Daniela Gabor: The Romanian Financial System: From Central Bank-Led to Dependent Financialisation

This study argues that financialisation is not a phenomenon exclusively associated with complex innovation in highly developed financial markets. Financialisation also affects countries with „shallow“ financial markets but with a significant presence of transnational financial actors that become a powerpul economic and political force able to navigate and shape uneven regulatory and institutional terrains in order to sustain new modes of profit generation. The study distinguishes two stages in the financialisation of the Romanian economy. The first, central bank dominated. Weiterlesen

Etienne Balibar: The Rise and Fall of the European Union: Temporalities and Teleologies

Historians and philosophers have been discussing the extent to which specific ideologies regarding the understanding of time and space are involved in the writing of history, as a consequence of the “central” place that Europe had attributed itself in Modern history. The idea of “Europe” itself, whether perceived from inside or outside, is by definition ideological or it is a teleological “discourse”, which performs epistemological and political functions at the same time. Whether we consider ourselves More

Patrick Bond: South Africa’s Multiple Resource Curses, the Metalworkers’ Break and Community Uprisings

The title of the following post may surprise. Why should a text from South Africa be put on this blog? The explanation is the asked by us questions: Why is the left in the EU, in Europe so weak? How could we become stronger? Bonds article helps us to discuss this issue productively. It starts from the opposite question: why could a left-emancipatory force become strong? The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa finished the tolereance of neoliberal development and split away  from the ANC. More

Jan Toporowski: Kalecki and the Political Economy of Trades Unions

‘There are certain “workers’ friends” who try to persuade the working class to abandon the fight for wages, of course in its own interest. The usual argument used for this purpose is that the increase of wages causes unemployment, and is thus detrimental to the working class as a whole… Our investigation… has shown that a wage increase… tends to reduce the degree of monopoly and thus to raise real wages… If viewed from this standpoint, strikes must have the full sympathy of “workers’ friends”. For a rise in wages tends to reduce the degree of Weiterlesen

Jan Toporowski: Debt, Class and Asset Inflation

The mainstream view of household consumption and saving is based on the idea of a ‘representative’ household endowed with more or less perfect foresight, according to whether the theory is New Classical or New Keynesian. The traditional Keynesian view had household saving and consumption determined by income, with Post-Keynesian innovations in the form of differentiated propensities to consume on the part of workers or capitalists and, following Minsky, increasing indebtedness of firms. More

Jan Toporowski: Fascist Spectre Looms over Stagnant Europe

A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of fascism, born of economic Stagnation and the very apparent ability of democratic governments to eliminate mass employment.

There are two main reasons for the alarming prospect: First, Exchange rate stability has come to be regarded as a precondition for European economic and monetarian union. More

Jan Toporowski: Eastern Europe: Post-Communist Assets in Crisis

During the 1980s, in the final years of communism, Eastern European economists and politicians were easily persuaded by the myth that removal of the petty restrictions on private business would allow private enterprise to flourish. The idea of a permanent state of capitalist dynamism is rooted in the notion that finance spontaneously backs industrial enterprise.                                                                                                         Many economists assume, at least in their abstract theories More

 

Jan Toporowski: The Wisdom of Property and the Politics of the Middle Classes

At the end of the twentieth century, while financial economists satisfied their intellectual pretensions to useful knowledge by conjuring up visions of a world peopled with materialistic consumer-investors optimizing rationally in accordance with their willingness to hazard their wealth, the propertied classes themselves were succumbing to new delusions fostered by the financial markets. The reasoned response of propertied individuals to their experience of the world of speculative finance More

 

Laura Horn, Angela Wigger: Uneven Development and Political Resistance against EU Austerity Politics

In response to the current crisis, European Union (EU) institutions and Eurozone governments have adopted a range of regulatory and treaty-based measures to ensure fiscal discipline through limiting the capacity of Eurozone governments running budget deficits and accumulating sovereign debt. In addition, almost all Eurozone governments have taken measures to deregulate labour laws, such as easing employee dismissals, reducing minimum wages, More