Public art of the day

[ht: stickerthing]

Poem of the day

Puttanesca

by Michael Heffernan

Before I gave up wondering why everything
was a lot of nothing worth losing or getting back,
I took out a jar of olives, a bottle of capers,
a container of leftover tomato sauce with onions,
put a generous portion of each in olive oil
just hot enough but not too hot,
along with some minced garlic and a whole can of anchovies,
until the mixture smelled like a streetwalker’s sweat,
then emptied it onto a half pound of penne, beautifully al dente,
under a heap of grated pecorino romano
in a wide bowl sprinkled with fresh chopped parsley.
If you had been there, I would have given you half,
and asked you whether its heavenly bitterness
made you remember anything you had once loved.

in honor of the founding members of the Puttanesca Review. . .

Marx and capitalist injustice

Daniel Little writes about Marx’s concept of capitalist injustice with characteristic seriousness. However, a lecture of John Rawls is not going to be a very good guide. (Nor, for that matter, is Brad DeLong’s commentary.)

The debate about whether Marx developed a scientific or moral critique of capitalism goes back a long way, and is not a very fruitful way of posing the question. Every theory of political economy—and, as with Marx, critique of political economy—has both scientific and moral (or, if you prefer, utopian) dimensions. Thus, for example, neoclassical economics is based on a view of the world in terms of supply and demand (and, behind them, given preferences, technology, and resource endowments), which affects and is affected by certain notions of justice (such as voluntary individual contracts) and utopian views (such as the efficient allocation of scarce resources). Other economic theories are based on analogous (but quite different) notions of justice and imagined utopias.

The same is true of every social formation: each has its own standards of justice (actually, both hegemonic and nonhegemonic standards of justice). Thus, for example, according to the dominant ideology of capitalism, slavery is unjust (because it is based on human chattel) and capitalism is just (because it is based on free individual decisionmaking, including decisions over one’s body).

What Marx did is develop a critique—of bourgeois thought and capitalist society—starting with bourgeois notions of justice. Thus, for example, in developing his labor theory of value, Marx started with the idea of the exchange of equivalents (a bourgeois notion of fairness) and then “discovered” surplus-value (a social theft of surplus labor from the direct producers), which violated bourgeois norms. That discovery was, in turn, predicated on (as it informed) the idea of non-exploitation (which, as Marx explained in the “Critique of the Gotha Program,” does NOT mean the direct producers get all the labor they perform).

There are two important points here: First, Marx’s critique of political economy does have moral and utopian dimensions. Second, the moral critique of capitalism (as social theft) does not, in itself, give rise to a communist morality (since it is a very different kind of society, in which exploitation is eliminated). The key, at least for me, is Marx’s insistence (as in his 1843 letter to Ruge) on the

ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.

Public art of the day

[ht: Wooster Collective]

It’s official-update 18

It’s done! The Department of Economics and Policy Studies at the University of Notre Dame has been officially dissolved.

On 25 February, the Academic Council approved the dean’s proposal to eliminate ECOP and to rename the remaining department the Department of Economics. Now, the members of ECOP need to find positions for themselves elsewhere in the university—or to leave the university entirely. There will be no place for them in the other department.

I don’t have any other details—about the discussion at the Academic Council or the vote. What I do know is that serious questions were raised about the proposal and the process by the Faculty Senate, by the student government, and at the College Council meeting where the proposal was presented. All those concerns were simply ignored. (Nick Krafft describes how stunned he was in reading the dean’s latest comments about students’ needing “to take charge of their education.”)

Readers should know that the implications of the decision are much broader than the fate of ECOP faculty. It shows how university governance has dramatically changed, at Notre Dame and elsewhere, in undermining faculty and student input. The basic idea is, they should shut up and tend to their “own affairs” (teaching, churning out publications, and studying) and let the administration go about its work in remaking the university. It also shows how closed the discipline of economics remains—even after the crises of capitalism that have called into question every facet and dimension of mainstream economics, from basic theory to policy recommendations. Finally, it shows how fragile and threatened academic freedom is, at Notre Dame and throughout higher education in the United States.

Off to Peru

Nuestra gente [Our people]

Faber

I’ll be back in 10 days. . .

Public art of the day

Peter Fuss

Ecology, Neoliberalism, and Keynesianism

In a recent article in Economic & Political Weekly [ht: is-i], Farshad Araghi (pdf) argues that “the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks is indicative of the depth of the crisis of ‘long Keynesianism’ that has exhausted its positive and negative ways of dealing with the ‘unsustainability’ of global capitalism.”

Araghi’s first point is that neoliberalism is not the opposite of Keynesianism, nor is global Keynesianism a possible alternative to global neoliberalism. Instead, he views neoliberalism as a moment within Keynesianism: “negative Keynesianism” (a reaction to wage inflation and stagflation at home and unruly developmentalism abroad, based on wage deflation, negative regulation, and financialisation of demand management) versus “positive Keynesianism” (based on wage-labour contracts and effective demand management leading to “wage inflation,” amidst competitive pressures and expansion of democratic rights). “Long Keynesianism” is therefore “a contradictory unity of liberalism and neoliberalism.”

Araghi views the current period as a crisis of long Keynesianism, and concludes that a return to positive Keynesianism simply won’t work.

The fantastic desire for a pendulum shift, in the form of a return to positive Keynesianism, fails to see that post-war Keynesianism was (1) an externalising regime fundamentally standing on the shoulder of the “cheap oil regime” of 1953-73, and (2) that the mass consumption component of high wage Keynesianism in the North was always standing on the shoulder of “forced underconsumption” in the South. . .Precisely for these reasons, green and global Keynesianism is a contradiction in terms.

Araghi’s eco-socialist perspective is valuable, as a way of prying progressives away from a narrow (and one might say naive) focus on stimulus spending and financial regulation. What is missing from his approach is a concern with class—both the role class exploitation has played in creating the conditions for the current crises (in both the South and the North) and the role eliminating class exploitation can play (again, in both regions) in moving us beyond capitalism.

“Rethinking Planning, Development, and Globalization”

The new book, Rethinking Planning, Development, and Globalization: Essays in Marxian Class Analysis, is finally done and off to the publisher.

The cover illustration, by Mercamutanterio, is above. Here’s the table of contents:

Foreword by Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff

Introduction

1 Rethinking Planning, Development, and Globalization  from a Marxian Perspective [here is the pre-publication version: pdf]

Planning

2 Essentialism and Socialist Economic Planning: A Methodological Critique of Optimal Planning Theory

3 Planning and Class in Transitional Societies

4 The State and Planning in Nicaragua

5 Nicaragua: The State, Class, and Transition

Development

6 Radical Theories of Development: Frank, the Modes of Production School, and Amin

7 The Costs of Austerity in Nicaragua: The Worker-Peasant Alliance, 1979-1987

8 When Failure Becomes Success: Class and the Debate over Stabilization and Adjustment

9 Power and Class: The Contribution of Radical Approaches to Debt and Development

10 Capitalism and Industrialization in the Third World: Recognizing the Costs and Imagining Alternatives

11 “After” Development: Reimagining Economy and Class

12 Reading Harold: Class Analysis, Capital Accumulation, and the Role of the Intellectual

Globalization

13 Fordism on a World Scale: International Dimensions of Regulation

14 Class Beyond the Nation-State

15 Global Fragments: Subjectivity and Class Politics in Discourses of Globalization

16 Globalization and Imperialism

Normalizing the unthinkable

David DeGraw has assembled a report (part 1 of 2) on how the “Economic Elite Have Engineered an Extraordinary Coup, Threatening the Very Existence of the Middle Class.”

It’s what I’ve been arguing for quite a while now: that, apart from (but also in part as a result of) the current crises, there has been a steady immiseration of the U.S. working-class.

The devastating numbers across-the-board on the economic front are staggering. I’ll go through some of them here, many we have already become all too familiar with. We hear some of these numbers all the time, so much so that it appears as if we have already begun “to normalize the unthinkable.” You may be sick of hearing them, but behind each number is an enormous amount of individual suffering, American lives and families who are struggling worse than they ever have.

DeGraw goes through the numbers, with links to the original sources. The upshot is, for the past 30 years or so, the balance has slowly but steadily shifted in favor of capital and against working people. The current crises are both a result of that shift (since the financial bubbles are at least in part a consequence of a worsening the distribution of income and wealth) and one more cause of that shift (since the current crises, and the policies enacted to “save” the system, are enhancing profitability but lowering living standards for the vast majority).

The fact is, neither the mainstream media, which fails to connect the dots, nor mainstream academic economists, who are obsessed with defending their models and pinning the blame on one or another financial enterprise, are helping us make sense of these changes. They are merely serving to normalize the unthinkable. It’s people like DeGraw and Elizabeth Warren who are putting the pieces together and sounding the alarm. The question is, who is listening? And when will we do something about it?