfolding of the process of competition itself will lead, the natural result of it is the creation of monopolies because after the process of competition has eliminated all the inefficient producers, there is only one or a handful left standing and that creates a context in which essentially society moves from competitive capitalism, even in the non-natural monopoly sectors, to monopoly capitalism where a small number of really big producers tend to monopolize everything.
Marx felt that once this stage was reached and there was nothing necessarily wrong with it, this is what capitalism was doing and it was leading to more efficient production, but it was more efficient production based on a massive socialization of labor involving the cooperation of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people in a single industrial enterprise.
And Marx felt that once this stage had been reached, everybody would be able to see that the myth of the heroic entrepreneur who is owed vast profits, et cetera, is a myth and the myth would be exposed and therefore people would be ready to take things into public hands. People would say, this is our labor, this is social labor and it should be socialized and it should be publicly owned. This is what neoliberalism has made a tremendous contribution to preventing so far.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, there are two kinds of monopolies. Now, what you describe, Marx is describing monopolization under industrial capitalism, but some monopolies are natural monopolies. That’s what governments have kept in the public domain like the postal service and other things.
And within industrial capitalism, already in the 19th century, the American laws and presidents said, banks are the mother of trusts and the antitrust laws in the United States that began to be passed in the 1890s realized that the bankers were organizing industry into trust, that this monopolization was not simply the workings of the marketplace that Marx described, but it was actually done in a predatory way by the banks buying up all of the steel companies and making the steel trust, buying up credit to merge all of the copper companies and making a copper trust to make sure that there was not competition. So that while neoliberalism promises to be a doctrine of free competition to everybody fighting to lower the price, it actually is to prevent competition by monopolizing the entire economy so that you can charge high monopoly rents.
As you’re seeing, this is what the legal cases today in the United States, the one good thing that Biden has done, which he’s very embarrassed at having done and doesn’t talk about it is the antitrust laws. You’ve had the antitrust ruling against Google. You’ve had a whole set of antitrust rulings that are being revived today to try to save the economy from being monopolized.
And this is something that Marx did not anticipate, the degree to which industrial capitalism would lose the fight against finance capitalism and essentially not defend its interest, but would be co-opted and somehow evolve into this basically anti-capitalist financialization and neoliberalism that is so economically self-destructive that there’s very little way that you can look at, this is a dynamic of the laws of motion because it’s the law of stopping motion, a law of degrowth, not growth.
RADHIKA DESAI: No, I must say on this point, I would slightly disagree with you, Michael, because the thing is, it’s important to remember that antitrust is actually one of the keystones of neoliberalism.
Let me explain what I mean. So, first of all, let me agree with you, what you were saying earlier, that in the United States, banks like J.P. Morgan played a leading role in essentially the cartelization, the monopolization, the trustification of the economy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And of course, Hilferding across the water was talking about similar trends in Germany where banks were playing a central role in aiding the monopolization of capital. But while banks aided it, this was a natural tendency of capitalism.
What Marx pointed out is that at this point, once you arrived at the monopoly phase, it was time to shift to socialism. Indeed, many people laugh at Hilferding because Hilferding said something like, you only have to nationalize six large Berlin banks in order to essentially take a bulk of the German economy into public ownership. But he was right because these banks, through their activity in aiding monopoly, had indeed created that sort of economy. He wasn’t talking about the banks of today, which have very little to do with production. At that time, particularly in Germany, they were very different types of banks.
So, banks were certainly aiding the process of monopolization, but what Lenin called monopoly capital, what Hilferding called finance capital, and what Buharin called the nationalization of capital were all referring to the same thing, that all the major capitalist societies were now dominated by big monopoly corporations. Marx thought that this was the time for socialism.
Antitrust law, therefore, arrives at this point to help the neoliberal defenders of capitalism to try to maintain the appearance of a certain minimum level of competition while actually continuing to have the monopoly structure of the capitalist economy. If it’s not monopoly, then it’s oligopoly, and the competition is largely in name. And it is really, at this point, you go from justifying capitalism in terms of competition to justifying capitalism in terms of consumer welfare.
Because remember now, the fate of capitalism is not being decided in the market as it once was in the competitive phase, but in the courtrooms of antitrust law. So, the whole purpose of antitrust law is to try to mask the fact that capitalism is now past its sell-by date and we have to do something much more radical. And this has been true now for about a century at least.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Okay, you’re talking about structural monopoly of how the economy is structured as opposed to just the competition within a given industry. So, we’re talking about monopoly. I agree with what you said. We’re just talking about two different kinds of monopoly. The structural monopoly of how wealth is made and then the specific industrial monopolies in particular industries.
RADHIKA DESAI: And you know, Michael, though, at the same time, what you were saying earlier, and I think this is absolutely critically important, is very true. Today, what we are seeing is that big monopoly corporate capital is preying upon, of course, first of all, in the days of more robust development of capitalism, even as it was entering in the monopoly phase, what we witnessed was that often the natural monopolistic activities, whether it was transportation or utilities or what have you, were actually often performed by the state. So, you had a fair amount of state ownership, whether it was at the municipal level or the state level or the federal level, you had a fair amount of state ownership.
Now, what we are seeing is the attempt by capital on the one hand to privatize those natural monopolies that were hitherto created and maintained by the state, for the purpose of private profit. And then also, of course, preying upon every other monopoly on which they could try and get their hands, whether it is health services or water provisional utilities or transportation, education, you name it, the private capital has got its fingers in every one of these spies.
And its purpose is not productive expansion, but rather the purpose today is to skim off the incomes, the ever shrinking share of incomes that are actually made by producing something. And these are largely made by workers, by smaller enterprises, and so on and so forth. And this is what is done through the entire structure of indebting the economy, whether you are indebting households or you’re indebting businesses or you’re indebting governments. And this is the way in which today’s financial monopoly capitalism is skimming off income.
But there is one other thing that I also want to introduce in here, which is that-
MICHAEL HUDSON: You should make one point at a time, not two points.
RADHIKA DESAI: Sorry, I will wait, I will wait, you go ahead.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Okay, what you said is what I said earlier in our discussion. I said, most wealth under neoliberalism is made by privatizing the public domain. And the fight between socialism and neoliberalism is who is going to provide for natural monopolies and basic needs? Who will provide healthcare, education, communications, transportation? Are these going to be public services provided at a low cost for everybody? Or will it be essentially privatized and monopolized, as you say, so that these natural monopolies are going to be able to become vehicles to squeeze out economic rent.
And economic rent is really the key objective of neoliberalism. Not so much profits, but monopoly rent. So neoliberalism denies that there’s any distinction between monopoly rent and profit. As opposed to classical economics that made a very clear distinction. There are rent recipients and profit recipients. And they’re antithetical, not together.
RADHIKA DESAI: And the reason why it’s so important to make this distinction between rent as unearned income, versus wages and profits as having at least some kind of earned element in it, is the simple fact that this, it draws attention to where production is involved. But of course, neoclassical economics is habituated to not focusing on production at all.
But yeah, okay, so I entirely agree with you. And I just wanted to say that in order to understand why we are in this position today, where you say the purpose of all capital today, especially in countries like the United States, seems to be to essentially prey upon and earn rents from these monopoly activities and so on. How did we come here?
Well, I just want to throw in one further thought, which is that, what I was saying earlier, that Marx was expecting that once capitalism arrived at this monopoly phase, that people would realize that it was important to socialize it, et cetera. Now, of course, neoliberalism came along and neoclassical economics came along and started producing these inherently false, and I would say that they were bad faith defenses of capitalism.
But nevertheless, all their efforts could not prevent the cataclysmic crisis. So what Arnold Mayer called the 30 years crisis of 1914 to 1945, from erupting, which involved inter-imperialist wars, which involved Great Depression, and finally, nuclear weapons, the Holocaust, and what have you. All of these things happen, and by the end of this period, I would say that most people were convinced that capitalism, really, that the world was going to move away from capitalism, that capitalism had shown the destruction that it would cause, the misery that it could cause, and that the world was not going to stand for it. People like Keynes or Polanyi expected that the world would move radically leftwards.
But then you got the golden age of capitalism, and most people attributed that golden age of capitalism to capitalism itself, sorry, the golden age of world growth, I should say, they attributed it to capitalism. They said, you know, people like Keynes or Polanyi were wrong, and others who thought that, you know, the capitalism would end in the post-Second World War period, they were wrong. Capitalism had regained its mojo and everything was fine.
But in reality, what we can, what becomes very clear after 40 years of neoliberalism, is that the real source of growth in this period, after three decades after the Second World War, lay in the fact that monopoly capitalism was heavily regulated, was ringed around with the institutions or with socialistic institutions and practices, whether it is the practice of macroeconomic management for full employment, the creation of welfare states, the expansion, massive expansion of domestic demand, etc., and all of these things, these socialistic measures, these are what account for the dynamism of capitalism.
Why can we see that? For the simple reason that after this model got into crisis, not because of the socialistic measures, but because the underlying system remained capitalist. After the crisis of the 70s, when the governments of these countries took the turn to neoliberalism and rolled back many of these socialistic measures, you did not get a revival of capitalism, but the transformation, the morphing of capitalism into the system that you were describing, Michael, as preying upon, you know, public enterprises, privatizing them, and essentially using the state as a (unclear) from which to make unearned profits.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, there’s also another factor that we haven’t discussed yet that gave the appearance of capitalism having a golden age after 1945, and that is that every country emerged from World War II almost free of debt, because the Depression had basically wiped out debt, and during the war, consumers were not going into debt because there was nothing they could buy. Corporations weren’t going into debt, and after the war, there were no reparations on the defeated parties as after World War I, so you had every economy beginning with what in Germany was called the economic miracle, a debt-free society.
Now, there were many business cycles after 1945, but each cycle started from a higher and higher debt level, and this rising debt increased the power of creditors and the bringing to power of Thatcher and Reagan and neoliberalism in the 1980s was largely a result of all of this growth in creditor power that resulted from the growth of debt, meaning of savings in the hands of the creditor class that found its counterpart on the other side of the balance sheet in debt by labor, by corporations, and by government, so the governments essentially were prone to a debt squeeze.
You had, since the 1980s, the International Monetary Fund telling countries, well, you have to pay your foreign creditors, and the way you’re going to pay your foreign dollar holders, basically, you’re going to have to sell off your infrastructure to monopolize it. It was debt that forced the privatization of monopolies throughout the global south, largely through the IMF and the World Bank, so you had a neoliberalism that was not only debt-based, but also, as we’ve discussed in our earlier broadcasts, that this is a U.S.-centered phenomenon because after World War II, the creditor-oriented system was really based on the U.S. dollar and U.S. government debt, which essentially was debt run up by balance of payment deficits to pay for America’s military control, and that is what neoliberalism leaves out.
Neoliberalism is wrapped in the iron military fist of 800 American military bases to make sure that there is no alternative. If you’re going to have no alternative, you need to enforce neoliberalism militarily, and that globalizes neoliberalism in the way that we’ve been talking about.
RADHIKA DESAI: I agree with what you say, but I would confine all of that to the neoliberal period because why does debt rise so exponentially in the neoliberal period? It rises exponentially in the neoliberal period because, first of all, the income of workers is being squeezed because there’s an attack on unions and, of course, there is a massive outsourcing and so on and so forth, so you get a squeeze on workers’ incomes and if workers need anything, then in that case they have to be indebted.
Secondly, although of course there are a lot of cutbacks of government spending as far as social spending is concerned, on a whole lot of other outlays, government spending does not decrease. Government spending does not decrease in terms of helping industry, subsidizing industry. Government spending does not decrease in terms of military activities. In fact, it increases on all these fronts massively, so government expenditures do not decrease.
Meanwhile, every government, especially every Republican government in the United States, tries to outdo the previous one in giving tax cuts to the rich, so the tax structure becomes increasingly regressive and therefore, of course, there is a debt crisis of governments and, of course, households, that is to say, yeah, I mean, and businesses are also increasingly indebted because as businesses are taken over by bigger businesses, the bigger businesses or financial interests that take over businesses are only interested in borrowing as much as they can on the basis of the collateral that that business provides, so they burden every business with as much debt that it can possibly take in order to essentially appropriate dividends and profits for themselves.
So in all of these ways, neoliberalism has led to a massive increase in debt and this is itself, to me, a result of the fact that freeing capital, freeing monopoly capital from the burdens of state regulation and social obligation, has not restored to capitalism any kind of productive mojo. It has only set capital, monopoly capital, free to prey upon the earned incomes of the rest of the world, so a tiny elite has as a consequence been getting ever richer at the expense of the vast majority of working people in the world.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I think the protector of monopoly capital was basically the financial interests and there was an exponential growth of debt beginning already in 1945. There was a build-up of pressure of increasing wealth and concentration of financial wealth that enabled the financial class to really take the lead in protecting monopolies and playing a catalystic and ultimately controlling role in the monopolization. So you have to look at this interaction between the financial sector and the rest.
RADHIKA DESAI: Well, I’ll say two things. Number one, I would say that first of all, if you look at, if you chart the amount of debt in the world, yes, sure it was increasing in the post-second world war period, but there is absolutely no doubt that it goes, I mean, it may be increasing like so, but then it spikes up in the neoliberal period in very noticeable ways.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes, because it was created.
RADHIKA DESAI: Yeah, exactly. And on the matter of the United States dollar and the dollar system, the fact of the matter is that again, the amount of debt the United States incurred as a result of the operation of the dollar system compared to what we have today in terms of the sheer amount of debt, not just the US debt to the world, which is a small part of it, but just the explosion of debt of all sorts. Again, it is out of proportion and this explosion of debt and the financial markets upon which it rests and the speculation to which it has given rise to, these are the things, not just the US’s current account deficit that accounts for the indebtedness of the world. The US’s current account deficit, big though it is, is a small portion of the largest structure of indebtedness.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Okay, you made an important distinction that is often left out of account. You’re absolutely right. When I talked about compound interest increasing exponentially, that’s interest on debt that is already in place. But what you’ve just mentioned is the very important fact that most debt isn’t simply the accumulation of interest on past credit, it’s actually the creation of new debt by banks simply creating bank money. And that’s exactly what’s happened. That was the explosion, the creation of bank money, which in a way you could call it the privatization of the monopoly of credit creation. And the credit creation was created, as you just pointed out, out of all proportion to the productive use of credit or to the means of production. It wasn’t created to create new means of production, but to buy existing means of production to take them over and monopolize them, downsize them and financialize them.
RADHIKA DESAI: No, exactly. And you know, Michael, this has been such an absorbing discussion, but I also noticed that we have only been through a fraction of the points that we wanted to go through. But let me just start bringing this hour to a close. We may do another session on the same subject, but let me start bringing this hour to a close by mentioning just one important thing that I think we should put out there, whether or not we do another hour on this.
And that is that precisely because neoliberalism was never an accurate theory of how the economy works or even how the capitalist economy works, precisely because neoliberalism, although, you know, was incapable of delivering the kind of prosperity that it was promising. As a result of that, it has been shifting shape about once every decade. So once every of each one of the four decades that we have seen, we have seen a slightly different type of neoliberalism. And as a consequence, the current debate, the current announcements of the demise of neoliberalism are also not going to lead to… are also, you know, the reports of the death of neoliberalism are greatly exaggerated.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you’re right. Neoliberalism in practice doesn’t work. And yet, if it doesn’t work, and it’s junk economics, what it has done to conceal the fact that it doesn’t work is to redesign the whole picture of the economy that’s depicted in the national income accounts and the GDP accounts. And it actually depicts this unproductive, predatory, rentier overhead as if it’s a product, a product, as if rents are a product. That’s it.
RADHIKA DESAI: No, absolutely. So on the one hand, it sort of tries to create the illusion of growth. You know, right now, everybody’s saying that the United States is growing. But how much of that growth is purely financial growth? So that’s absolutely right. And as I say, we must talk about this as well.
But I just wanted to finish the point. So in the 1980s, you got classic neoliberalism, you know, markets good, states bad. And this is what’s going to lead to prosperity. By the end of the 80s, this was no longer so. Then in the 1990s, you got a different neoliberalism. This was the neoliberalism of globalization. It was enforced not by right wing, new right governments like Reagan and Thatcher, but by new labor and sort of, you know, Clintonite, you know, third way governments like Clinton and Blair and so on and so forth.
And what did they say? They did not deny that neoliberalism was very punishing for ordinary people. And they said to their mostly working class support base, they said, we would love to raise your wages, we would love to increase welfare, we would love to have, you know, better environmental protection. But you know what, our hands are tied, our hands are tied by globalization. Globalization is this unstoppable juggernaut, that’s not going not going to, you know, we’re going to have to bow to it. By the 2000s, you’ve got jobs.
Two more, three more points. So by George Bush, Jr, you got the US as an empire. And by this time, Europe was suffering from euro-sclerosis, and Japan was not doing well. So the United States economy, especially with the housing and credit bubbles was made to look, you know, with great difficulty, of course, but made to look like it was somehow avery dynamic economy. After 2008, you got the massive period of austerity. That was the neoliberalism of the 2010s. And now we are going to see a new version of neoliberalism.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you’re talking about the conflict between illusion and reality. And in the United States, all of the polls show that consumers, workers, consumers are the neoliberal word for workers, say that they’re much worse off.
And President Biden keeps saying, how can you be worse off? Read Paul Krugman in the New York Times, and he said GDP is up. Well, GDP is up, but all the GDP is occurring to the monopoly class, finance, insurance, and real estate, not to the workers. So when they talked about a boom with GDP up, that’s again for the neoliberalized rentier economy.
So the way to make a transition, I guess, from what we’re talking about now to our future broadcasts, is just ask yourself, would China have been better off if it would have abandoned its socialism and adopted the U.S. neoliberal model back in 1990 with Clinton? Should China have just said, well, Russia invited the neoliberals in to just close down all of our industry and give everything in the public sector to the ruling class and the gangs for free? Would China have been better off if it would have followed the Russian Boris Yeltsin’s plan in the 1990s and the Clinton plan in the United States and the Obama plan? Or would it have been better off being socialism? Once you ask that question, you begin to say, what is neoliberalism leaving out of account?
RADHIKA DESAI: Well, exactly. And so, you know, I mean, bang on, you know, I don’t think that the rest of the world is going to do and, you know, the rest of the world is going to benefit by imitating what the U.S. is doing.
But in the U.S. itself, you know, this idea that somehow Bidenomics is going to, you know, is now talking about industrial policy and it is going to essentially constitute the rejection of neoliberalism. This is all complete nonsense.
You’d only believe it if you thought neoliberalism was about free markets. Neoliberalism has never been about free markets. It has always been about hiding the fact that capitalism is now in its senile monopoly phase. Instead, you keep talking about competition as though it’s going to revive it. But in any case, it has always been about preserving the power of an ever-shrinking monopoly, financialized monopoly, capitalist elite.
And in this form, Bidenomics, with its massive subsidies to corporations, etc., is just another version of that. In my book, Capitalism, Coronavirus and More, I call what we are now about to see pseudo-civic neoliberalism. That is to say, our governments will tell us the people must have X, Y, Z goods which are free or very cheap. And they will subsidize massively the production of these things, whether it is vaccines or various forms of green technology or transportation, what have you.
And the governments will essentially give vast subsidies to private corporations to produce these things, which they will sell at high cost to government. And government will then allegedly make it available to us, either for cheap or for free, at least in name. But the fact of the matter is, we are going to pay for it through our taxes. And we are also going to pay for it because the goods and services we get will be so shoddy that they will probably not be worth having. So this is the kind of pseudo-civic neoliberalism that we are about to witness. What is being called Bidenomics is not at all the advent of a new post neoliberal age, but merely the fifth form that neoliberalism will take in its fifth decade.
MICHAEL HUDSON: So neoliberalism is the new Cold War turning into a hot war, basically. It’s a globalized Cold War.
RADHIKA DESAI: I guess, Michael, you might want to elaborate very briefly on it.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, in order to maintain the system, you can’t have a rivalry to neoliberalism. There must be no alternative in the United States. Why is it fighting against China? China is an alternative. Russia is an alternative. If the world sees that the US and NATO, Europe are shrinking, and Eurasia is going way ahead, then there obviously is an alternative, and people are going to ask, what makes the Eurasian multipolar development so different from the world that the United States is trying to create, a neoliberal, financialized, privatized world ruling by force and by client military oligarchies?
RADHIKA DESAI: You’re so right. In a certain sense, this new Cold War is the Cold War. I think it’s like the old Cold War. It’s the Cold War between, on the one hand, those countries that refuse to accept that capitalism is past its sell-by date, and on the other hand, countries that know this and are willing to experiment with all sorts of interesting ways of creating economies that are actually going to work for people. I think that’s the divide we are increasingly going to see.
So that really means, you know, perhaps another program which we must do is, really, we should talk about the international manifestations of neoliberalism over the last four decades, and how they have changed, and how they have brought us to this point of this new Cold War.
But for now, I guess we will say goodbye, and looking forward to seeing you, perhaps not in two weeks, but certainly in early January. So look forward to that, and thank you very much. Bye-bye.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
Video is worth the time to listen to. A summary:
Classic liberalism focused on competition and free markets. Over time and through finance capital, monopolies develop. This leads to a shift away from classic liberalism to neo-liberalism. The monopolies want to control the national economy, so they try to shrink government and privatize (take-over) public industries. Sometimes this is called “shock treatment”. There is another option, however. When capitalism reaches its “sell-by” date, instead of shifting to neo-liberalism, a socialist economy could emerge. This happened in China recently, and neo-liberalism can only survive if there are no other alternatives, so China is public enemy #1 or else people would want the same thing in their countries
The U.S. was friendly to China during a long time, and it did not become more like China during that period. On the contrary, when it began antagonizing China it increased the government’s role on the economy, as was to be expected (and Hudson didn’t like it!).
I love these discussions between these two economists.
I figured out about 30 years ago that capitalism (Oligarchic capitalism) was crap and that as a member of the working class, socialism was a better form of government for me (and 99% of everyone else). I just sigh when some working class fool remarks how much better off he is than the average Chinaman. I’d guess that he just doesn’t know crap about anything.
I fear that when the dollar finally dies, the working class will not come together and help each other – they will just try to grab what they can in imitation of their “betters”. Too many will actually starve to death.
Capitalism & Communism–two Jewish created socioeconomic scam systems devised to conceal & replace the racial basis & stimulus of civilization with economic materialism–thus solely profiting the Jew.
“The question of genetic quality is a hundred times more important than the question of capitalism or socialism.” –Fritz Lenz
Another great discussion. Thank you.
One thing I think Dr. DESAI is getting terribly wrong… and I wish Dr. Hudson had continued to push back against… by suggesting “anti-trust”…
I was a kid in mechanical engineering in 1980 when the first robotics labs and 3D modeling software was only just being developed. Those were the days when the ‘markets’ were like a patch of ocean with many waves (i.e. competing small companies) transferred their energy to neighboring waves in a natural, extremely exciting, enjoyable and profitable environment FOR ALL US CREATIVE PROUD WORKERS. There was massive competition between thousands of companies and innovation was literally everywhere you looked. (Then ‘they’ crashed the financially-over-supplied markets and Dr. Hudson’s 1% ended up owning all the extremely valuable technology for a tiny fraction of its value by 2003… an incredibly important scam that was never discussed… because 9/11/2001… but that’s NOT my point).
Ever since, with massive mergers and acquisitions (i.e. 40 years of “neoliberal economics”) the “ocean” of competing businesses now looks like a moonscape with massively tall, thin-based, rigid, EXTREMELY UNNATURAL, suck-up pyramids (i.e. no more fluid waves of innovation/competition to be seen anywhere). These unnatural evil suck-up structures are managed by the 5% MBA managerial class who serve only the interests of the 1% and openly and constantly declare that the 95% scum below them are society’s evil disgusting enemy (who deserve nothing and must be constantly punished into submission). In this ‘social’ environment everything (i.e. “production”) is stagnant and rotting. The 5% are totally incompetent and they are literally preventing all, what Dr. Desai calls, “production”.
With this in mind… does it make sense what Dr. Desai claims… that “industrial capitalism progresses inevitably to monopoly capitalism”… which the state must take-over and manage?????? Yikes, I disagree whole heartedly… that makes every cell in my body shake in frustration and fear. It’s ABSOLUTELY NOT TRUE THAT MONOPOLY PRODUCTION IS THE ENNEVITABLE END STATE… no way… if that’s what Karl Marx believed then he was wrong. I can’t imagine how production by “massively tall, thin-based, rigid, EXTREMELY UNNATURAL, suck-up pyramids”, managed by MBA suck-ups or (well intentioned?) government suck-ups (trained by Dr. Desai?), makes any sense… anywhere… at any time.
What Dr. Desai seems to be falling for is Global Scientism Philosophy… the incredibly stupid assumption that everything has already been invented and developed. Please Dr. Desai, if you think through that assumption, you will discover that you are very wrong… there is INFINITELY MORE to be invented and developed… we’ve really only just started… just compare China’s 10s-of-thousands of miles of high-speed rail systems to the West’s nothing, and all that entails scientifically, technologically, socially. Real production, by workers in all regions of the world, consuming/trading what they produce, will always and forever REQUIRE a sea of natural waves (i.e. innovative workers) cooperatively competing with each other. Monopoly production IS NOT ‘THE’ ABSOLUTE END STATE.
Dr. Hudson’s suggestion of anti-trust action, is absolutely correct… EXACTLY what we MUST do. The big monster evil suck-up pyramids need to be torn down… ripped into thousands of pieces and the science/technology scattered to all parts of the world… the seas of innovation must be restored… so that engineers everywhere, like me, can get busy again doing what we’re supposed to be doing… and again enjoying and being proud of ourselves and the communities around us. The 5% managerial class must first be forced to understand how horrible and destructive they are… and then systematically/methodically integrated back into the 95% working class. Those in the 95% that sucked up to 5% also need to be set straight… sucking up (i.e. tolerating the bullshit coming down from above) is the essence of ‘corruption’… it destroys everything that is ‘civilized’ in any society. If I saw a bumper sticker that said… “STOP SUCKING-UP”… wow would that do my heart/soul good.
I hope I made my point…. yikes… sorry so long.
Dr. Hudson… thank you so much for replying to my comment a few weeks ago when I asked you whether you worked with my father at Conoco Oil. I was VERY disappointed… I so hoped there was a link between you and me through my father. Thank you for all you do, I consider myself very fortunate to have a hero like you.
“With this in mind… does it make sense what Dr. Desai claims… that “industrial capitalism progresses inevitably to monopoly capitalism”… which the state must take-over and manage?????? Yikes, I disagree whole heartedly…”
Is it true that governments have sponsored direct creation of private sector monopolies, by policy? That is, the humble beginnings, garage start-up cartoon so dear to corporate America, is myth, fable.
This is the same myth that Adam Smith pushed.
Examples: msft, goog, mic welfare queens, … social media and censorship complex…
Evidence appears to indicate government policy, in concert with cartel finance, leads to direct creation of monopolies. (and cartels)
The government created those billionaires.
Back in the day, governments handed out massive public assets in a cartel like creation system to the railroad barrons. Industrial capitalism starts with monopolism/cartelism. The patent system is part of this monpoly creation.
It’s an open question…
There is nothing about Capitalism vs Communism in this interview. The idea is that Capitalism is only efficient in the presence of competition. As monopoly power grows, competition declines. Economies then reach a turning point, where they can choose finance Capitalism or some degree of Socialism that will benefit the people who comprise the economy.
You should listen to the video. It’s quite good.
Neoliberalism is dead. And the biggest problem the world has is avoiding the damage that will be attempted with the money accumulated by the crooks seeking to continue with more of the same.
And faced with the dilemma that the game is over, they tried to print a lot of money and turn it into gold and that is the reason for the world disorder.
Globalism is syncretic and the USEUNATO terrorists and Chinky/Russky “multipolars” adhere to it, that’s how “dead” neoliberalism is.
It’s not quite dead, yet. It just smells that way.
Just like its tool, modern monetary theory.
Neoliberalism isn’t dead it just smells bad.
Although the idea of producing a particular service or product frequently originates in the mind of one person, the manufacture and delivery are necessarily social and cooperative. The incentives of capitalism have produced enormous wealth, but the distribution of the wealth is the central,vexing
question debated, fought over and killed over for two hundred years or more.
The distribution of wealth is a social, moral and political question that cannot be decided by the capitalists. We know how that works out, but it is also obvious that the entrepreneurs must receive a substantial reward for their work and investment.
Capitalists need to make critical decisions about production, demand and technical matters, but they must be totally excluded from politics and government. Any government which allows the participation of the wealthy will inevitably become corrupt and serve only them.
When Lord Acton made his memorable statement about power corrupting, he curiously forgot how greed can take hold of men.
Prof. Desai is not suggesting capitalism to evolve into monopoly capitalism-she is just observing the fact and providing explanation for it. You and Prof is saying the same thing.
Anti trust action was very effective since 1930’s for a few decades-then why did it cease to be so effective after sometime? What is the reason? Co-option by capitalist class through lobbying, revolving doors, bribery, lawfare, venue shopping, corruption of incentive structures of regulators (revenue sharing by regulatees to the regulator effectively making regulator a client of regulatees etc.) and various other tools.
Yeah, no doubt there SHOULD BE strong anti trust action, but what are the incentive structures in a society that prevents this to be the case? Prof is stating reasons for it, why it cant be so within the commercial logics of capitalism.
Is journalism really dead?
Neoliberalism is something journalists talk about, so it probably never existed in the first place. Not outside their feverish, coke-fuelled imaginations.
If it does exist, not a single story has ever been written about it, and that will continue to be true as long as journalism isn’t dead.
The face of Neoliberalism is Mitt Romney.
While working for Bain Capital, Romney would purchase a business and leverage the business’s assets to create debt. They paid themselves out through this loan money and then sold the debt-burdened, hollowed out company. Hudson says the result is that GDP goes up, but no productive economic activity has taken place and the GDP increase is not distributed throughout the economy.
Another example of Neoliberal economics is to look at Brazil in the 1980s. The country drastically cut social spending to make interest payments to international bankers and Brazil’s people suffered greatly. From 1985 to ’86, food subsidies went from 2.1 billion to 7.7 million (amounts in Brazilian Real). Public health expenditures dropped from 4.1 billion to 12.9 million, and other social benefit programs fell from 19.7 billion to 44.7 million.
https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/278751468769740302/pdf/multi-page.pdf
Those kind of drops in numbers are devastating to the population, especially in a short period of time, but this happened throughout the world. Neoliberalism used the same tactics as Bain’s vulture-capitalism. Burden a country with debt and then, when the country cannot make interest payments, start stripping it of assets. As a result, those least able to handle the financial shock–poor people–suffer the greatest harm
Modern monetary theory is tool of neoliberalism is a new concept to me. I would appreciate if you can take time to explain it more.
I really want to understand the statement Industrial capitalism leading to socialism. Does it mean that socialism is historic destiny of industrial capitalism? And if so, then why did the US and German industrial capitalism did not lead to socialism? What were some important events which thwarted this historic destiny?
My view is that labor-capital frictions in industrial capitalism can be resolved in either of the two ways: Leading to hard socialism in case of labor victory or Finance capitalism in case of capital triumph. Obviously, industrial capitalism is intermediate stage but it can have both of these eventual outcomes depending on who comes on top.
Secondly, In case of labor coming on top in industrial capitalism, the resulting socialism would be of a particular hard type…. It cannot be some benign mix like government providing utilities so that capitalists pay taxes instead of wages.
Because ultimately, in such a mix, capital substitute wages for taxes. And this create new problems like resentment about waste and bloat of government, efficiency argument, freedom of choice argument, profit making oppurtunity by privatization of such public utilities etc. Also, the question arises again, in a liberal democracy, who watches the watchman? In a system of monetized electoral democracy, how capital’s control of legislature, social discourses, resource and value allocation functions be kept in neutral domain? It is simply not commensurate within the commercial logic of capitalism.
Also, industrial capitalism has poor history of developing into socialism. All empirical cases of revolutions USSR, PRC, North Korea, Cuba, Iran etc were basically rural agrarian societies at time of revolution, contrary to theoretical prediction.
I posted the same question in split posts at your tube too but here it has more probability of being answered. I would really appreciate if Prof Hudson can help me understand it.
Thank You for your work.
“Also, industrial capitalism has poor history of developing into socialism. All empirical cases of revolutions USSR, PRC, North Korea, Cuba, Iran etc were basically rural agrarian societies at time of revolution, contrary to theoretical prediction. ”
Good observation. However there were revolution in France. Paris commune which however could not survive. There was revolutions in Germany, Hungary. Capitalists managed to put them down as well. In almost every case starting with revolutions in England and France every revolution required suffering by people and total failure by ruling elites to govern. Moving in that direction. There is leadership needed. Just like Bolsheviks with Lenin at the helm. Organization that can take power and lead people towards common goals to the just world without exploitation and people power-true democracy.
Romney isn’t real either.
MMT is primarily the idea that supply and demand aren’t linked to price, and therefore it’s fine to dramatically increase the supply of money.
No one genuinely believes in this flim flam. The phrase “increase the supply of money” is a giant bureaucratic euphemism for “counterfeiting,” which is a crime even if it’s legal. MMT is merely a justification for doing what they were going to do anyway. They know about the Cantillon effect, they just like it because they’re the ones getting the counterfeit money first.
In short, this is another journalism. It doesn’t.
What’s happening is that “industrial capitalism” is in fact crony communism. They repeatedly find they have to soften the communism to avoid imminent collapse, and the word they use for soft communism, in this context, is socialism.
E.g. the “private” healthcare in America is in fact communist, and has communist shortages and all the other supply issues the USSR faced. However, in this case, they make the private taxpaying citizen pay for the enormous cost overruns communism is famous for, because (amazingly) this is still not worse than having a single-payer system.
This is a superstitious myth. If “labour” comes out “on top” of capitalism, what you get is universal poverty. This is a consequence of the Chamley-Judd redistribution impossibility theorem.
Put another way, it’s due to the fact that supply and demand determines price. Labour is paid what it’s worth. If it politically demands more, then it makes the product not worth buying, the product isn’t produced, and labour is now unemployed.
Refer to what minimum wages have done to McDonalds cashiers.
The idea that labour isn’t able to refuse jobs that pay less than they’re worth is the idea that workers are in face irresponsible slaves who need to do what master says, as they can’t take care of themselves. Under full USSR communism labour is treated like slaves because that’s the point of anticapitalist thought.
Thank You for bringing up these other examples. I should have written “The bringing about and its successful continuation of revolutions”. The thing missed in the original analysis where industrial capitalism is considered beach head for socialism overlooks a fundamental problem. The problem of the costs of collective action i.e. extremely concentrated costs over vastly diffused benefits. Rural agrarian societies are better suited for bringing about and sustaining revolution because unlike industrial capitalism where options like moving to another industry or employer exist, the connection of peasant to land is far stronger and his ability to substitute land or skill transference is non-existent. Therefore, faced with substantial risk of survival or changes to land tenure, overwhelming personal costs can be overwhelmed.
Also, industrial capitalism as beach head for socialism is very interesting point from a historic perspective however, its relevance is strictly limited and not futuristic. Simple composition of workforce in modern society indicates that percentage of workforce engaged in industrial production (as conceived in the classical sense of Large scale manufacturing and its allied industry), is very limited. And it is consequence of various factors. One being that industrial capitalism, in order to undermine labor, evolves into finance capitalism, which in simple words is to generate rents without need for labor.
Another important aspect, and much less noticed, is that under industrial capitalism, the R & D and industrial innovation is dictated by the logics of capitalism, which is to eliminate the need of labor. And thus all new innovation i.e. robotics, AI, mechanical scaling of production processes etc is geared towards elimination of labor and moving towards dashboard production which a gentrified class of labor is skilled and qualified to operate and thus does not have any sense of collective interest and solidarity. E.g we see this trend mainly in gig labor where the yuppie class has no sense of class and are a purveyors of new Brahmanism.
In the not too distant future, today will be,”back in the day”. History does not repeat, but it certainly echoes.
The railroad barrons were preceeded by the earls and dukes of William the Conquerer. They were preceeded by the friends and supporters of Caesar Augustus. And so forth into antiquity.
I think we have the answer. It’s just that some are reluctant to accept harsh reality. Fantasy Land is so much more pleasant.
So who borrowed the money in the loan? Where does the money originate? Where do the assets go? Many questions to be answered.
Take the Democratic / Republican way out. Print genuine counterfeit money. Pay off the dept. Pennies on the dollar. Over time, nobody will notice. Especially if everybody is always getting pay raises to offset the rise in prices at the food store.
The current price of gasoline locally is about $3.50 per US gallon. Sixty years ago it was about thirty two cents per gallon. The value of gasoline is probably about the same today as it was then. So what has changed?
Hmmmm?
Actually, Capitalism Is Collectivist
Video Link
The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim: nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences.
– Carroll Quigley
How Finance Capitalism Ruined the World – Dr. Michael Hudson & Dr. Steve Keen, DSPod
Video Link
Loans to foreign countries are dollar-denominated. Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, and so on cannot print US dollars. Whatever the original purpose of the loan was for, once it becomes unpayable, then the theft begins. The Neoliberal method was to pile loans upon a country and wait for the foreign government to miss an interest payment. Then bankers demand austerity for the population, while buying up public assets at firesale prices
I don’t know what neo liberalism is. This Marxist economist Hudson is against it. Therefore it must be good.
U.S industrial capitalism was called the American System by Henry Clay. IC was invented in the colonies, especially by Massachusets Bay. They created Bills of Credit (looks like a check) and also Mass Bills (looks like money signed by Treasurer). The Bills of Credit were debt instruments that are paid back and then extinguished, and the mass bills were debt free money, to pay the interest on the bills of credit. Just remember there were two finance instruments, one was a form of debt, and the other was debt free. Both of them worked together.
London became finance capitalist in 1694, and was at war with the Colonials who invented IC. The revolutionary war was because King George demonetized colonial script. Mass Bills were script. This then caused a depression, which led to the war.
Germany became IC after it was transmitted to them by Frederick List, and then was uptaken by the Kaiser. List, learned of the system while he was in America and after reading about it from Henry Carrey (Lincolns economist).
IC in America was killed by the FC’s via war and intrigue. The war of 1812 was a failure, and then the intrigue of the split election in 1912, which was successful, inserted IC into America. Shortly after the 1912 win, America was maneuvered into War against Germany.
IC requires state banks, or some sort of state credit, which channels toward industry and production.
Hamilton sprang from this colonial background:
Hamilton felt that the country needed to establish its own factories to produce goods such as clothing and tools. If Americans relied on manufactured goods from Europe, the economy could easily be destabilized and the US would not be truly independent. He believed that the US had to develop an economy based on agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce.
When Alexander Hamilton took charge of the new Department of Treasury, one of his primary goals was to establish a national currency via a state bank, and a mint that would produce coins to rationalize the currency.
FC attacked and killed IC. It was murder, not suicide. And wherever IC erupts in the world, then war will soon follow. China is now the first case of an IC economy that has not been subverted or warred upon.
In 1900, the 4 most industrialized countries in the world were the United States Germany Britain and Russia. It’s liberal lies that poverty stricken peasants rise up against the oppressive landowners in Russia.
. It’s also total ignorance and idiot academics who think that agriculture means poor and backward. Yes, Cuba was agricultural. But it was also one of the most prosperous and advanced countries in the Americas Why do you think the United States wanted it so much? . Late 19th early & mid 20th century Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world. Why? wheat and meat exported to Europe. Of course railroads combines and refrigerated steamships were necessary Idiot academics don’t even know what a combine is.
The biggest industry in California is agriculture including marijuana. California is hardly a backward primitive peasant state. Santa Clara County, home of Silicon Valley is still full of farms and orchards.
Also, peasant does not mean landless poverty stricken migrant farm laborer slave or serf.
Thanks for the summary. If that’s what those people are thinking they are most certainly willing to serve up a dog’s breakfast of political and economic “ideas.”
Mr. Hudson describes a “neo-liberal” economy as one
All we’re missing here are Dudley Do-Right and Boris and Natasha.
I suppose it’s remotely possible there are people who want no protection against fraud or exploitation though for the life of me I don’t know what “social” protection against these is. And Biden is a neo-liberal it appears. Who knew?
If we can retreat from cartoonish ideas for a moment, Hudson’s idea of “neo-liberalism” is pathetic and reflects the garden-variety misunderstanding of capitalism, ordered liberty, and (basically) free markets. The choice is not between (1) HVAC companies and hardware store rampaging through the lives of people and (2) suffocating, irrational regulation. Protection against fraud is IN FACT an essential element of any kind of an economic system, not least a capitalist one. So are judicial enforcement of contracts and legal regulation of monopolies. Where is there a country on the planet that operates as Hudson envisages that is not otherwise in the grip of some horrible civil war or war lord predation?
This bizarre focus on “neo-liberalism” tries to establish that the SLIGHTEST retreat from the insanities of democratic socialism simply cannot be tolerated. People who flog this nonsense want us all to think that the slightest step in the direction of more rationality, less bureaucratic rule and freedom from banker and borderless corporations (and rapacious, moronic politicians) will ignite a powder trail of social, political, and economic insanity that leads straight to the Wiley Coyote dynamite charge that will destroy TWAWKI.
Oligarchy is a failure of the political system not the economic system. All economic activity cannot operate in an environment of no government regulation at all. The Uniform Commercial Code is a superb job of trying to codify commercial practice, banking, and security interests in personal property. 50 unique systems of business law in the states would be a huge drag on trade.
Your reliance on socialism is touching. The benevolence of socialist governments is legendary as we all know. No need for constitutions and laws and stuff. Socialists love you and have your back. It would be heaven . . . heaven I tell you . . . if you could just have “socialism.”
And I bet you love trade unions, those organizations that just live or die on how well they safeguard worker interests. The ones that raised such a fuss when the US was deindustrialized. Whoa. That was epic what they did to safeguard the interests of working people.
Correction and expansion. Finance capitalism was inserted into America after 1912 election.
The war of 1812 was a failure, which means the London finance class lost out. The first bank was still taken out by intrigue, and then sold to the Baring Brothers of London,. Hamilton had a sinking fund to to buy out the private stock holders, and then turn the bank over to Treasury; but instead the privateering stock holders maneuvered to take over the bank, and then earn forever rents.
Lesson: Don’t let the Camel stick his nose in the tent.
Lincoln, like him or not, attempted to resurrect the Colonial System with the national banking act, and then channeling new state credit into industry. The post war experience, especially the rapid industrialization of America, was observed by the world, and this form of industrial capitalist economy was in the process of being up-taken by other nations, but instead was short-circuited by world war.
Ironically, FDR (post 1912 FC takeover) had to re-implement some aspects of IC to win world war 2, using state credit to jump start new industry with American aviation, power generation, rubber substitution, etc.
Primitive accumulation. The enclosure acts, game laws, and transportation acts. Ongoing, permanent programs of privatization. Freeze out competition.
Grab the commanding heights.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12889075/Harvard-president-Claudine-Gay-new-plagiarism.html
Odd.
This wasn’t a problem before but suddenly is a BIG DEAL and only because Ms. Gay defended the right of students to denounce Gaza Genocide.
It goes to show… the so-called ‘left’ has no power. It’s Zion that has it all.
I’m sure Ms. Gay is an airhead, an AA case. But Jewish Power showered her with promotion and praise as long as she was deemed a good dog. The minute she showed the slightest bit of principle, they’re coming after all.
So, her plagiarism issue is really secondary. The people attacking her have no interest in truth, integrity, and standards. They’re going after her for one reason only. She dared to allow criticism of Zion at Harvard.
Hudson’s research goes back four thousand years to the cuneiform clay tablets of Mesopotamia. He has identified a cycle of debt, through which oligarchs gain increasing power over society and the usual mechanisms of a free market diminish. Oligarchs are usually self-serving and do not have society’s best interests in mind. Historically, debt forgiveness has been used to break this cycle and maintain a cohesive, integrated society. While the modern world has bankruptcy protection, there is no process to clear the debt.
If you do not like money controlling government, and the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer, then there are two options. Either a strong man can come along and repudiate the debts, or some kind of socialism can emerge to protect the population from the predatory practices of the oligarchs.
Hudson is not advocating for the return of mustache man, so he is pushing for an economy that benefits more than just the 1%
Germany had industrial capitalism, which was implemented by the Kaiser. It was overturned in WW1, as the London Finance Capital Class could not abide a competitor who could not be beaten. Knowing this, it was not Germany that started the war.
After WW1, the Versailles debts were to keep Germany down and out, while also enriching the debt instrument holders at Germany’s expense.
In 1933, Germany adopted national socialism, which was not “international socialism,” but instead national socialism. This was a huge threat to the international finance creditor. The other huge threat was the adoption of industrial capitalism within national socialist Germany.
http://www.renegadetribune.com/winston-churchill-germanys-unforgivable-crime/
Germany’s most unforgivable crime before the Second World War was her attempt to extricate her economic power from the world’s trading system and to create her own exchange mechanism which would deny world finance its opportunity to profit. Winston Churchill
The Reichsbank starting in 1933, almost immediately began erasing debts to the farming class, and then issued state credit into industry and the commons. This issuance was very nearly identical to what the American Colonials used …. Bills of Credit, emitted by State authority.
(Ultimately the bills of credit were redeemed by the Reichsbank, so they were sovereign/state money. The Reichsbank had already returned to Chancellorship control prior to Hitler’s election in 1933.)
German industrial capitalism did lead to national socialism, but with war to thwart the transition.
> Germany’s most unforgivable crime
Is a fake quote.
https://gizmodo.com/9-quotes-from-winston-churchill-that-are-totally-fake-1790585636
—–
This quote appears to have been invented in 2001 and inserted into the foreword to a new edition of a book first written in 1938, Propaganda in the Next War. Since the book is out of copyright and the original author is dead, the new foreword could’ve been written by any lunatic with an account on a self-publishing site.
All we know for sure is that the quote doesn’t appear anywhere before 2001.
—–
Anybody know what this is?just saw it on FB stories
something about setting up an adult fantacy land with its own laws like C.O.L.
where the wealthy could engage in perversions thet would make Epstein look tame
https://www.facebook.com/reel/319026117678706
Much like the blue-collar class, non-US countries are unable to refuse loans.
Hmm.
Poltergeists? 🤔
No it is not.
MMT is only a description of how the corporate private banking system works. The banking system is a private affair, that uses the government as a backstop. MMT accurately identifies that the government backstop is the ultimate “creditor,” and somehow this identification was distorted to create even more public debt (T bill issuance) ad infinitum.
The FED always buys all the TBills issued, on the secondary market, using its power to expand the Fed ledger. Open market operations are the buying of TBills and there is NEVER a failure, as the TBills are made ready in advance, by certain banking actors acting as the Fed’s agents.
MMT, is chartalist, as is all money in history. Money since it first began in the barley cults (ancient near east civilizations) was numbers on a ledger. Barley was the first money, monetized on the ledger. Gold is measured in grains weight, which is barley grains relative to gold on a balance beam scale.
That MMT theory is being abused by self interested types, is a different conversation. It could have easily gone the other way, with people coming to the conclusion that private bank credit is the bulk of the money supply, and said credit is at private debt; this hypothecation mechanism in corporate banking does not always have equity on the other side. For example, if you hypothecate yourself for a car, that is a depreciating asset, and maybe allows you to be productive only to the extent you can get around.
A double entry ledger can be thought of as a mirror. The debt instrument on one side and the counterparty on the other side should be equity. Industrial capitalism, when it creates debt instruments (usually in a state bank), the equity created simultaneously is production and improving the commons. Finance Capitalism, does not discern debt instruments by type (as if all debts are equal), and further all debt types are made sacrosanct, and must be paid, even when they are odious and cannot be paid.
MMT is only a definition, not a policy prescription. It is similar to Hudson in his description of balance of flows in ‘SUPER IMPERIALISM,” that was then used as a cookbook by the MIC. The definition and analysis was abused by self interested actors.
I can accept that much of history is twisted and conveyed to us in distorted form. What doesn’t change is the large mass of evidence that points to WW1 being driven by a conspiracy of finance actors. Churchill had been impaled on a debt hook by the Jewish Focus Group. Churchill’s pride made his accept the loans to maintain appearances as lord over his estates.
Video Link
ALL BULL-DUST. Ever increasing size of economy= ecological collapse ie NOW, and Near Term Human Extinction.It does not matter the colour or breed of dog, if it has rabies….
“Neoliberalism advocates an economy without government regulation, without social protection against fraud…”
So Ron Unz provides a platform to a doctrinaire socialist and assorted commenters who deny the benefits of free and open markets, and believe that China has shown the world that vast state control is the key to prosperity.
I write from Shanghai and as someone who has loaded the Big Data into a computer and done the multiple regression analyses required to disentangle causes and effects. Simple conclusions stand out:
1. On a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 refers to complete state control, and 10 refers to the most extreme capitalism possible (including private police forces and zero government assistance for paraplegic poor people), Switzerland is above 8 and China is about 6, having been at about 3 before market-opening reforms were launched in the late 1970s.
2. Switzerland obviously has a substantial amount of regulation, laws against fraud, assistance for poor people, etc. And it has freer markets than the US.
3. China’s high growth rate was due to its previous backwardness combined with a high level of cognitive ability. It adopted foreign technologies very rapidly. It is now slowing down as its average living standards have caught up to Mexico’s. What is alarming is that it is growing more slowly than South Korea or Taiwan did at a similar stage. Taiwan and South Korea have freer markets and now have living standards comparable to middle-of-the-pack European economies. Michael Hudson calls for “public banking.” Okay, under Xi Xinping 83 percent of the lending by the 4 giant government banks has been going to state-owned enterprises. Is this a recipe for a dynamic economy, or is it, in fact, producing fossilization? And this is occurring in a one-party state that blocks access to websites that it doesn’t like.
The US already has a semi-fascist state, but independent voices still have a chance to be heard.
Lie. You don’t believe this, and it is rude to suggest I would believe you believe it.
continuing with the blatant lies
As I said: nobody believes in this flim-flam. You can only justify it with blatant lies.
generally the military, using the intimidation of force of arms
Nobody wants to buy T-bills, but the conquered must pay tribute.
lie
I’m sorry I’m not that stupid, and I’m sorry for anyone who is that stupid.
Ignorance or lie. The first money was seashells or something of that nature.
Lie.
Use of grammatically awkward “people” shibboleth, common to secular humanists and other forms of Democratic Man.
Also, lie.
Private banks who reserve fractionally go out of business. Thus, all fractional reserve, being 90% or more of the money supply, is the result of direct black government action.
Like many forms of public-private “partnership” this allows DC to circumvent the constitution. In this case printing money and giving it to favoured actors by means of having it be “voluntarily” done by “private” entities. Look for phrases like “favourable loan terms” and the like. It’s crony communism.
Lie, but hilarious.
I can’t believe you said that with a straight face.
Juggling ledger entries is “creating value” top kek.
Counterfeiting is “improving the commons.”
See, if Mefobills was genuinely this stupid, they would claim that the commons need to be unhealthy or something equally deranged. “A certain amount of random theft and robbery is good for the body politic.” Instead all the lies are properly prettified.
MMT is 100% policy. Got it.
It’s reasonably safe to always believe the opposite of whatever a journalist, teacher, or bureaucrat says.
Q: Why did Hong Kong have a “democracy” protest?
A: “Nice island you have there. Would be a shame if something happened to it.”
They fell behind on paying “protection” money. Quite possibly they didn’t buy enough T-bills. Haha, oops!
And that’s why Japan buys T-bills.
That and the dozens of military bases implanted like malignant tumours everywhere.
No. The most industrialized were USA, Germany, UK, France and Italy. Russia while having industries had them mostly owned by Western investors and all those industries served one and only goal, to supply the West with what Russia had to offer while Russia itself had very little machine building industries. 11 out of 12 Russia banks were foreign owned. By 1914 Russia owed more to France and UK than she had assets, hence it was forced to enter WW1 in which Russia had nothing to win. Trust me but I know a lot more than you do about what Russia was then…
Thank you.
If all he means is plutocratic predation and rigging everything against the deplorables then that is how to describe that. There’s nothing “neo” about that because we never departed from the reality of banker/ plutocrat domination. America’s widely distributed prosperity was the aberration.
Nor is there anything liberal about this vision that Hudson describes.
I can’t think of a mushier term. In the ’80s there’s “classic neoliberalism” — markets good, states bad — and this was going to lead to prosperity. It did then it didn’t. Then in the ’90s, a “different neoliberalism” appeared — “the neoliberalism of globalization.”
Anything anyone doesn’t like can be called neoliberalism and, voila, pundit careers are launched.
If the term can fit these two approaches and have prosperity as its aim as well as enriching the rentier class then we’ve got a term as rubbery as “racism” or “extreme right wing.”
I do think after Thacher and Reagan the world went nuts and we see policies adopted that are lunatic, warlike, and vicious. That seems to be something really new that’s aimed at active destruction. It’s the culmination of out of control spending, monetary debasement, monopoly, reckless, pointless war and climate, diversity, and covid madness.
MMT is only a description of how the private banking system works. It is not bull-dust.
This description, once you begin to understand it, also explains the expansion required due to the debt instruments. Said instruments compound and want to be paid = increasing size of the economy = ecological collapse.
So yes, you are right in that expanding claims are made against the earth and labor, to then flog it, to then pay.
Women were removed from the gift economy, and were monetized. This in turn has caused a birth collapse. So, it is actually worse than you think. MMT doesn’t codify gift economy, where people work for free, but it does “chart” the flows of bank credit (which unfortunately is the money today).
There are so many people like you, unwilling to shed their shibboleths about money creation, that the Bank of England had to write a white paper, putting it to bed. If you want to continue to be a mushroom, then go right ahead, and cling to your manure piles.
Here it is:
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf
Anybody who even mentions fractional reserve is living in La La land. Banks are not reserve constrained. They can always get reserves from somewhere in the system, or at the FED discount window. Again for emphasis, banks are not reserve constrained. If you are credit worthy, you will be hypothecated with a new loan.
Yes, it is shocking that the first debt spreading bank to control a country – the BOE, was also the first to drop the dime. The first actual proof of banker “money creation” occurred was done by Major Clifford Douglas back in the 1930’s. Banker insiders have always known how things work, as they watch their ledgers.
The U.S. is a corporatocracy, which is rule by corporations – and the Oligarchs behind them. Finance corporations (private banks) have on their ledgers, claims tying them to other corporations.
Fascism is the opposite, where corporations are brought to heel. China today is the closest to fascism, or national socialism. Both fascism and national socialism require state credit. Mussolini nationalized the banks in 1926.
https://www.unz.com/mhudson/beyond-the-dollar/
Dominant states and their capitalists seek to externalise onto other states or territories the consequences of their capitalism’s contradictions, such as excess commodities and capital, or the need for cheap labour and raw materials. These efforts victimize subordinated economies, but make rivals of states that are able to contest this domination. When the latter happens, there are confrontations – diplomatic, economic or even military – like those between Britain and her nineteenth century rivals, such as Germany. The result then was a Thirty Years’ Crisis (1914-45), including two world wars and a Great Depression.
Wet streets cause rain.
The 1945 Regime was purified when the New Left violently overthrew it in the Revolution of 1969. Reagan and Thatcher appeared because the New Left is especially vicious and insane, and attempted to push it back. However, having rejected the fundamental religion of neither 1945 nor 1969, they failed. They were little more than left-behind troops from 1945, a society that had already been defeated. Consequently the New Left was emboldened, correctly concluding that no domestic force existed that could oppose them.
Projection. The manipulation attempt is trying to put me on the defensive. Secondly, assuming the sale. It slyly suggests that the author has already set aside their prejudices, trying to get you to assume they’ve done it rather than checking. Question nothing, that you might be fooled.
—
Bad faith actor is bad.
Note that you can always secure yourself against manipulation. Manipulation is an inherently dominated strategy. It only works on the weak minded. There is always a tell.
If you haven’t fully learned the tells yet, then hire someone who has and listen to them instead of random strangers who haven’t earned any trust.
—
Using social moves reveals there’s an intellectual weakness here. Unconscious submission; copying the use of ‘shibboleth.’ Yes, I am superior. Oops.
Assuming the sale some more. Was anything put to bed? By inspection, the Bank of England is untrustworthy. Only very untrustworthy folk put any weight behind their words.
Also note the lack of engineering detail. How it was put to bed can’t be mentioned, because it has no argument stronger than a bare assertion. Revealing any details would only make it less persuasive.
Further this assumes – admitting bare assumption is the strongest available argument – that [written by BoE] is all the proof you need this paper is worth your time.
Let me check that for you: indeed, there is no independent replication. It’s just some self-serving fraud. Nemo iudex in causa sua.
MMT defenders can’t cite anyone in support except precisely the corrupt institutions that they need to lie on behalf of. In these circles, circular reasoning is considered a feature, not a bug. No loose ends, see.
Indeed. Misdirection; deliberately misinterpreting what I said in the hopes the reader is too lazy to go back and look.
Resentful playground insults. My superiority has already been accepted; this is a problem, so it has to be hidden. Pretend the opposite and hope it sticks. This sort of technique is used in the hopes you’re so afraid of being on the losing side that you automatically and unquestioningly side with the initiator.
Be too afraid to stand on your own and make your own assessment. Just like you trust the BoE because it was assumed that the BoE was trustworthy, right?
Naturally, anyone who doesn’t mention it is living in la-la land, as 90% of the money-printing, aka counterfeiting, is done by “private” banks.
Again, we must assume that nobody can refuse a loan.
This guy postures as your friend but assumes you’re a mindless slave. A cowardly slave, as above. Indeed this sort of thing is a 100% reliable tell. The myths about demons being unable to hide their chicken feet is basically accurate. They all have to pull one manoeuvre or another exactly like this one. Note that he’s not even a good friend to mindless slaves. He wants to beat them up and take their stuff.
What actually happened is that England banned profits for non-BoE banks, while subsidizing the shit out of the BoE. Short of the British discarding pounds entirely, you couldn’t escape the BoE. That debt was used to exploit this system was basically incidental. Some got favourable loan terms, others got unfavourable.
The ones offered unfavourable loans took them because they were vulnerable to manipulation. The accounting showed, even at the time, that they were bad deals.
Notice how you’re supposed to forget the bits about shell money and ledgers. Argument conceded; liar can’t even come up with a good lie about it.
Likewise that T-bills are largely sold by the military via threats.
Private banks who reserve fractionally go out of business.
As usual, you deceive.
According to Mussolini, far from “bringing corporations to heel”, Fascism is actually the melding of corporations and the state. Mussolini invented the word “Fascism”, so he should have known what it meant.
Do you really want another argument about it (link). In that thread, you claimed that China must be fascist as it shares some features with the Nazis. Well, almost every country has something in common with the Nazis; that doesn’t make them fascist. I countered with the observation that you share many features with girls, so by your logic you must be a girl.
I would say that China isn’t close to being Fascist, not at all. A critically important difference is that in China, the government owns all the land, every square inch; the most that you can do is lease some land for 70 years. None of the Fascist countries had this.
As usual, the brutal Fascists try to make themselves look respectable by claiming some association with currently popular movements: Hitler’s NSDAP called itself “socialist” though it was not; and now that China’s economic performance is looking good, you try to steal some of the glory.
The term ‘fascism’ is not meaningful outside of its place and time in history. It developed in the inter-war period as a reaction to the Soviet Union. After witnessing the atrocities of the Russian and Spanish civil wars, and in response to Stalin’s economy geared for total war, European economies had to be centrally controlled to manage war production. Outside of this unique situation, fascism is merely a pejorative, or a ‘boo word’, so corporatism is a much more descriptive term.
The word fascism existed long before il duce. It was associated with the people’s tribunes in the Roman republic, two representatives who carried a fasces as the symbol of their power. After several rebellions by the populace, the Senate approved these tribunes as a way to maintain peace and order.
Roman fascism was populist and defended the interests of the common people, so it could be described as something like “bringing corporations to heel”
Marx thought industrial capitalism would lead to monopolies or oligarchies, and the greediness of the oligarchs would cause the workers to revolt. The result would be socialism.
I think Marx was just a little off on the timing; the transition to socialism will come. And fear of the transition among the Western oligarchs is driving much of geopolitics now. For example, China is demonstrating that a socialist/capitalist hybrid can be far more successful economically than capitalism by itself. Huawei in particular is proving that a worker-owned corporation can grow to $100 billion of annual revenue in the highest technology, which is vastly more successful than most corporations owned by billionaire oligarchs. So China is now Enemy Number 1 for USA, and Huawei is perhaps the first individual company to be under direct attack by a superpower.
What caused the transition to socialism to fail in Germany and USA? I don’t know much about Germany. But I think the US fended off socialism by basically bribing the workers with many socialist programs: the minimum wage, Social Security, Medicare, and progressive taxation (up to 95% tax rates) were given to the workers by a government under pressure from the socialists, not by the generosity of the oligarchs’ hearts. Now many of these concessions are being clawed back, and socialist pressure is increasing again.
Fascism is not dead. For example, the Ukrainian Nazis are very much alive; they appear just as nasty as the thugs in Hitler’s Partei. Remember the Maidan snipers who shot people on BOTH sides, guaranteeing a riot. Remember the burning to death of people in Odessa’s Trade Union building (link). Remember the kidnapping of civilians to use as hostages in Mariupol.
If Fascism is corporatism, it can hardly be said to “be bringing corporations to heel”.
What Mussolini claimed and what he actually did were often very different things.
If Wilhelm II had simply told Franz Joseph that another Balkan War (after 2 previous ones in 1912-3) would be too much of a stress on the European peace, then there would have been no war at all. Austrian conservatives were happy to see Franz Ferdinand gone, since he had favored greater autonomy for ethnic groups in Austria-Hungary. But they had wanted war against Serbia for a long time before June 28, 1914. Wilhelm II told them they could have it with his backing, and that was set everything else loose. Without that stupid arrogant move by Wilhelm II, no hypothetical conspiracy in London would have amounted to a hill of beans. Germany backed Austria’s war on Serbia, Russia decided that it needed to mobilize its army in support of Serbia, and from there on everything else followed. Nothing decided in London or Paris played any role in this.
One of the most childish fake arguments that one runs across is the claim that somehow France was instigating the war by assuring Russia that they would receive French backing if a war broke out. In reality, the Schlieffen plan of the German had already determined that if a war with Russia were to break out, then Germany would immediately attack France and aim defeating France before Russia had fully mobilized its forced. All German plans were predicated on the assumption that as soon as Russia began to mobilize its forces, Germany would strike at France through Belgium and after defeating France within 6 weeks would swiftly turn its forces against Russia for a similar victory.
None of these factors, which played the central role in the outbreak of World War I, was determined by anyone in London.
So, now the bank of england is untrustworthy. Only you can determine what is right or wrong!
There are lots of clowns in clownworld.
Earlier you said Romney wasn’t real. Then this:
Blame the victim hey, clown? Third world countries are given the option. Take the loan or die, it is not a poltergeist. I’ll make it easy for you and provide the link, all you have to do is read and think for a change.
> What caused the transition to socialism to fail in Germany and USA? I don’t know much about Germany.
From the late 19th century onward, the German labor movement led by the Social Democrats won many concessions for the German working class. By the end of the century, Edward Bernstein had emerged as a prominent advocate of the idea that Marx had been mistaken in his belief that a proletarian revolution would be necessary. Instead, Bernstein postulated the notion of evolutionary socialism which maintained that workers would simply go on and on winning better reforms through the system so that no violent uprising would ever be necessary. Although Bernstein was unique in the degree to which he sought to theorize all of this out, many average workers basically accepted his view.
The outbreak of war in 1914 caught the Social Democratic leadership unprepared. Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914, addresses the issue of just how real enthusiasm there was for the war among ordinary people:
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/6/article/16181/pdf
—–
What was portrayed in the German press as a collective resolve to defend the fatherland at all costs was really a mixture of various attitudes: excitement, curiosity, escape from routine, and hunger for adventure, in conjunction with suspicion, insecurity, depression, and fear. Differences in popular perception reflected, in part, social or class differences. City dwellers tended to be more warlike than villagers; workers and peasants were more dubious than members of the bourgeoisie; and the educated were more convinced than the uneducated that the nation must stand firm, even to the point of war.
—–
The issue was more complex than some claims about unanimous public support for the war would imply. But either way, it was a challenging situation for the Social Democrats since a failure to vote for war credits was bound to at least initially alienate a portion of the working class. The SPD voted for war credits and by 1916 their willingness to endorse the continuance of the war had become a major pillar of support for the Kaiser. If the SPD had disappeared in the summer of 1914, then it’s quite likely that strikes and mutinies would have begun breaking out across Germany by 1916. Eventually such an outbreak did occur, but only when it was obvious that Ludendorff had been defeated.
The mishandling of this situation by the Social Democrats created a very deep bitter feud within the German labor movement, eventually giving rise to the Communist Party (KPD). The SPD for the next 14+ years tended to dominate among the most steadily employed workers. The KPD was dominant among the most steadily unemployed. The underemployed tended to oscillate between the 2 parties. In the last honest national election in the Weimar Republic, that of November 6, 1932, the NSDAP got 11.737,021 votes, the SPD 7,247,901, and the KPD 5,980,239. If the SPD and KPD had been coalition partners, they would have beaten the NSDAP by 1,491,119 votes. But the division between them was too sharp.
Right. So fascism is still alive because Ukrainian nazis are slaughtering innocent civilians. You prove my point. Fascism is a scare word that elicits an emotional response. You are not using it to describe a form of government, but rather as a pejorative to de-legitimize a government regime that you dislike. It’s like calling someone racist.
Outside of the 1930s, fascism is a meaningless term. National Socialist Germany brought the corporations to heel so that the wealthy contributed to well-being of the folk, instead of focusing on their own self-interest.
If you think someone like Zelensky, Biden, or Trump is a tyrant who wants dictatorial powers, then say what you mean. There’s no need to resurrect systems of government from the early 20th century to make your point.
Why is a pair of fasces prominently displayed in the US House of Congress? They represent people power, rather than rule by nobility.
London was the epicenter, and there is a considerable body of evidence to prove it, which was laid out in the video from corbett posted above (which you obviously did not watch).
Our Jewish friends inserted finance capitalism into London with the “crossing of the Dutch.” This act overturned the sovereign king system, and then made the “City of London” the real power.
Small minded men, driven only by lust for profit, maneuvered and grabbed power in the crossing, especially with the advent of the BOE in 1694. The merchant won, and consolidated his gains in war.
The USSA couldn’t transition to socialism because it was founded as, and continues to be, a soviet socialist republic.
It calls itself capitalist so you don’t blame the numerous failures of socialism on socialism.
Prototype Fascism is properly called National Socialism. Cue midwit meme. Turns out the obvious is true.
Fascism = Socialism.
Socialism = Fascism.
Socialists like to claim Fascism is right-wing primarily to hide the socialistic nature of their policies. “Communism has never been tried.” Yeah it was all Fascism, right? Or Fascism won, etc.
OG Stalinism hated Fascism precisely because it was so similar. Narcissism of small differences, plus they were competing for the same audience. Nuclear smears were called for.
Trying to pretend this is surprising so you doubt your own eyes. Not an argument, a social move. Revealing the intellectual weakness. Might as well put up a neon sign. “Armour missing here.”
In general, the logical payload of rhetoric augers against the prima facie reading.
Again, distrust yourself. Trust Mefo Williams.
Again, this guy is pretending to posture as your friend. Cannot handle dealing with any skepticism. Hopes to make you afraid so you stop thinking.
Playground insults, trying to get you on the defensive so you don’t see it’s a clown doing it.
“Someone will say mean words about you, just like I am!” Even that’s true, I’m not a little girl, sorry. Imagine being so weak mere words can hurt you. Back to the playground, child.
Yes, you already conceded that T-bills are largely sold by the army.
Of course then the issue isn’t loans and it’s weird you bring up finance at all. It’s military conquest with fudging for optics. Saying ‘spreading loans’ is the issue and something something neoliberalism is like blaming a particular serial number of bomb for the Ukraine situation.
Like any contract, loans taken under duress are illegitimate, and they would simply default if there wasn’t a military involved.
The separation of left and right-wing ideas and activity becomes diluted when applied to social movements, such as marriage rights and gender identity, and this leads to some confusion. Yet these terms have clarity when applying them to systems of government. The sine qua non, or the essential distinction, between left and right is the size of government. The true right-wing position is small and limited government, while the left distinguishes itself by constantly increasing government.
Fascism had right-wing tendencies about promoting fitness and suppressing degeneracy, but ultimately it was a left-wing form of government, due to its size, social benefit programs, and involvement in the economy.
But if what you say is true, then Germany and the USSR should have been natural allies in the 1930s and ’40s, since they were both Socialist.
Step away from the crack, clown. Pretty much you are living in upside down clown world, and nobody should listen to a word you say.
TBills are not sold by the Army, you are crazy as hell.
Hudson articles always draw out the clowns, crazies and cranks.
I think the part that does me the best is how desperate Mefo Bill Payables is to win. Could have just left it alone, but here we are. Sorry man, I have way more points in my [will not fucking shut up] skill than you do.
Lies have to be defended, see. Truth can live on its own. Truth can take care of itself.
Me For Paying Bills really enjoys the projection. Just gotta hit that well over and over.
Again with the unconscious mimicry, lol. “I no u r, bt wat m I?”
“Me, for example.”
Well, no, I suspect Mefo is a Fed. If not a Fed, a cuck. Sucking it for free? Why not get paid?
The parts that make him most mad are the parts where his posture (not an argument) is most vulnerable.
“Oh shit oh shit get away from that!”
btw
Hmmm. What do y’all think? Think this replicates? Think it’s applied fairly?
There can be only one.
Tyrant vs. tyrant.
World’s never big enough for two, and they’ll say whatever they have to in their attempt to trick their natural prey into taking their side.
> London was the epicenter, and there is a considerable body of evidence to prove it,
Again, a very simple point, if there had been no German-backing for an Austrian war on Serbia, there would have been no First World War. All of the ramblings about a “London epicenter” can’t change that. To deal with this fact, one would have to somehow argue that there was an immense impending threat which compelled Wilhelm II to back Franz Joseph in a war on Serbia. But there obviously wasn’t.
You are wrong. True, I loathe the people who burn others to death, but that is not the reason I call the perpetrators Nazis; I call them Nazis because that is what they are. Their hero is Stepan Bandera, who was a leader of the organization that formed the Nichtengall and Roland divisions of the Ukrainian Waffen SS. The thugs who burned people to death in Odessa’s Trade Union building were direct inheritors of the Nazis. They were true Fascists, and they behaved like Fascists.
You prove my point. What you claim the fasces symbolize and what is actually happening are completely different. You claim the fasces mean that corporations have been brought to heel, but what is actually happening in the US is that corporations and some special interests totally dominate the government. So it was with Mussolini: he may have claimed to be keeping corporations under control, but his actual policy was to make his government work for the corporations.
So your attempt to gaslight people on what Fascism is, so that you could stretch the term to include even socialist China, has completely failed.
Gaslighters love to change the meanings of words.
You forcibly remind me of Confucious’ wisdom: according to him, the first and most important task of a civilization is to establish clear, consistent definitions for words. It follows that for those who wish to ruin a civilization, the first task is to subvert the language.
Maybe OT and I’m clueless on economics but … Raising the debt ceiling? America is in debt to a super-astronomical height. Er… depth. Running up a trillion dollars in interest due per annum. But can still borrow more!!! Who lends that? Lends what? How? Why?
Regards,
Nonny
Oh, so you’re a gaslighter. A usual thing for socialists. Thanks for admitting it so blatantly. You’re subverting civilization on purpose? Hey, that’s what I was going to say is normal for socialists.
And I was going to be gentle. Thanks for correcting this foolish outbreak of mercy.
Democracy is socializing political power.
Remember, if you want to not be completely blatant, you have to offer some semblance of an argument. It can’t all be posturing. You’re not a peacock, this is not a lek.
Indeed gaslighting is inherent to socialism as was found by the Owenites in the 1830s, the last time it was remotely reasonable to suppose communism hadn’t been tried. They already tried it in Jamestown in the 1600s, but of course the gaslighters covered that up.
The Owenites were completely honest about their intentions. Socialize X and Y and so on. Problem: nobody bought it. Even illiterate peasants could tell they were off their rocker. Ever since, socialism knew it has to hide behind lies and misdirection. E.g. Karl Marx.
Similar to the way even peasants could debunk Owenism, at any time you don’t live in a “Democratic” empire such as Rome or America, every scholar agrees that democracy is an awful idea that leads to e.g. exponentially growing debt.
The easiest way to see this is to review the Chamley-Judd redistribution impossibility theorem.
Allegedly, socialisms (such as democracy) are supposed to end the exploitation of the lower classes. What actually happens is that everyone gets poorer. The lower classes weren’t being exploited, they were in fact suffering from noblesse oblige. (Socialists hate it when someone is nice to them. Envy, you know.)
If you try to redistribute, all that happens is that the rich producers don’t have as much to produce with, there’s less stuff for everyone, and everyone gets poorer.
It doesn’t stop there. Having created a property-right-oppressing political machine, parasites can hijack the machine to siphon off the redistribution. The poor, of course, are innumerate and can’t tell they’re being stiffed. The rich realize the way to win is to get their snout in the pig trough, and, unless someone pushes back, your society collapses for lack of production.
E.g. someone offshores factories and extorts China to trade steel away for worthless paper.
You would expect that, since the destructive nature of socialism is obvious even to illiterate peasants, it’s obvious to Owenites as well. And Karl Marx. And Adolf Hitler.
Indeed it is. They’re just gaslighting.
The point of socialism, from the point of view of socialists, is precisely the immiseration of the lower classes. They’re not oppressed enough.
The inevitable failures and corruption of redistribution is the point. Secondarily.
It’s constructed of literally pure malice.
Thus it makes sense that it’s so easy to spot. If you meet one in person you get synesthesia; it’s like you can physically feel the evil radiating off them. Socialists are entirely impossible to trust.
A proper government would have an allocated budget, but that requires transparency and accountability. Instead, they set a maximum that they can spend and then raise the maximum when the time comes. To pay for this, US government debt is sold on the open market as treasury bonds. Some investors, including foreign countries, may buy them, but the biggest purchasers of unsold treasuries are the member banks of the Federal Reserve system. The Fed loans money to the banks for this, at a low interest rate, while the treasuries typically pay a higher rate of return. The difference between the two interest rates is free money for the member banks, so it’s pretty hard for them not to make a profit
This remains to be seen. China is trying to contain a real estate debt bubble that seems ready to burst. Chinese investors have a preference for real assets over stocks and bonds, so they buy real estate. Construction companies have collected money for homes that have not been built, and now there is such a back-log of paid for, but unbuilt, buildings that the construction companies will almost certainly fail to deliver.
How China responds to this eventuality will be the moment of truth. If it let’s the banks and construction companies fail, and does something to protect the small investors, then China will choose national socialism by bringing the corporations to heel. Yet, if China follows the advice of the IMF and World Bank, then it will save the banks and force small investors to eat the loss, thereby choosing finance capitalism, which falls under Neoliberalism
You don’t dispute that the thugs who burned people to death in Odessa were direct inheritors of the Waffen SS? Fascism is not dead; it’s as nasty as ever.
China will bring the corporations to heel, but not because it is Nazi. For one thing, the Fascists worked for corporations like IG Farben (once the largest company in Europe). In contrast, China has disciplined some major corporations, like Ant Financial.
People like you lack imagination and believe that there are only two alternatives.
I should have known that you would not argue honestly. So I will be direct. The gaslighter I was denouncing was you, for slyly changing the meaning of “soviet socialist republic” and equating the early US to it.
I have little doubt that some of the early colonies had features in common with the USSR, as most attempts at a better life have socialist features. But to claim that all the colonies were as socialist as an SSR is dishonest.
NOT RAMBLING! That is you tryin to make light of something very serious.
You still have not watched the video and are clinging to your myopic worldview.
The London conspirators, (Milner et al) worked behind the scenes to change alliances. The rise of Germany into a state changed the calculus in London. London finance and propaganda then went about bringing former enemies such as France, Spain, and Russia into the alliance against Germany. These new allies, formed a pincer on Germany.
Germany also had adopted a superior form of economy, industrial capitalism. The conspirators in London were small minded men, following the Jewish religion of materialism. They thought they were gods on earth. Oligarchs of this type want to control the world through string pulling using their finance capital. Rothschild and the Gold obtained in the Boer war, then gave sustenance to Rhodes/Milner conspiracy.
I don’t think about them at all. I’m talking about terms, and you use ‘fascism’ and ‘nazi’ interchangeably, as if those terms had clear meaning. Why can’t you just say that the thugs who burned people in Odessa are evil murderers that don’t value human life? What do groups from the 1940s have to do with anything? Your use of scare words are not helpful in proving your point.
Watch this video and then we’ll talk:
https://www.unz.com/mhudson/is-chinas-economy-collapsing-economic-war/
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“Most attempts at a better life feature gulags, mass starvation, and total social collapse.”
You can see why nobody took the Owenites seriously.
(You see, losing a war is only sometimes a feature of attempts at a [better life]. Uncommon rather than common.)
Ah, so you concede that all but one of them was literally the USSR avante la lettre, and the last one was 99% Stalinist. Cool.
I mean, I didn’t claim it was. I thought it was highly adulterated due to, basically, Owenism problems. They made it as socialist as they could, but it wasn’t even Nazi-tier yet, albeit largely because they didn’t yet have the technology.
Thanks for the update.
Alt: socialists are innumerate. (Shocking news.)
Alt alt: socialists always have to leave escape hatches in their rhetoric, hatches large enough to drive a bus through. Put those goal posts on wheels, we gonna be moving them 100%.
You were “denouncing” me in an attempt to deflect attention away from the truth, namely, that you are a wannabe genocidal war criminal.
It’s impossible for such folk to get anything done without gaslighting. Refer to, and yes this is getting old, the Owenites.
I did not use the two terms interchangeably. Unlike you, I know some logic. The thugs who burned people to death in Odessa were definitely Nazis; Nazis are a subset of Fascists; ergo, those thugs were Fascists. You don’t seem to understand this simple syllogism.
As I showed above, I was being precisely logical. I was not using scare words; I was definitely not attempting to incite emotions and subdue the mind, a favorite tactic of Hitler.
As for proving my point, I proved it long ago. Fascism is NOT about “bringing corporations to heel”, regardless of the symbolism of the Roman fasces; rather, Hitler and Mussolini worked for corporations like IG Farben.
Fascism is the theocratic government formed by the religion of Egalitarianism. You can also call it envy worship or the politics of narcissism.
All Fascist governments share six features.
1. Dogmatic and xenophobic.
2. Utopian; believe individuals and society are perfectible.
3. Obsessed with the Plot of a State Enemy, on whom all imperfections are blamed. The Heretics.
4. Monogenderism. One gender is considered a bad copy of the other.
5. Newspeak. They come up with new words to hide their obvious natures.
6. Performative demotism. They are allegedly run for the lower classes, but are corrupt in practice.
For example, as far as I know China does not have a State boogieman, not since the time of Mao. My impression is that they are slowly and painfully relieving themselves of the legacy of Fascism; rather than blaming problems on a boogieman and engaging in a witch hunt, they address the problem, which causes it to be mitigated or even fixed.
They would go faster but don’t care for a colour revolution at this time. One Tiananmen was more than enough.
1776 USSA was Fascist. Gender: female. Designated heretic: redcoats. Newspeak: “Liberty.” “Representation.” &c. Performative demotism: the new USSA immediately raised taxes above the British standard.
Fun fact: Washington was powerless figurehead almost exactly of the kind Biden is. Lindy.
—
China’s highly inflated house prices are the result of socialist policies, namely the central bank.
As always, it runs afoul of the Chamley-Judd redistribution impossibility theorem. Allegedly inflation helps the poor debtors and progressively taxes the rich, with their large bank accounts.
In reality the rich take out huge loans, so they benefit from inflation. The money comes from fractional reserve, so the banks never run out of money to loan them. They spend the loans on e.g. houses, causing price inflation local to that market. The infinitely-printed money is always looking for a haven from the very inflation which it came from.
Since the houses are bought on leverage, it also makes “asset” prices sensitive to interest rate changes, as the rich de-leverage when interest goes up, forcing them to sell the houses and tanking house prices.
In an central bank regime, the irresponsibility causes stuff like houses to be highly “financialized” which is a weird buzzword referring to the fact that housing demand is dominated by speculative demand, not, say, demand for living space. Typical socialist projection: speculators, which are caused by socialist policies, are attributed to capitalism. Have to defend the socialist policy from scrutiny, as it cannot survive any.
Keeping the central bank is one of China’s major sins. Less a misstep and more of a leaping in front of a bus.
Let’s also go over how the poor get jacked. Tanstaafl: the wealth bought by printed money has to come from somewhere. Basically “asset” prices rise, meaning the productive have to pay more to produce, meaning there’s less stuff for anyone who isn’t exploiting the central bank.
There’s also less stuff for anyone who is exploiting the central bank. The redistribution has overhead costs. Prices become chaotic, causing friction and economic shocks, because inflation causes a perma-bubble. There is more money chasing fewer assets; the money has to go somewhere, and if a bubble “pops” it has to find something else to inflate.
They do become poorer slower than the poor, though. In China’s case, this is masked by the background of post-Communism economic catchup. A rising tide has been lifting all boats, lol. Even the ones taking on water.
There is a Logos, Pathos, and Ethos.
What you are doing in the above statement is Pathos. You are shrieking and trying to impugn guilt onto Suetonius. Why he is evil if he doesn’t virtue signal and agree with your guilt tripping.
Fascism goes back very far into time, and predates Mussolini:
https://www.worldfuturefund.org/Ideas/ancientrootsoffascism.htm
Left out of your account was that the Waffen SS was the first “European Army” and that many nations joined in. Europeans felt they were in a life and death struggle with the Bolsheviks, and were afraid of the red terror.
Post WW2, the Azov types were funded by MI6, with CIA involvement. Azov’s found succor from finance capital, to put pressure on the post war Soviet Union. Stalin after 1944 morphed Bolshevism into National Communism. National communism became the new enemy of the “international finance capitalist,” hence the iron wall, and then financial support of the Azovs, hence the Jewish leadership of Ukraine.
In other words, your guilt tripping is a complete fail, and you don’t even understand the real roots of the evil Naaazis in Ukraine, who are actually dupes and unwitting agents for the finance class.
Where is your compassion for the Slavs who are being marched off into war, so that Ukraine’s black lands can be depopulated and put into permanent debts to black rock?
Almost missed the part where Vidi unconsciously mimicked me like Mefobills does. “Slyly” haha
No, I was merely stating an indisputable fact: the thugs who burned people to death in Odessa were direct inheritors of the Waffen SS, and were therefore definitely Fascists. Whether you or Suetonius considers himself guilty for advocating Fascism is up to you. I merely note that the incineration in the Ukrainian city was only one of many, many atrocities committed by the Fascist gangs; things like that is what they did — and as Odessa proves, it’s what they still do.
True. Most new movements fail, and most new businesses fail. (I think the casualty rate for new businesses is something like 95 percent failure in the first five years.)
I think it says much that China didn’t fail. Of course you repeat the Western propaganda that the popping of the real-estate bubble will finally break China. However in the video you pointed out (and that I forgot to respond to), the economist Michael Hudson basically laughed at that; he thought that China was merely popping the bubble. He expected some people to take a haircut (and I add that some of these are foreigners like Blackrock and Goldman Sachs, and hence the loud squeals of pain from the West), but China as a whole would scarcely notice.
Very good description of fascism. There are no major points to refute. Point 3 is perhaps the most important:
Fascism develops as a reaction to an external threat, like in ancient Rome when they granted temporary dictatorial powers to someone, such as Sulla. In the 20th century, Italy and Germany had to organize their populations to face the Soviet threat. China similarly had been dominated by European powers, and then Japan, so it needed to adopt strong central control over the economy and adopted elements of fascism. You may be right that they are slowly and painfully relieving themselves of this legacy.
My question is about point 6:
If Germany had somehow emerged victorious from the war, would the authoritarian and centralization measures have slowly been rolled back during peacetime? Could power have reverted back to the Reichstag? The Enabling Acts were intended to be temporary dictatorial powers, like with Sulla
Alright, Mr. Logical. Please explain how the thugs who burned people in Odessa were connected to the National Socialist German Workers Party. This organization has been defunct since 1945
As I already mentioned, multiple regression analysis with all the relevant data does NOT indicate that China is a successful example of socialism. Its previously high growth rate was due primarily to its having been very backward. In fact, China is now growing more slowly than Taiwan or South Korea grew at a similar stage of development.
I am in China now collecting more information.
Literally [Communism has never been tried]. “War crimes are okay if your intentions are pure.”
Capitalist firms manage to fail without killing anyone at all, almost every time. If you’re not Pol Pot who just kinda liked killin’ it’s not a huge ask.
Likewise, Britain managed to free the slaves without a war or anything like it (before 1861). Turns out it was easy: eschew socialism, just buy ’em. Turns out the owner can emancipate slaves without any fuss. Skip the “stealing all the slaves” step in the middle, the way Stalin didn’t skip “stealing the entire country,” and you’re good to go.
Um, thanks for making my point for me, I guess?
Hudson, of course, is an anti-authority. When he endorses something, it is evidence against that proposition. Albeit only weak evidence.
Likewise, someone who uses an authority as argument offers evidence against whatever they’re professing. “My best material is ad authoritam.”
I consider it unlikely.
Both the USSA and the USSR could have made peace and given up their obsession with, respectively, racists and kulaks. Instead the USSR found new kulaks when the previous witch became untenable. Wreckers, hoarders, speculators, etc. We also see it wasn’t really new, it was all variations on bourgeoisie.
You can’t steal from banks that don’t have any money, and consequently Stalin always chose a moneyed witch to burn.
Likewise we can see that the USSA’s chosen boogiemen are all variations on redcoats. Conquering European. Colonialists, rednecks, Ze Germans, the empire of the Red Army, Christian/Trump Republicans, etc etc.
The colour red doesn’t appear to be a coincidence either. It’s branded into American DNA. Americans need a racial Empire to rebel against, or they simply aren’t American. They can never declare victory.
Especially post-USSR, the USSA has no good excuse not to settle down. Instead they’re winding themselves into even more frantic paroxysms – precisely because victory threatens to be declared. They cannot tolerate even the idea of it. As with the USSR, the USSA will only change course once the system collapses entirely.
If Hitler had killed all the Jews he would have had to find new Jews somehow.
One small difference: the USSA commits ever more violence against the ever-broader majority on behalf of smaller and smaller minorities. Hitler would likely have chosen the smallest available minority and extirpated it until only the majority was left to abuse. The problem being that Fascism is ineffective and unworkable, and its failures have to be blamed on someone.
The term “authoritarian” is something of a misnomer. China was (is?) genuinely authoritarian, meaning when CIA agent Mao died his system died with him. The USSA is a religious theocracy. No matter how many authorities you kill (e.g. Soros’ employer) they will find new ones to hire.
Just as no matter how many Roman Imperators you knifed in the gut, a new Imperator was found until the Imperium plain ran out of money. Btw fun fact, Sulla = Robert E. Lee, he lost this time around. Lincoln = Kaisar. FDR = Augustus, almost bit-for-bit identical in that case. Speedrunning Roman decline. History gets faster with practice, you see.
Insofar as any such thing is possible, Fascism really is the Will of the Laypeople. This won’t change until the religion is stamped out by catastrophic failure.
Thanks. But amazing! Can such a trick keep ponzying along forever, keep paying for military bases all over the world? Neat trick!
Mathematically, the ponzi scheme has a limited existence. Due to compound interest, there are always less dollars in circulation than the total amount of outstanding debts to be paid. The Fed constantly creates money and tries to keep up with the debt growth, but the tricky part is how to get that money into circulation without revealing the ponzi scheme (Fed Chair Bernanke joked about throwing $100 bills out of helicopters). US government debt is at $34 trillion. Since interest growth is exponential, eventually the point will be reached when the debt increases by a trillion dollars a day, and the dollar will have to be retired. But our leaders no doubt have a plan for this inevitable outcome
One thing about Huawei is pay goes by output… Recruits are brought in with high salaries- and you better perform. People work long hours. So Huawei is like a hybrid.
At which stage of development are you comparing the PRC with the ROC and South Korea? What is the metric? By HDI?
‘Full of Shit’ Phil, the confabulator. God the insects hate China, because they fear it. Suffer, little man.
Growth is usually slow because most investments are wasted. Nobody knows what to invest in. E.g. Blockbuster and Netflix likely did not improve growth at all and simply hoovered up a bunch of money. Never mind multi-level marketing. Don’t even think about post-Latin humanities departments.
If you have a rich country as a guide and the cognitive chops to support a complex society, you can simply copy their investments and grow at a near-maximum rate. Result: Meiji Restoration, Deng China.
Once they run out of investments to copy and have to figure out new ones on their own, China’s growth will be curtailed.
A fortiori: they also copied all of America’s mistakes. Debt isn’t growth, it’s debt. It isn’t growth, and it doesn’t drive growth. It causes a surge the same way burning the seed corn causes a surge of heat and energy. Growing without debt is faster, cue midwit meme, you don’t have to pay back the debts.
On the plus side China calls itself Communist precisely because it isn’t Communist. It doesn’t want to upset the State department and figure out what kind of pressures they can bring to bear, so it wears a Communist skinsuit.
It has some socialist legacies, but it’s actively working to discard most of them, albeit very slowly. E.g. it still has Communist interest rates, not supply/demand balanced interest rates. Artificially low interest rates cause a glut of debt, which causes pricing issues throughout the economy.
It does have an authoritarian streak. The rigid top-down command structure, which Communists need to circumvent the lack of price signals, has been retained. They have no intention of changing that policy.
Of course, SpaceX also has a rigid top-down command structure. Used wisely, there’s nothing anticapitalist about authoritarianism. However, lacking the profit motive, the CCP doesn’t use it particularly wisely.
Profit = discipline. CCP => lacking discipline and responsibility, except insofar as they import responsibility by force of will. The incentives actively punish it, which is why, when they do corruption sweeps, there’s always so much corruption to crack down on.
The CCP can’t be real Communists because they’re not anti-Chinese.
Anti-Chinese is simply not on the list of possible accusations.
> bringing … Spain … into the alliance against Germany.
Bizarre. Spain stayed neutral. France was already aligned with Russia before Britain did anything. Germany’s support for an Austrian war on Serbia was what created the confrontation with Russia. London had nothing to do with fostering the Pan-Slavism that motivated Russian support for Serbia.