Frieder Otto Wolf: Reflections on the 1. Day

We have tried to address the problems posed by conceiving a modern left wing policy in Europe and in the EU, specifically reflecting its dynamic global context, and trying to reflect recent experiences adequately, while establishing a theoretical basis for a critical approach to them.
The task formulated by Judith Dellheim in the “Opening” had been to clarify the global context and the theoretical basis of the discussion. She had asked the workshop More

Judith Dellheim: Opening

This is the fourth meeting of our EU experts’ discussions and I should like to remind or to inform you, very briefly, about its history and also about the main ideas of this project or its underlying “philosophy”.
Our first EU experts’ discussion has taken place in December 2011. It had the ironic title “Crisis, Crisis, Euro Crisis” and helped to overcome More

Claude Serfati: 2014 – A Turning Point in the Economic and Geopolitical Situation

1) The hypothesis laid out in this paper is that a new turn in the international economic and geopolitical situation took place in the last months. On the economic side, not only it appears that the finance capital’s social and economic power has not been seriously dented by the new regulatory framework under way in different countries, but that it goes on thriving on the global bleak macroeconomic situation. Through the last years, mainstream economists’ main concern was EU deflation, a code name for depression. More

Workshop Organizers: A Few More Remarks

We now propose the following workshop parts:

  • I. Global Context, Experience and Theoretical Basics
  • II. Financialisation and Transnationalisation; Social and Production Structures
  • III. Case Studies in Regard to Countries
  • IV. More specifically on Alternatives

Weiterlesen

Kees van der Pijl: The Financial Crisis and the War for Global Governance

This paper argues that in the transition from corporate liberalism to neoliberalism, the projection of global governance by the West replaces the previous recognition of bloc formation of non-Western states. The military build-up and counterrevolutionary interventions  under Reagan, and the revolt of the capital markets against Keynesianism coupled with unregulated finance, were the relays in this projection. In the same period the Israeli Far Right and their supporters in the United States re-baptised national liberation as terrorism. This made it possible to continue with record defence outlays and arms exports to Middle East and Asian clients. In the early nineties the US military-industrial complex  More

Kees van der Pijl: 1984 All Over Again. The Snowden NSA Revelations in Perspective

In the discussion concerning the Snowden NSA revelations many have referred to Orwell’s 1984. This paper highlights that Orwell identified two components–total surveillance and permanent war. The paper then looks at the actual year 1984 and argues that in that year was significant after all because both elements of today’s War on Terror (surveillance and war) were being prepared. One was the Washington conference on the War on Terror, the third in a series initiated from Israel; the other, the preparation of a Continuity of Government (COG) programme by the Reagan administration, 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: 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

 

Jan Toporowski: Sweezy and the Monthly Review on Capitalism and Finance

The New York Monthly Review established by Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman in 1949 represents a unique venture in disseminating Marxist ideas in a way that has been informed by serious economic analysis. In particular it has benefited from the close relationship that Paul Sweezy had with his PhD supervisor at Harvard, Joseph Schumpeter; Sweezy’s own personal knowledge of finance through his father, who was one of five vice-presidents of the New York-based First National Bank (which eventually became Citibank); More