Tadeusz Kowalik, the doyen of Polish political economists, died at his home in Warsaw on the 30 July. He had been suffering from cancer in recent years. In the English-speaking world Tadeusz Kowalik is best known as the last surviving co-author of the great Polish economist, Michał Kalecki (1899-1970), an advisor to the Polish trades union movement Solidarity during the 1980s, when it played a key part in bringing down the Communist Government in Poland, and subsequently as a fierce critic of the capitalism established in his country. In his work he challenged both the commonly accepted view of the ‘Keynesian Revolution’ and inability of Polish communists to come to terms with their revolutionary past and find a place for themselves in the modern world. More

Rosa Luxemburg is best known for her attempt in her book The Accumulation of Capital to show that capitalist accumulation requires external markets in order to overcome a tendency to stagnation.  These external markets formed the basis of her theory of imperialism, which was taken over by Lenin and subsequent Marxists.  However, in chapter xxx of that book, on ‘International Loans’, Rosa Luxemburg examined the role of finance in capital accumulation.  This analysis was perhaps peripheral to her argument.  But it has sufficient critical elements to warrant a place for Luxemburg among the pioneers of critical finance, while the fate of that analysis among Marxists reveals how the most important school of radical political economy in the twentieth century came to an attenuated view of finance as a factor in capitalist crisis. In this paper, it is argued that Luxemburg put forward an analysis of international finance that not only allows for a disturbing character of finance, but also looks forward to important aspects of Minsky’s analysis in the second half of the twentieth century. More

Unlike many post-socialist countries, Slovenia adopted the so-called „gradualist“ model of transition from socialism to capitalism. In 1992 and 1993, massive workers’ strikes were organized to oppose the privatization of production, the process that proved to be destructive in general and fatal for heavy industry in particular. Due to these strikes, the Slovenian political and economic elites reconsidered their
sympathies with the so-called „shock doctrine“ of the early nineties, adopting instead the „gradualist“ transition model. This model was based on four premises: a) retaining state control over financial and key industrial sectors as well as infrastructure; b) slow and merely partial privatization of public institutions; c)
maintaining social peace through high employment and national-level collective bargaining agreements; and d) export-oriented monetary policies (with relatively high rates of inflation). Those policies enabled Slovenia to maintain at least a part of its industrial basis that was inherited from socialism and was able to support a relatively wide set of welfare-state mechanisms and social protection. More

Abstract:

Ecological economics has been repeatedly described as transdiciplinary and open to including everything from positivism to relativism. I argue for a revision and rejection of this position in favour of realism and reasoned critique. Looking into the ontological presuppositions and considering an epistemology appropriate for ecological
economics to meaningfully exist requires rejecting the form of methodological pluralism which has been advocated since the start of this journal. This means being clear about the differences in our worldview (or paradigm) from others and being aware of the substantive failures of orthodox economics in addressing reality.
This paper argues for a fundamental review of the basis upon which ecological economics has been founded and in so doing seeks improved clarity as to the competing and complementary epistemologies and methodologies.
In part this requires establishing serious interdisciplinary research to replace superficial transdisciplinary rhetoric. More

ABSTRACT

All processes of commodification are different. Some “succeed” better than others. Because the neoliberal era has witnessed an unprecedented expansion in theoretical ambitions for commodification (whether commodification of species, biodiversity, security, public services, water, ideas, genomic information, climate benefit and so forth), paying attention to the particularities and resistances associated with each attempted commodification process has never been more important. Using the example of climate service markets, this chapter proposes and demonstrates one method for breaking down into bite-sized chunks the radical efforts at
commensuration characteristic of neoliberal commodification, so that accounts of the relevant actors, methodologies, institutions, contradiction and outcomes can be more easily organized. Applying this tool – performative equations – helps explain why the failures of climate service markets go far beyond those of more
traditional markets. more

1. THE KEY FEATURES OF FINANCIALISATION

The Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) Economy

Financialisation is a process in which the FIRE economy (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) takes up an ever larger share of transactions, and FIRE beneficiaries take an ever larger share of aggregate claims on the money supply. Prof. Michael Hudson goes into considerable detail of how financialisation works in his new book, ‘The Bubble and Beyond’. A useful shorter summary is an article by Dirk Bezemer and Michael Hudson, ‘The Bubble Economy and Debt Deflation’. more

Following extraordinary state intervention in the financial and banking sector in the form of stimulus packages and bailouts, fiscal deficits across the Eurozone have soared, with an average fiscal deficit (as percentage of GDP) of 6.4% in 2009, from 2.1% in the current employment growth rate of just 1% across the G20 is indicative here. As the ILO cautions (2011), at this rate it won’t even be possible to recover the estimated 20 million jobs lost in the G20 since the crisis began in 2008. So who is paying for these government policies across the advanced economies? Based on far-ranging austerity measures and wage depression, it seems that the solutions to the Eurozone crisis will ultimately come at the expense of the employment and living conditions of the European working class. more

Please see here

1. Introduction
The collapse of Bretton Woods and the abandonment of fixed exchange rates signaled
the start of profound changes in the patterns of accumulation. One important result of those changes has been the increase in avenues for appropriation in the financial sector. These new avenues arose as market actors faced new risks, in the first instance those associated with floating exchange rates. New instruments – such as currency and interest rate futures, options, and swaps – arose to redress these new risks. Hedging on derivatives markets became an imperative for all actors engaged in the trading of foreign currencies. The growth of derivatives markets also provided new opportunities for speculation. more

Premise

This short note tries to address four key questions posed by seminar organizers in preparation to the event. Each question is quite broad and would require a specific dissertation.

I tried to encapsulate under each question some concepts already expressed in preparation to a civil society event last May (“EU in crisis”) by making more explicit some points when thought to be more relevant for the type of seminar that Rosa Luxemburg Foundation is kindly convening in November. Weiterlesen →