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Capital Eats the World
Suresh Naidu is an Assistant Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Columbia University
Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows that not everything in mainstream economics is worthless.
In their essay last fall on the state of economics, Seth Ackerman and Mike Beggs charged that today’s mainstream is irredeemably captured by conservative ideology. The good news is they’re wrong — Piketty’s work testifies to that.
Contemporary mainstream economics is a politically broad tent, and has a lot to contribute to economic analysis. But it needs to be struggled with, as many have in the debate surrounding Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
Every economics student learns the “Kaldor facts” of economic growth. One of these is that the share of national income going to capital has a long-run tendency to stay constant..................................
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/05/capital-eats-the-world/
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Barbarism with a Human Face
Slavoj Žižek
Again and again in television reports on the mass protests in Kiev against the Yanukovich government, we saw images of protesters tearing down statues of Lenin. It was an easy way to demonstrate anger: the statues functioned as a symbol of Soviet oppression, and Putin’s Russia is perceived as continuing the Soviet policy of Russian domination of its neighbours. Bear in mind that it was only in 1956 that Lenin’s statues started to proliferate throughout the Soviet Union: until then, statues of Stalin were much more common. But after Krushchev’s ‘secret’ denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, Stalin’s statues were replaced en masse by Lenin’s: Lenin was literally a stand-in for Stalin. This was made equally clear by a change made in 1962 to the masthead of Pravda. Until then, at the top left-hand corner of the front page, there had been a drawing of two profiles, Lenin’s and Stalin’s, side by side. Shortly after the 22nd Congress publicly rejected Stalin, his profile wasn’t merely removed but replaced with a second profile of Lenin: now there were two identical Lenins printed side by side. In a way, this weird repetition made Stalin more present in his absence than ever........................................................................................................................
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n09/slavoj-zizek/barbarism-with-a-human-face
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Does He Pass the Test?
Paul Krugman JULY 10, 2014 ISSUE
Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises
by Timothy F. Geithner
Crown, 580 pp., $35.00
Midway through Timothy Geithner’s Stress Test, the former treasury secretary describes a late-2008 conversation with the then president-elect. Obama “wanted to discuss what he should try to accomplish.” Geithner’s reply was that his accomplishment would be “preventing a second Great Depression.” And Obama shot back that he didn’t want to be defined by what he had prevented
It’s an ironic tale for Geithner to be telling, although it’s not clear whether he himself realizes just how ironic. For Stress Test is meant to be a story of successful policy—but that success is defined not by what happened but by what didn’t. America did indeed manage to avoid a full replay of the Great Depression—an achievement for which Geithner implicitly claims much of the credit, and with some justification. We did not, however, avoid economic disaster. By any plausible accounting, we’ve lost trillions of dollars’ worth of goods and services that we could and should have produced; millions of Americans have lost their jobs, their homes, and their dreams. Call it the Lesser Depression—not as bad as the 1930s, but still a terrible thing. Not to mention the disastrous consequences abroad............................
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jul/10/geithner-does-he-pass-test/
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Bulletproof Neoliberalism
Paul Heideman holds a PhD in American Studies from Rutgers University-Newark.
To understand how a body of thought became an era of capitalism requires more than intellectual history
“What is going to come after neoliberalism?” It was the question on many radicals’ lips, present writer included, after the financial crisis hit in 2008. Though few were so sanguine about our prospects as to repeat the suicidal optimism of previous radical movements (“After Hitler, Our Turn!”), the feeling of the day was that the era of unfettered marketization was coming to a close. A new period of what was loosely referred to as Keynesianism would be the inevitable result of a crisis caused by markets run amok.
Five years later, little has changed. What comes after neoliberalism? More neoliberalism, apparently. The prospects for a revived Left capable of confronting it appear grim.
Enter Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. Mirowski maintains that the true nature of neoliberalism has gone unrecognized by its would-be critics, allowing the doctrine to flourish even in conditions, such as a massive financial crisis, that would seem to be inimical to its survival. Leftists keep busy tilting at the windmill of deregulation as the giants of neoliberalism go on pillaging unmoleste
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/bulletproof-neoliberalism/Enter Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. Mirowski maintains that the true nature of neoliberalism has gone unrecognized by its would-be critics, allowing the doctrine to flourish even in conditions, such as a massive financial crisis, that would seem to be inimical to its survival. Leftists keep busy tilting at the windmill of deregulation as the giants of neoliberalism go on pillaging unmoleste
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Why We’re Marxists
Nivedita Majumdar is an associate professor in English at John Jay College.
Marxism lives because we have not gone beyond the circumstances that created it.
Months after its release, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is still getting praised in reviews and sitting near the top of bestseller charts. If the invisibility of a system is a marker of its ideological success, this can’t be a good sign for capitalism.
It’s no surprise that people are curious about the causes of the injustice that surrounds them. Average workers’ wages in the US have fallen sizably from 2007 to 2012; in the same period, over 90 percent of all new income went to the top 1 percent; while around 46 million Americans live in poverty, the gap between corporate profits and workers’ wages has never been greater. Piketty’s conclusion that capitalism, if left unchecked, generates a concentration of wealth among a tiny minority sits well with this lived experience.
It’s no surprise that people are curious about the causes of the injustice that surrounds them. Average workers’ wages in the US have fallen sizably from 2007 to 2012; in the same period, over 90 percent of all new income went to the top 1 percent; while around 46 million Americans live in poverty, the gap between corporate profits and workers’ wages has never been greater. Piketty’s conclusion that capitalism, if left unchecked, generates a concentration of wealth among a tiny minority sits well with this lived experience.
Merit or hard work, the standard justification for inequality, has little to do with our new gilded age.
Though he distances himself from the old man, Piketty’s analyses have been aligned in a certain sense with those of Marx. Not surprisingly, the response to the book has revealed some central misconceptions embedded in critiques of Marxism
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/07/why-were-marxists/Though he distances himself from the old man, Piketty’s analyses have been aligned in a certain sense with those of Marx. Not surprisingly, the response to the book has revealed some central misconceptions embedded in critiques of Marxism
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Atlas Smug
Alex Payne is a programmer and writer. He helped start Twitter and Simple
Marc Andreessen likes to talk about the Awesome Robot Future without addressing the essential question: who owns the robots?
Hi, Marc.
I grew up using your work. Thanks to one of my parents being employed by a university, I got to use Mosaic to browse the early Web way before most people had even heard of it. My first software development internship was a summer spent using beta versions of Netscape technologies — what was then “LiveScript”and “dynamic HTML” — to sketch new interface elements for a protean web collaboration app. I rooted for Netscape when Microsoft came barging in to the browser market. When you started A16Z a few years ago I was excited to see what you’d invest in.
You’ve got a big audience of admirers. I’ve counted myself among them, but lately you’ve made it a challenge. I just can’t square with the way of looking at our industry, political economy, and the future laid out in your latest post........................
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/atlas-smug/
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Be grateful for drizzle
Donald MacKenzie on high-frequency trading
The beams are infrared, which means you can’t see them, but lasers are now flashing stock-market data through the skies over New Jersey. If they work well there, they might soon be flashing over London too. Lasers are the latest tool for high-frequency trading: the fast, entirely automated trading of large numbers of shares and other financial instrumentsOriginally, the data needed for high-frequency trading travelled almost exclusively via fibre-optic cables, in which signals move at about two-thirds of the speed that light travels in a vacuum. It’s a tried, trusted technology. Fibre has the bandwidth to transmit the huge volumes of data spewed out by today’s financial markets. Although accidents do happen (farmers, for example, sometimes cut the buried cables when ploughing), fibre-optic links are very reliable. But 125,000 miles per second isn’t fast enough if other market participants are faster. So there’s a race on. The theory of relativity tells us that nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum. Air, unlike glass fibre, slows light down almost imperceptibly. Sending light or radio signals through the atmosphere is less than a tenth of 1 per cent slower than the speed of light in a vacuum...................................
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n17/donald-mackenzie/be-grateful-for-drizzle
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A General Without an Army
Mike Beggs is an editor at Jacobin and a lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Sydney
For all Piketty’s mainstream respectability, it is only the radical left and the labor movement — not treasuries and central banks — that can push his program.
“Capital is back.” That’s the title of the long paper that first presented the core data and many of the concepts for Piketty’s book — the Grundrisse for his Capital, coauthored with Gabriel Zucman. The title captures perfectly what is so striking about Piketty’s approach to inequality. Conventional treatments have for years focused mainly on inequalities of income from work. The book returns the discussion to capital and labor.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/05/a-general-without-an-army/
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Scalpers Inc.
John LanchesterEarly in the afternoon of 6 May 2010, the leading stock market index in the US, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, suddenly started falling. There was no evident external reason for the fall – no piece of news or economic data – but the market, which had been drifting slowly downwards that day, in a matter of minutes dropped by 6 per cent. There was pandemonium: some stocks in the Dow were trading for prices as low as 1 cent, others for prices as high as $100,000, in both cases with no apparent rationale. A 15-minute period saw a loss of roughly $1 trillion in market capitalisation.....................................................................................
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n11/john-lanchester/scalpers-inc
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Paupers and Richlings
Benjamin Kunkel
Benjamin Kunkel
- BUYCapital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty, translated by Arthur Goldhammer
- Capitalist societies today exhibit ‘an arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes’ as bad as or worse than in the 1930s, when Keynes declared this one of ‘the outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live’. (The other – not unrelated – was the failure to achieve full employment.) Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century is an intelligent, ambitious and above all informative treatment of the problem. This accounts for much of the unusual excitement surrounding a lengthy, often dry economic tract. But there’s something else to the ‘Piketty bubble’: he is one of the very few contemporary economists eager to revive the old-fashioned spirit of political economy. .........
- http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n13/benjamin-kunkel/paupers-and-richlings
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Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord 1967
1.
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
2.
The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.
