A really interesting chat between Novara's Aaaron Bastani and Mariana Mazzucato. Wise old Marxists in the audience are bound to shake their heads at the title, but what is interesting how the arguments proposed by Mazzucato - who received plaudits for her 2013 book,
The Entrepreneurial State - aren't arid wonkery and technical fixes. Okay, some of her arguments do lend themselves to such an interpetation (and indeed application), such as the state providing tax breaks or match funding to crowd private investment into strategically defined objectives. Ideas, which to be fair, aren't new and lie around in
dusty tomes of market socialism, but her robust defence of the public sector and assumption mass democratic participation has to intevene to stabilise capitalism's crisis tendencies opens up the possibility of its positive transcendence. In other words, why Mazzucato is regarded by some as the world's most dangerous economist is because her work is intellectually adjacent to Corbynomics. And Corbynism's abominable character resided in this popular democratic content. It pointed to the great unsaid: the antagonism between socialised (
and socialising) production and the private appropriation of wealth.
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Hey Phil you should lookup economist Mark Blyth. He has recently coauthored a book called "Angrynomics" talking about economic solutions for the current instability in western nations.
ReplyDeleteYes, of course, it can resolve its crises, it has continually done so, and as Marx describes, there is no reason why it cannot continue to do so.
ReplyDeleteAs Marx put it in response to Adam Smith who argued that some such denouement was inevitable - "Permanent Crises do not exist."
" Ideas, which to be fair, aren't new and lie around in dusty tomes of market socialism, but her robust defence of the public sector and assumption mass democratic participation has to intevene to stabilise capitalism's crisis tendencies opens up the possibility of its positive transcendence. In other words, why Mazzucato is regarded by some as the world's most dangerous economist is because her work is intellectually adjacent to Corbynomics."
ReplyDeleteThe trouble here is that capitalism itself outgrew the nation state more than a century ago, and any growing over of capitalism is only conceivable on an international not a national scale. Any idea based upon popular sovereignty, popular democratic control and other such vague notions, are necessarily utopian, and thereby reactionary.
Its simply the re-emergence of the debate debate over Permanent Revolution versus Socialism In One Country.
“Wise old Marxists in the audience are bound to shake their heads at the title”
ReplyDeleteIf that is the case they are not very wise or very Marxist. For one thing, empirically speaking capitalism has dealt really well with its crises, in that it hasn’t led to a collapse of the system. Ok millions may have died in wars but we still live under a capitalism of sorts, right?
And why do we live under a capitalism of sorts? Because as Marx pointed out capitalism’s crises are precisely capitalism resolving its contradictions. The crises are the way capitalism resolves its problems, which is why capitalism never looks like the economists say it should or how libertarians imagine it should be.
As for Market socialism, that is simply bourgeois ideology for the woke generation, we keep Catholicism but get rid of the Pope. No wonder Hitler could call himself a socialist when all socialism means is tinkering about with the capitalist system.
We need communism, i.e. the end of exchange. Any less and you might as well run off and join UKIP for all the difference it will make.