Summary
EU financial reforms have been without ambition at the beginning. With the
emergence of the Greek crisis, there was a certain adjustment, and stricter reforms
were envisaged. But the complex nature of EU governance structures together with
strong national interest and the influence of the finance lobby make reforms
inefficient, too slow and too late. The only modus of operandi of the EU is therefore
slow and incremental change. In addition, the sovereign debt crisis, which is closely
interlinked it the crisis of the finance system, makes reforms even more difficult. As a
supra-national state in the making, the EU is not strong and flexible enough to
manage extraordinary crises. This is why muddling through can be expected to
continue until something dramatic happens. more

Continuing our remarks of 20.6.2012 and of 10.9.2012 (See the links below[i]), we would like to re-introduce the overall project, to strengthen the underlying orientation for both workshops and to concretize the aim and the structure of each of both workshops. A third aim of this round mail is to give some organisational information. The need for doing so has become more urgent with the approaching date of the workshops, on the one hand, and due to the fact that our budget has been increased and that we have been allowed to invite additional people, on the other hand.

Please note:

1. When we started our project in the beginning of this year, we have tried to continue our work in two directions: in the direction of a discussion of experts on the EU (we had the first at the end of 2011) and in the direction of discussing our question „Is it possible to have another economics for another economic policy?“. Weiterlesen →

1. Of Suffocation and War

The central cause of the Eurozone crisis is the insistence on a single currency and hence a single interest rate across 17 highly diverse national economies, themselves made up of very diverse regional and local economies. Such a proposal was always opposed vigorously by economists–mostly of the right but also of the left–whose theory told them that there are very strict conditions under which a currency area can operate and that these were very far from being met by the European union and its member states. The argument was that the Eurozone project was always a political project, aiming to put unendurable pressure on countries, some of which were reluctant to relinquish sovereignty, to become part of a single political unit. Tie them into an unbreakable currency union, so ran the thinking, and the ensuing crises world force political union, making it eventually the lesser of two evils. This is the situation we have reached now, the last battle between the political unifiers and their unwilling citizens. Weiterlesen →

According to calculations made by leading institutes of ecological economics, each passing year fewer and fewer calendar days within which you consume all the resources on the basis of sustainability and reproducibility should instead be enough for the entire period of 12 months.

This evidence makes it perfectly the idea that the true default risk -as humanity- is the one with nature. Discuss environmental debt should be a top priority. But the neoliberal narrative has instead imposed the dominus of monetary debt, followed by a declaration of a sort of monetary state of emergency and the austerity. Weiterlesen →

Since 2010, in the stronger countries of the eurozone most political leaders supported by mainstream media have flaunted their so-called generosity towards the Greek people and other weaker countries in the eurozone that are currently in the limelight (Ireland, Portugal, Spain…). In this context, measures that further destroy the economy of recipient countries and involve social regression on a scale unprecedented over the past 65 years are called ‘rescue plans’. To this we must add the ripoff of the March 2012 plan to reduce the Greek debt – a plan that involves a 50% reduction of debts owed by Greece to private banks whereas these same debts, if negotiated on the secondary market, had lost up to 65 to 75% of their value. While the government’s debt to private banks was reduced, there was an increase in what it owes to the Troika resulting in new measures of phenomenal injustice and brutality. This agreement to reduce the debt aims at burdening the Greek people with permanent austerity; it is an insult and a threat to all peoples in Europe and elsewhere. According to the IMF research unit, in 2013 the Greek public debt will amount to 164% of GDP, which shows that the debt reduction announced in March 2012 will fail to provide any actual relief of the debt burden weighing on the Greek people. It is in this context that Alexis Tsipras visited the European Parliament Weiterlesen →

1.    How to explain financialisation as a systemic transformation of capitalist modes of production and living? (in the above-mentioned complex meaning)

There are many factors behind financialization and its role in transforming the capitalist mode of production. Chief among the factors behind financialization are: (1) the relative exhaustion of Atlantic Fordism as the driving force behind the 30 years of economic growth and welfare expansion in the North Atlantic region; (2) the limits to a successful transition to the knowledge-based economy as the new driving force for growth – something promoted by the OECD, European Union, World Bank, and several other international agencies as well as at national, regional, urban, and neighbourhood levels; (3) the impact of neo-liberalism in intensifying the downward pressure on wages and the social wage considered as costs of (international) production and the resulting deregulatory race to the bottom, which also prompted the development of so-called private Keynesianism, i.e., debt-fuelled household consumption, which was at best a short-term strategy once private debt reached its limits; Weiterlesen →

1. What are the stereotypes of mainstream economics in the debate on debt? (At this point conceptual issues of economics such as the role of economic history and history of economic thought in economic theory building should be raised.)

Neo-classical economics ignores the role of money (and therefore debt) and also tends to assume away time or treat time as reversible; it therefore also assumes away debt. The Keynesian and post-Keynesian tradition (and its precursors) have a better (but still limited) account of money, the motives for holding it, and its role in liquidity and demand. The Marxist critique of political economy assumes a profit-oriented, market-mediated process of accumulation in which money is central (M-C-M or M-C-M’) and debt is a central mechanism in accumulation. Weiterlesen →

The basic features of the capitalist mode of production (hereafter CMP) and its nature as a distinctive ensemble of objects of regulation/governance are such that neither capital as a whole nor the capital-labour relation on which its contradictor and conflictual dynamic depends can be reproduced purely through market relation (Box 1). What most distinguishes capitalism from other forms of producing wealth is its treatment of labour-power as if it were a commodity. In short, the appropriation of surplus labour takes the form of exchange. This turns the labour market and labour process into sites of class struggle between capital and workers. This economic class struggle is overdetermined, of course, by juridico-political and ideological structures and struggles, the complexity of class relations in actually existing social formations, and the intersection of class with other social categories. more

The aims of the paper are to introduce the new role of the debt, family and state ones, as a general key tool useful to structure the so called austerity polical economical european trend.

All over EU we face a review of the welfare state social organization, with the objective to define a   new governance model, where monetarism and new liberarism are the milestones and the crisis (and its shock effects) is the context where it appens.

According to Antonio Gramsci, what it is happening under that’s grey sky, it is a subversion from the top where finance-capitalism is surfing the crisis figuring out a new paradigm. Weiterlesen →

Cultural political economy combines critical semiotic analysis (one way to make
a cultural turn) with critical political economy’s interest in economic and political
institutions, contradictions, crisis-tendencies, and dynamics.1 While cultural turns
occur in the investigation of many social fields, this article focuses on political ecology.
It concerns two (potentially overlapping, often contrary, even antagonistic) multiform
sets of imaginaries that frame the observation, interpretation, and attempted management of the continuing global economic crisis. Let me first introduce the concept of ‘imaginary’. This denotes a simplified, necessarily selective ‘mental map’of a supercomplex reality and typically has normative and cognitive functions. more