Ekonomija za decu

[eumeswil]

Pjer Burdije o neoliberalizmu.

 

 

 

What is neoliberalism? A programme for destroying collective structures which may impede the pure market logic.

As the dominant discourse would have it, the economic world is a pure and perfect order, implacably unrolling the logic of its predictable consequences, and prompt to repress all violations by the sanctions that it inflicts, either automatically or —more unusually — through the intermediary of its armed extensions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the policies they impose: reducing labour costs, reducing public expenditures and making work more flexible. Is the dominant discourse right? What if, in reality, this economic order were no more than the implementation of a utopia - the utopia of neoliberalism - thus converted into a political problem? One that, with the aid of the economic theory that it proclaims, succeeds in conceiving of itself as the scientific description of reality?

Da se citiram sa komšijskog mesta:

 

Ne bi trebalo na situaciju gledati kroz rigidne ideološke naočare. Treba primeniti jedan kritično-naučni pristup i reći da danas imamo miks i fluks elemenata i društvenih odnosa robovlasništva, feudalizma, kapitalizma, socijalizma, u zavisnosti od geografske lokacije i položaja države i privrede u regionalnim i svetskim okvirima.

 

 

- Robovlasništvo: dugo radno vreme i eksploatacija u užasnim radnim uslovima za jako malu platu, 

- Feudalizam: disperzija moći u vidu prebacivanja autoriteta sa vlade na privatni autoritet vlasnika/ca, sudstvo i zakonodavstvo nalik feudalnom, lični odnosi dominacije na radnom mestu

- Kapitalizam: najamni rad, privatno, javno i državno vlasništvo nad produktivnim asetima, tržišna konkurencija, intenzivan umesto ekstenzivnog privrednog rasta, slaba do nikakva ekološka regulativa, nesigurni/prekarijatski radni odnosi, kronizam i korumpiranost, socijalizacija gubitaka, saturacija buržoaskim vrednostima od dna ka vrhu društva, pravna država i vladavina prava

- Socijalizam: skraćivanje radnog vremena, socijalizacija viškova stvorene vrednosti/profita koji se koriste za finansiranje države blagostanja, briga za životnu sredinu, sindikati

 

 

Sve u svemu, jedan kupus.

 

[eumeswil]

Gaj Stending o rentijerskom kapitalizmu.

 

 

We live in the age of rentier capitalism. It is the crisis point of the Global Transformation, during which claims made for capitalism have been wholly undermined by a developing system that is radically different from what its advocates say. They assert a belief in ‘free markets’ and want us to believe that they are extending them. That is untrue. Today we have a most unfree market system.
 

How can politicians say we have a free market system when patents guarantee monopoly incomes for 20 years, preventing anyone from competing? How can they claim there are free markets when copyright rules give guaranteed income for 70 years after a person’s death? Far from trying to stop these and other negations of free markets, governments are creating rules that encourage them.
 

The twentieth-century income distribution system has broken down. Since the 1980s, the share of income going to labour has shrunk in most economically significant countries. Real wages on average have stagnated or fallen. Today, a tiny minority of people and corporations are accumulating vast wealth, not from ‘hard work’ or productive activity, but from rental income.
 

‘Rentiers’ derive income from possession of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, minerals or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’; capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant position); income from subsidies; and income of financial intermediaries derived from third-party transactions.

 

 

Standing shows in relentless detail how the institutional architecture of modern capitalism is geared to benefit rentiers. When cancer drugs are overpriced, it’s because monopolies in the form of patents are granted to private “owners” of inventions, who get rent from their manufacture. When governments break trade agreements, they can be sued, generating income for the litigating company. When you use Airbnb, you’re not part of the sharing economy but of “platform capitalism”, a term Standing uses to describe how digital platforms act as labour brokers, extracting rent from every transaction (often 20%, sometimes more). These and other new technologies have enabled the outsourcing and offshoring of production, ever greater capital mobility, and make corporations more fluid and flexible. Unlike in the past, power today lies not with corporations that control the means of production, but with those that control the “technological apparatus”.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/26/the-corruption-of-capitalism-guy-standing-review-why-rentiers-thrive-and-work-does-not-pay

 

 

 

     

[noskich]

Miki, ovo je ponovljen moj post, sa prethodne strane, ali neka, vazan je, treba ga ponavljati dok ne udje u glavu!

 

 

 

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/lies-of-global-capitalism-guy-standing

 

1. The first lie is the claim that global capitalism is based on free markets.Without hyperbole, it can be said that what has been constructed is the most unfree market system ever. Thus, intellectual property has become a prime source of rental income, through market power created by the spread of trademarks (crucial for branding), copyright, design rights, geographical indications, trade secrets and, above all, patents.

Knowledge and technology-intensive industries, which now account for over 30% of global output, are gaining as much or more in rental income from intellectual property rights as from the production of goods or services. This represents a political choice by governments around the world to grant monopolies on knowledge to private interests, allowing them to restrict public access to knowledge and to raise the price of obtaining it, or of the products and services embodying it. Not for nothing did Thomas Jefferson say that ideas should not be the subject of property.

2. The second lie is that strong intellectual property rights are required to encourage and reward the risks of investment in research and development. Yet it is the public, ordinary taxpayers, who bear the cost of much of that investment. A lot of corporate cash cows derive from publicly funded research, in public universities or institutions, or through subsidies and tax breaks. Moreover, most innovations that yield large returns in rental income to companies or individuals are the result of a series of ideas and experiments attributable to many individuals or groups who go unrewarded. And many patents are filed to block competition or head off lawsuits, and are not intended to be exploited for production.

3. The third lie is that strengthening property rights is good for growth. On the contrary, by increasing inequality and distorting consumption patterns, it has hindered growth and made the growth that has occurred less sustainable. Slow and unstable growth builds up economic frustration for millions, not to mention the political risks that come with it.

4. The fourth is that rising profits reflect managerial efficiency and a return to risk-taking. In reality, the increased profit share has gone mainly to those receiving rental income, much of it linked to financial assets.

5. “Work is the best route out of poverty.” This is the fifth and politically most important lie. For millions of people in the precariat, it's a sick joke.

 

Ovo ti je isto kao u Srbiji kad seljaci proizvode hranu, ali glavni kajmak skidaju nakupci i prekupci. Najlagodnije zive presipaci iz supljeg u prazno, spekulanti, a najveci medju njima manipulisu 'trzistem' kako im se cefne.

 

[eumeswil]

Veblen o rentijerima.
 

 

 

Significance of Veblen for Today
 

As the heirs to classical political economy and the German historical school, the American institutionalists retained rent theory and its corollary idea of unearned income. More than any other institutionalist, Veblen emphasized the dynamics of banks financing real estate speculation and Wall Street maneuvering to organize monopolies and trusts. Yet despite the popularity of his writings with the reading public, his contribution has remained isolated from the academic mainstream, and he did not leave a “school.” The rentier strategy has been to make rent extraction invisible, not the center of attention it occupied in classical political economy. One barely sees today a quantification of the degree to which overhead charges for rent, insurance and interest are rising above the cost of production, even as this prices financialized economies out of world markets.
 

The narrowing of Chicago-style monetarism and neoliberalism has left the economics discipline in much the state that Max Planck applied to physics from Maxwell to Einstein: Progress occurs one funeral at a time. The old conservatives die off, freeing the way for more progressive successors to take the steering wheel. But what makes today’s economics different is that it actually would help to look backward, to the epoch before the financial sector and its allied rentier interests hijacked the discipline. The most systematic analysis of this process was that of Veblen nearly a century ago. It remains sufficiently relevant that Marxists and more heterodox critics have incorporated his theorizing into their worldview.

[eumeswil]

 

 

http://davidharvey.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/slide.pdf

 

 

Ja bih možda umesto ""industrial profit" upotrebio precizniji termin "producer's profit" ili "direct producer's profit".

[eumeswil]

Btw, jesu Selakovićevi notari rentijerski kapitalisti?

[eumeswil]

Karl Polanyi

 

 

Karl Polanyi changes the whole concept of the market, in my reading in any case, by talking about the market society. Polanyi reset the terms of the argument. It wasn’t just about whether markets were more efficient economically, it was about the human and environmental costs of allowing people and nature to be included as parts of the production process within the market economy. Karl Polanyi gave us a set of philosophical issues that we’re still wrestling with today. Are we content to allow people to become ever more incorporated into the market society if we can show that it’s not necessarily good for them? Are we comfortable in allowing more of the environment to be incorporated into a market society if we can show that it’s not good for the environment?

 

“Polanyi talked in really compelling terms about fictitious commodification. He was worried that things were being put up for sale when they had an essence before their marketised form. Think of labour markets. We all exist within labour markets of one form or another, we’ve become more and more familiar with using the language of labour markets, but there is a non-commodified essence to the human form before it becomes labour. We’re just people and we have needs as people. Those needs as people might very well clash with the needs that we have to demonstrate as labour.
 

“The BMJ [british Medical Journal] has, for example, documented a whole catalogue of new psychological illnesses over the last 10 or 20 years that come with new forms of work. So as the labour market makes more and more demands of us, the less and less able we are to function as human beings; we lose some of that essential human essence.
 

“We can tell the same story about the environment and the commodification of nature. Polanyi now allows us to have a conceptual language of the economy to take these things seriously and to challenge some of the certainties with which politicians present the case for more and more market.”

 

[eumeswil]

 

The Only Thing, Historically, That's Curbed Inequality: Catastrophe

 

Plagues, revolutions, massive wars, collapsed states—these are what reliably reduce economic disparities.

 

[eumeswil]

Jeste čuli za ovog Kristijana Fuksa, teoritičara medija, komunikacija i digitalnog kapitalizma, deluje hardkor.

https://www.westminster.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/directory/fuchs-christian

 

 

Christian Fuchs is Professor at the University of Westminster’s Communication and Media Research Institute. He is author of Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media (Routledge, 2015), Social Media: A Critical Introduction (Sage, 2014), OccupyMedia! The Occupy Movement and Social Media in Crisis Capitalism (Zero Books, 2014), Digital Labour and Karl Marx (Routledge, 2014), Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies (Routledge, 2011), and Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age (Routledge, 2008). He edits the open access journal tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique.
 

Christian Fuchs is Professor at, and the Director of, the Communication and Media Research Institute. He is also Director of the Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies.

His fields of expertise are critical digital & social media studies, Internet & society, political economy of media and communication, information society theory, social theory and critical theory.

  

[eumeswil]

Moji razgovori s ćerkom o ekonomiji

 

Nejednakost kao samoobnavljajuća ideologija

Kadа sam se osvrnuo na sveštenstvo i njegovu ulogu, rekao sam da ono funkcioniše stvarajući ideologije koje legalizuju nejednaku i neravnopravnu raspodelu viška u očima svih – i onih koji imaju, i onih koji nemaju. Ono funkcioniše delotvorno, na nivou na kom stvara mrežu verovanja, nešto poput mitologije koja pomaže u reprodukciji viška i njegove neravnopravne raspodele.
 

Ako o tome razmisliš, videćeš da se ništa ne reprodukuje lakše od ubeđenja bogatih da su „oni dostojni“ onoga što im pripada. Od malih nogu sistematski ubeđuješ sebe (kao i sva deca) da ti tvoje igračke, tvoja odeća, tvoja kuća po svakom pravu pripadaju. Naš mozak automatski smatra: „Imam X“ = „X mi pripada“. To je psihološka osnova na kojoj se temelji ideološki proces koji ubeđuje one što imaju moć i bogatstvo (uglavnom su to iste osobe) da je „ispravno“, „pravedno“ i „neophodno“ da oni imaju mnogo, a da „oni drugi“ imaju mnogo manje.
 

Nemoj im to uzimati za zlo. Nezamislivo je koliko je lako ubediti sebe da je raspodela koju primećujemo, pogotovo kad nam ide u prilog, „logična“, „prirodna“ i „pravedna“. Kad osetiš da si spremna da podlegneš takvim mislima, seti se onog što smo govorili na početku: kako je, uprkos tome što se sve bebe rađaju podjednako golišave, nekoj od te dece predodređeno da budu odenuta u preskupa odelca, dok su druga osuđena na glad, eksploataciju i bedu. Sačuvaj u svojoj duši odbojnost prema takvoj stvarnosti kao jedino „logičnoj“, „prirodnoj“ i „pravednoj“.

 

[eumeswil]

Economists versus the Economy

by Robert Skidelsky

 

 

What unites the great economists, and many other good ones, is a broad education and outlook. This gives them access to many different ways of understanding the economy. The giants of earlier generations knew a lot of things besides economics. Keynes graduated in mathematics, but was steeped in the classics (and studied economics for less than a year before starting to teach it). Schumpeter got his PhD in law; Hayek’s were in law and political science, and he also studied philosophy, psychology, and brain anatomy.

 

Today’s professional economists, by contrast, have studied almost nothing but economics. They don’t even read the classics of their own discipline. Economic history comes, if at all, from data sets. Philosophy, which could teach them about the limits of the economic method, is a closed book. Mathematics, demanding and seductive, has monopolized their mental horizons. The economists are the idiots savants of our time.

 

[eumeswil]

Wolfgang Streeck
 

​Before capitalism will go to hell, it will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around, as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the way.”

...

“You look out here,” He gestures out of the windows of the National Gallery, at the domes and columns of Trafalgar Square, “And it’s a second Rome. You walk through the streets at night and you say, ‘My God, yes: this is what an empire looks like’

Edited March 21, 2017 by miki.bg

[eumeswil]

Capitalism Will Shrink Inequality. In Fact, It's Happening.

 

 

Does capitalist economic growth lead to greater inequality, or less? The mid-20th-century economist Simon Kuznets believed that at first, industrialization would lead to greater inequality as a few pioneering entrepreneurs and workers moved to the cities where the growth was happening. But as rural areas emptied out and the economy matured, he said, inequality would fall. This prediction contradicted Marxist ideas, which envisioned a capitalist class steadily immiserating the workers of the world. The solution to the problems of capitalist growth, Kuznets asserted, was more capitalist growth.

 

 Sve go stručnjak do stručnjaka, ko li ih samo uzgaja da mi je znati.

Edited March 26, 2017 by miki.bg

[eumeswil]

Zombie Marx
 

If we are to engage in these ways with modern economics, what, if anything, makes our analysis distinctively Marxist? It is the two-fold project behind Capital as a critique of political economy: first to demonstrate the social preconditions that lie beneath the concepts of political economy, and especially their dependence on class relationships; and second, to demonstrate these social relations as historical, not eternal.

These two strands of Marx’s thought are as valid as ever. The way to apply them today is not to maintain the form and content of Capital as a complete, separate way to approach economics, as if we are superior because we begin from superior principles. Instead, I think it is to approach modern economics as we find it and ask the same kinds of critical questions: what are the social conditions that make economic phenomena appear the way they do? It is to deal not only, not even mainly, with economic high theory, but also with the applied economics produced every day in the reports and statements of central banks, Treasuries, the IMF, etc., and ask, what are the implicit class relations here? Why are these the driving issues at this point in history? What are the deeper social contradictions lying behind them? The pursuit of a separate system of economics as something wholly other from mainstream economics isolates us from the political and ideological space where these things take place: better, instead, to fight from the inside, to make clear the social and political content of the categories.

As undead Marxes go, I would rather have the kind of Marx in Joan Robinson’s bones than either a Frankenstein Marx pieced together from scraps of quotations, or a Zombie Marx, embalmed in the 1860s and reanimated whole. That is a spirit that might haunt again.

 

[eumeswil]

The Hidden Monopolies That Raise Drug Prices

 

How pharmacy benefit managers morphed from processors to predators

David Dayen
March 28, 2017