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

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

 

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