Radical Political Economy

Radio WNUR Chicago Political interview program This is Hell! Susan Paulson and Giorgos Kallis discuss degrowth in EU, US, and Latin America with host Chuck Mertz. Tuesday 10 November 2020, 11:10am – 12:00pm EST.
https://thisishell.com/interviews/1258-giorgos-kallis-susan-paulson

An interdisciplinary podcast featuring guests with different approaches talking about the relationships between politics and economics, and how political economy can encompass a lot more than just politics and economics.

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/introduction-to-political-economy/id1539892801

Spotify: https://podcasters.spotify.com/podcast/5xkEZXPXjJ9LR9mXfpzw8F/overview

Castbox: https://castbox.fm/channel/Introduction-to-Political-Economy-id3434950

Google: https://bit.ly/390RvA4

OXFORD TALKS online: 9 November - “Radical change without crisis, revolution, or utopia” (book talk): European Studies Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford. Albena Azmanova will discuss her new book Capitalism on Edge with Kalypso Nicolaidis, Karthik Ramanna, and Will Hutton: https://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/events/capitalism-edge-radical-change-without-crisis-revolution-or-utopia.

Les crises climatique et écologique occupent désormais le devant de la scène, mais la profondeur des questionnements nécessaires, quant à nos façons de produire, de travailler, de consommer et de nous épanouir, manque souvent à ce brouhaha médiatique. Cette anthologie, la première réunissant les principaux textes d'un des plus grands penseurs de l'écologie et du capitalisme tardif, décédé en 2007, comble ce vide. Elle offrira des repères et des perspectives solides pour les tempêtes en cours : pensée de l'autonomie et de la liberté prolongeant l'existentialisme, lecture critique des derniers avatars du capitalisme et de sa crise écosystémique. Pour Gorz, loin des mesures gestionnaires et technocratiques, l'écologie est d'emblée politique, impliquant une critique radicale des formes de domination, tant par le travail que sur la nature ou via le consumérisme. Textes rassemblés et présentés par Françoise Gollain et Willy Gianinazzi.

In the wake of the neoliberal wave, there is a continuing debate about alternatives to privatization. While there is widespread agreement among anti-privatization groups that privatization has been marked by dramatic failures and disappointments, alternatives to privatization are as diverse as traditional forms of state ownership, corporatization, and democratic control. Focus-ing on an emerging literature and drawing on the experience of low-and middle-income countries (Turkey, in particular), it appears unlikely that we can begin to offer a substantial alternative to privatization without promoting democratic control and deeper social commitment. There are two necessary, if insufficient, strategies for constructing and defending any substantial alternative based on democratic control and social commitment: 1) the building of broad political alliances; and 2) operationalizing the state as a contested space.

Many of the radical ideas of present-day opponents of the growth society build upon a rich intellectual heritage of opposition to growth, stretching back to the 1960s. What’s intriguing about the works of the past opponents of growth, the ‘old dissenters’, is that their indictment of growth doesn’t rely solely on the ‘silver bullet’ of excessive greenhouse gas emissions. This means that their intellectual arguments are more comprehensive and erudite than present-day critics who rely solely on climate change to clinch their case. This essay surveys the contributions of the most eminent of the ‘old dissenters’, in the hope that readers may acquire a more nuanced appreciation of the case against growth. The contributions surveyed are from Kenneth Boulding (1966), Garrett Hardin (1968), Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1971), Donella and Denis Meadows, Jørgen Randers and William Behrens (1972), Arne Naess (1973), Ivan Illich (1973), E.F. Schumacher (1973) and Herman Daly (1989 and 1996).

This paper uses social structures of accumulation theory in combination with Ernesto Laclau's discourse theory in order to analyze the institutional mechanisms that sustained the long economic expansion of the Spanish economy between 1995 and 2008. Productive deficiencies endogenously gave way to several trends that, despite displaying a highly contradictory character when considered in isolation, managed to coalesce into a relatively coherent whole for more than a decade, namely, a massive housing bubble, an explosion of private debt in the face of real wage stagnation, and family economies being submitted to increasing strains. Moreover, their joint occurrence prevented their inherently conflictive nature from acquiring a political expression liable to undo the institutional structure itself, so that a social order was successfully reproduced throughout the whole expansion phase.

We have been lied to about what real Pythagorean harmonics alchemy is. The lie started with Philolaus who wrote a book, even though he was not a real practitioner of the Pythagorean training, requiring five years of silence meditation as incubation. The lies in this book were then spread by Plato and Archytas and powerful lies they were! They created Western civilization which has enabled very fancy materialistic technology, at great expense to ecology and social justice around the world. Aristotle critiqued the lies spread by Plato but Aristotle did not know the real truth of Pythagorean philosophy. By then, as Dr. Peter Kingsley has pointed out, it was too late.

In fact the secret of Pythagorean alchemy was known in ancient Egypt since 2/3 was the sacred fraction there, as well as in ancient Sumeria and ancient Dravidian culture and ancient Chinese culture – going back to the original human culture, the San Bushmen from at least 70,000 years ago! Just as Pythagoras means "snake-master" so too did the San Bushmen teach that N/om as snake energy is sacred and the ancient Greeks knew this was the reproductive life force energy that is ionized into the cerebrospinal fluid. For example ejaculation is mainly lecithin and lecithin is what myelinates the neurons so that more electromagnetic charge can be stored up in the body.

And so the One was also known as the Counter-Fire that exists in the Underworld and as the pan pipes blow this creates the One as the Fire and light of the Universe. So the Pan Pipes were the original Harmonia "breathing" that feeds the spirit light energy. Or in other words the secret, as Empedocles taught, is to visualize the fire underneath the water in the body – to reverse the Tetraktys based on the complementary opposites of the Perfect Fifth and Perfect Fourth – so that more Air or Aion energy (ionized Snake kundalini) energy is created, called Qi or Prana by the ancients in China and India.

In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx wondered how it was possible for the exchange of commodities to generate so much wealth for some and so much misery for the others. A similar question now haunts our discussions of financial markets: how can the expanding trade in financial securities create such extraordinary wealth for the financiers while creating increasing vulnerability for the rest of us? Taking a leaf out of Marx's playbook, I propose in this essay to follow Moneybags to the market and consider what he finds there. In the nineteenth century, Moneybags was able to purchase labor-power at its value while somehow generating more value merely from using it; by the late twentieth century, it appears that Moneybags is similarly able, in all good conscience, to acquire other people's probability-their ability, that is, to make promises and to be believed-while somehow becoming more credible in the process.

Gramscian IPE scholarship has predominantly focused on studying capital’s power to subsume labour under different hegemonic projects. Various autonomist Marxists have recently sought to ‘voice labour’ by proposing a disruption-oriented IPE. However, this article argues that such an approach mirrors domination-oriented IPE approaches by overemphasising labour’s disruptive potentiality and by paying little attention to the historical limitations that labour faces in its own empowerment. To escape from the unilateralism of these two mutually exclusive perspectives, Gramsci’s ‘Methodology of the Subaltern’ is reviewed in order to propose a Gramscian or strategic International Political Economy of Labour. Hence, this article shows that it is possible for IPE scholars to study uneven capitalist development as the result of the agency of (dis)organised labour and thereby, to better account for the emancipatory potentiality of working class strategies in specific contexts.

While the notion of populism has gained greater conceptual clarity in the work of Ernesto Laclau, its material conditions of existence have not yet been properly theorized. In order to grasp populism’s historical specificity, an analysis of the internal dynamics of capitalism is required. A crucial distinction between Liberal and Regulated Social Structures of Accumulation (SSAs) reveals that the types of organic crisis associated with the former are conducive to populist expressions, while, regarding the latter, the opposite is the case. This claim is substantiated via exploration of the types of actors each kind of SSA empowers dur- ing the expansion phase, the nature of the systemic breakdown ensuing from each, and the mode of rupture of its associated social consensuses.

Buena parte de la Microeconomía que nos vemos obligados a impartir es errónea e interesadamente adoctrinadora.

La Teoría de la Producción es la parte de la Microeconomía que estudia el modo en que las empresas toman las decisiones acerca de cuánto producir y cómo producir. En la Economía Convencional, o Economía Burguesa, es una herramienta extremadamente útil de adoctrinamiento al servicio del Capitalismo.

En nuestra opinión, tratar de mantener la vinculación entre utilidad ordinal y Teoría de los Precios tiene beneficios ideológicos para determinados grupos: la utilidad ordinal hace inviable la comparación interpersonal de la utilidad y por tanto deja fuera de juego el tratamiento microeconómico de la redistribución de la renta, conduciendo a un criterio de eficiencia (el de Pareto), bastante estéril.

En este trabajo examinamos la deriva pseudocientífica del debate sobre la relación entre inflación y desempleo, particularmente a partir de las eminentes obras de Phillips y Friedman. Tanto la Nairu como los refinamientos posteriores de la Curva de Phillips, perpetúan el núcleo duro marginalista que subyace en la "tasa natural de desempleo". La incapacidad de encontrar una síntesis macroeconómica satisfactoria es resultado del empeño de conciliar el discurso legitimador del neoliberalismo con el funcionamiento real del sistema capitalista. La contradicción ha tratado de resolverse plagando el debate de estrategias de inmunización y falacias, que han empujado la Teoría Económica al campo de la pseudociencia.