I Knock Over Your Block Tower, a Metaphor For Socialism
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zubenelgenubi
I'm a star
Another point about regulation, besides simply being hijacked by the regulated sector, they also use regulation to turn around and set the bar of entry to industry too high to allow emerging competitors to get off the ground. This is a problem of power, as Chomsky points out, and not specifically that of capitalism or free markets.
Do you know much about populism?
Well, it did for a limited time. That's basically what the New Economic Policy was.
I think the beginning of an actual capitalist system there may have been better. I think Marx would agree as well. But who knows what kind of butterfly effect that would've had, especially on WWII. I suspect it would have changed the outcome.
zubenelgenubi
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this isn’t even remotely true lol.
To expand on the "extremely advanced." The Soviet Union had many crop failures. Had to import wheat and other grains. What products did it develop and sell around the world other than military weaponry? And the fact was that it was Russians dominating other ethnic and racial groups in its many republics. I spent 7 months in 4 of them in 2018. The one thing that was consistent was how many times I was told they hated the Russians. Man in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, the capital, told me that when they became independent after the collapse they literally had nothing. That the development I was seeing, which looked very new, was all due to capitalism. And that was basically in the prosperous center. Outside of that it was extraordinarily poor. So people in ivory towers theorize about how wonderful communism could be, even convince themselves it was a legitimate alternative to the West, but the reality on the ground is quite different. Think how much further the former communist world could be along if they hadn't gotten mired in that economic dogma for decades.
not really
some market failures in america would be the annual vacation or lack there of. although the govt also repressed workers through regulation so its hard to only blame it on markets.
you could say just he same about americans. it was taboo to debate socialism until recently.
@El Correcto
World War I changed all that. Already in the late 19th century the landlords and the banks fought back. They fought back largely through the Austrian School of individualism and the English marginalists, and they euphemized it as free markets. That slogan meant giving power to the monopolists, to the oppressors, to violence. A free market was where armies can come in, take over your country, impose a client dictatorship like Pinochet in Chile or the neo-Nazis in Ukraine. Americans call that a free market. The Free World was a world centrally planned by the American military and finance. So, it’s Orwellian double-think. The dynamic of this world is shrinking because it’s polarizing. You’ve seen with the COVID pandemic in the United States, the economy has polarized much more sharply between the 1%, the 10% and the rest of the economy.
Well, as opposed to that, you have economies that are not run by a rentier class, and that do not have a banking class and landlord class controlling the economy. The kind of arrangement that you had in Germany in the late 19th century: government, industry and labor coordinated. The question was how to provide the financing for industry so that banks can provide not only industrial capital formation, but public funding to build infrastructure and uplift the population.
China is doing just what made America rich in the 19th century, and what made Germany rich. It’s the same logic of industrial engineering. This plan is based on economic expansion, environmental preservation and economic balance instead of concentration, so this is going to be a growing economy. So, you’re having a growing economy outside of the United States and a shrinking economy in the States and its satellites in Europe.
Europe had a choice: Either it could shrink and be an American satellite economy, or it could join the growth. Europe has decided unanimously to forego growth and become a set of client oligarchies and kleptocracies. It is willing to let its financial sector take over just as in America. That’s a “free market,” because I’m told by American officials that they can just buy the European politicians, they’re bribable. Being up for sale is what a free political market means.
michael-hudson.com
World War I changed all that. Already in the late 19th century the landlords and the banks fought back. They fought back largely through the Austrian School of individualism and the English marginalists, and they euphemized it as free markets. That slogan meant giving power to the monopolists, to the oppressors, to violence. A free market was where armies can come in, take over your country, impose a client dictatorship like Pinochet in Chile or the neo-Nazis in Ukraine. Americans call that a free market. The Free World was a world centrally planned by the American military and finance. So, it’s Orwellian double-think. The dynamic of this world is shrinking because it’s polarizing. You’ve seen with the COVID pandemic in the United States, the economy has polarized much more sharply between the 1%, the 10% and the rest of the economy.
Well, as opposed to that, you have economies that are not run by a rentier class, and that do not have a banking class and landlord class controlling the economy. The kind of arrangement that you had in Germany in the late 19th century: government, industry and labor coordinated. The question was how to provide the financing for industry so that banks can provide not only industrial capital formation, but public funding to build infrastructure and uplift the population.
China is doing just what made America rich in the 19th century, and what made Germany rich. It’s the same logic of industrial engineering. This plan is based on economic expansion, environmental preservation and economic balance instead of concentration, so this is going to be a growing economy. So, you’re having a growing economy outside of the United States and a shrinking economy in the States and its satellites in Europe.
Europe had a choice: Either it could shrink and be an American satellite economy, or it could join the growth. Europe has decided unanimously to forego growth and become a set of client oligarchies and kleptocracies. It is willing to let its financial sector take over just as in America. That’s a “free market,” because I’m told by American officials that they can just buy the European politicians, they’re bribable. Being up for sale is what a free political market means.
What Flavour Oligarchy? | Michael Hudson
#post_contentHudson in discussion with Pepe Escobar on the geo-political landscape, through the lense of rentier economics. The agenda of the 1% under deep analysis.
Michael Hudson: Well, Italy is a very good example. When you have a country that needs infrastructure and public, social democratic spending, you need a government to create the credit. But when Americans – and specifically the University of Chicago free-market lobbyists – created the Eurozone financial system, their premise was that governments should not create money. Only banks should be allowed to do that, for the benefit of their stock and bond holders. So, no European governments can run a budget deficit large enough to cope with the coronavirus or with the problems that have been plaguing Italy for a decade. They can’t create their money to revive employment, to revive infrastructure or to revive the economy.
The European central bank only lends to other central banks. It’s created trillions of euros just to buy stocks and bonds, not to spend into the economy, not to hire labor, not to build infrastructure, but just to save the holders of the stocks and bonds from losing money from falling asset prices. That makes 1% or 5% of the population richer. So in practice, the function of the European Central Bank is to create money only for the purpose of saving the wealthiest 5% from losses on their stocks and bonds.
The cost of this limitation is to impoverish the economy and to basically make it looking like Greece, which was a dress rehearsal for how the Eurozone was going to reduce Europe to debt dependency. Under feudalism, everybody had to have access to the land by becoming a serf. Well now you’re in debt peonage, modern, finance capitalism’s version of serfdom.
So, Italy says, “We’re going to need government spending. We’re going to need to do in our way what China’s doing in its way, and what Russia is doing in its way. We’re going to have some kind of government program. We can’t just let the economy be impoverished simply because the University of Chicago has designed a plan for Europe to prevent the Euro from being a rival to the dollar. If there’s no European Central Bank to pump euros into the world economy, then only dollars will be left for central bank reserves.
The United States doesn’t ever want a rival. It wants satellites. That’s what it’s basically turned Europe into. I don’t see any response outside of Italy for an attempt to say they can’t be a part of this system and so should withdraw from the Eurozone. When I was in Greece years ago, we all thought it might join with Italy, Portugal and Ireland and say that the system wasn’t working. But everybody else said no, no, the Americans will just simply get us out of office one way or another. And in Italy, of course, if you look at what happened after World War II, the great threat was Italian communism. You had the Americans essentially say, “Well, we know the answer to communism. It’s fascism,” and you saw them buying politicians. They did every dirty trick in the book in order to fight any left wing group in Italy, just as they did in Yugoslavia, and just as they did in Greece. They wiped out the partisans, all the leading anti-Nazi groups from Greece to Italy to elsewhere. All of a sudden, they were all either assassinated or moved out of office – and replaced by the very people that America had been fighting against during World War II.
Well, now Italy is finally coming to terms with this and trying to fight back. You’re having what’s happening there, between Northern Italy and Southern Italy, the same splits as in other countries.
michael-hudson.com
The European central bank only lends to other central banks. It’s created trillions of euros just to buy stocks and bonds, not to spend into the economy, not to hire labor, not to build infrastructure, but just to save the holders of the stocks and bonds from losing money from falling asset prices. That makes 1% or 5% of the population richer. So in practice, the function of the European Central Bank is to create money only for the purpose of saving the wealthiest 5% from losses on their stocks and bonds.
The cost of this limitation is to impoverish the economy and to basically make it looking like Greece, which was a dress rehearsal for how the Eurozone was going to reduce Europe to debt dependency. Under feudalism, everybody had to have access to the land by becoming a serf. Well now you’re in debt peonage, modern, finance capitalism’s version of serfdom.
So, Italy says, “We’re going to need government spending. We’re going to need to do in our way what China’s doing in its way, and what Russia is doing in its way. We’re going to have some kind of government program. We can’t just let the economy be impoverished simply because the University of Chicago has designed a plan for Europe to prevent the Euro from being a rival to the dollar. If there’s no European Central Bank to pump euros into the world economy, then only dollars will be left for central bank reserves.
The United States doesn’t ever want a rival. It wants satellites. That’s what it’s basically turned Europe into. I don’t see any response outside of Italy for an attempt to say they can’t be a part of this system and so should withdraw from the Eurozone. When I was in Greece years ago, we all thought it might join with Italy, Portugal and Ireland and say that the system wasn’t working. But everybody else said no, no, the Americans will just simply get us out of office one way or another. And in Italy, of course, if you look at what happened after World War II, the great threat was Italian communism. You had the Americans essentially say, “Well, we know the answer to communism. It’s fascism,” and you saw them buying politicians. They did every dirty trick in the book in order to fight any left wing group in Italy, just as they did in Yugoslavia, and just as they did in Greece. They wiped out the partisans, all the leading anti-Nazi groups from Greece to Italy to elsewhere. All of a sudden, they were all either assassinated or moved out of office – and replaced by the very people that America had been fighting against during World War II.
Well, now Italy is finally coming to terms with this and trying to fight back. You’re having what’s happening there, between Northern Italy and Southern Italy, the same splits as in other countries.
What Flavour Oligarchy? | Michael Hudson
#post_contentHudson in discussion with Pepe Escobar on the geo-political landscape, through the lense of rentier economics. The agenda of the 1% under deep analysis.
i guess one thing about populism recently is the left wing and right wing are becoming more popular because the center stands for nothing and ppl are figuring it out.
zubenelgenubi
I'm a star
There's literally no way to know that. It is speculation, and depends on what comparisons you use, and on what time scale.
It moved them forward dramatically in almost every way. I think the argument is would capitalism have brought them to the same point or better. I would say yes, but it would have taken a much, much, much longer time to do so.
zubenelgenubi
I'm a star
The markets are the people, and the regulation. You look at not enough vacation as a "failure" of the market. That is a value judgment suggesting you know what's best for everyone else. Vacation times are averages, and they are a choice made by people. If the job doesn't offer enough vacation time to suit someone's needs or wants, that person looks elsewhere. In a sense, they vote with their feet. But, we both know why companies can get away with offering less vacation time, and that is because of excess labor.
zubenelgenubi
I'm a star
I only ask because, as I'm learning more about populism, it seems to me that the things you argue for are more in line with a populist movement, rather than specifically a socialist one. Not that the two are mutually exclusive.
yeah I think it's safe to say when Americans are only getting two weeks vacation or whatever that report no vacation Nation says that probably want more paid vacation. the easy fix is a vacation regulation like every other developed country has besides I think Japan America and Canada. I've never worked another job that pays as much vacation as one of the other developed countries. I'm not sure what Michael hudsons definition of a market is but I know what Richard Wolf's is. again agreeing to follow orders at work is a very limited kind of freedom.. it's true you can choose your job but the problem is what you're choosing. I think it's going to be a long time before American workers get more vacation because of a shortage of Labor.
yeah I'm in favour of debt write-offs, free higher education, less war, less government spying, less inherited wealth of which im a prime beneficiary,
participatory economics, less bailouts for the rich, expanded and more luxurious public transportation ,I'm very skeptical of the Federal Reserve and central banks in general, housing should be cheaper, more political democracy, the msm needs to be regulated and pay for the airwaves they use, and consumer goods which can b upgraded and fixed and shared more efficiently
o if that makes me a popular so I guess I am in part. I'm very skeptical of power and in favor of worker self determination so that makes me an anarchist in part.
El Correcto
god is dead
You think the commies weren’t imperialistic and bribing politicians for access to countries resources? That’s naive and kind of sad Ricky. Look into the USSR for yourself, look into China for yourself.@El Correcto
World War I changed all that. Already in the late 19th century the landlords and the banks fought back. They fought back largely through the Austrian School of individualism and the English marginalists, and they euphemized it as free markets. That slogan meant giving power to the monopolists, to the oppressors, to violence. A free market was where armies can come in, take over your country, impose a client dictatorship like Pinochet in Chile or the neo-Nazis in Ukraine. Americans call that a free market. The Free World was a world centrally planned by the American military and finance. So, it’s Orwellian double-think. The dynamic of this world is shrinking because it’s polarizing. You’ve seen with the COVID pandemic in the United States, the economy has polarized much more sharply between the 1%, the 10% and the rest of the economy.
Well, as opposed to that, you have economies that are not run by a rentier class, and that do not have a banking class and landlord class controlling the economy. The kind of arrangement that you had in Germany in the late 19th century: government, industry and labor coordinated. The question was how to provide the financing for industry so that banks can provide not only industrial capital formation, but public funding to build infrastructure and uplift the population.
China is doing just what made America rich in the 19th century, and what made Germany rich. It’s the same logic of industrial engineering. This plan is based on economic expansion, environmental preservation and economic balance instead of concentration, so this is going to be a growing economy. So, you’re having a growing economy outside of the United States and a shrinking economy in the States and its satellites in Europe.
Europe had a choice: Either it could shrink and be an American satellite economy, or it could join the growth. Europe has decided unanimously to forego growth and become a set of client oligarchies and kleptocracies. It is willing to let its financial sector take over just as in America. That’s a “free market,” because I’m told by American officials that they can just buy the European politicians, they’re bribable. Being up for sale is what a free political market means.
What Flavour Oligarchy? | Michael Hudson
#post_contentHudson in discussion with Pepe Escobar on the geo-political landscape, through the lense of rentier economics. The agenda of the 1% under deep analysis.
Let me guess wah that wasn’t communism we will get it right this time.
the point was also about giving too much power to the FIRE sector of the economy, in addition to imperialism which you also bring up.
theres no point in defending something that doesnt work either.
El Correcto
god is dead
You are putting all the woes of government onto an economic system.
I’m thinking what is the most productive, successful economic system? It’s free markets. Once you arrive at that you begin discussing what social welfare your economic system can realistically support.
Communist societies had horrible results economically and had to begin privatizing
before everyone ended up dead. You’re naive Ricky.
