Jamie Merchant
@pathtopraxis
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Rock over London, rock on Chicago
Chicago, IL
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coming August 2024 to bookstores near you!
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In the controversy around Modern Monetary Theory, both its advocates and its critics (for the most part) take MMT at face value as a theory of money, and so go back and forth about whether it gets money right. What they both miss is that MMT is really a theory of the state.
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Mike Davis recently said we are afflicted by a "ruling class brain tumour." This essay basically tries to explain where the tumour came from, what are the political-economic contradictions driving it, and why the elites are not gonna figure it out.
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MMT is a state theory of money, but what is needed now, as the title of my essay suggests, is a money theory of the state: how money power both makes imperialism possible *and* subordinates and constrains the empire itself.
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Again: Bidenomics is not meant to empower the U.S. working class, expand manufacturing employment, or raise workers' standard of living; first and foremost it's meant to be a geoeconomic weapon in the new inter-imperial competition. Any domestic effects are secondary.
Despite all the talk of a manufacturing revival under Biden, IRA, EV, batteries etc
@BLS_gov
projects US manufacturing sector to lose 113k jobs over the 2022−32 decade as manufacturers continue to automate processes -> share will further decline
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i want to write an essay on why liberalism seems incapable of producing halfway decent intellectuals anymore. it used to have formidable figures like Arendt, Aron, Lippmann, Weber, etc., and now there's just like, what, Steven Pinker? Jordan Peterson? Michael Lind?
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"It's impossible to write history without using a whole range of concepts directly or indirectly linked to Marx's thought...One might even wonder what difference there could ultimately be between being a historian and being a Marxist."
- Foucault
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just finished The Dispossessed. thinking about how different my life would have been if we were assigned that to read in high school instead of The Fountainhead
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A socialist left, if there is to be one, will take the system as a whole, state and civil society as a global relationship, as its horizon, rather than presupposing the epistemology of the capitalist state as its point of departure.
[really sorry about this thread]
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But capital is a transnational form of society, and its contradictions and irrationalities are equally transnational. The "mental block" that MMT ppl are constantly enjoining us to overcome is not just some subjective error, but is the irrationalism of capital itself.
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The coming crash of the "AI" hype wave is gonna be historic and brutal. really can't recommend
@edzitron
's newsletter enough
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finally getting around to a book that amid the current inflationary crisis, moral panic, and hunt for scapegoats seems more relevant than ever
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weird it’s almost as if there’s some kind of inherent crisis tendency that governments can temporarily stabilize only to make the underlying problem worse in the long run
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this kind of mindless nationalist militarism is exactly what C. Wright Mills used to call “crackpot realism:” never question or analyze the causes of tension, just accept it as an existential fact in order to justify “inevitable” military conflicts.
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“In practice, adults from all walks — Republicans, Democrats, the media and university administrations — are exhibiting traits of hysteria and dogmatism they deplore in the young. It should come as no surprise that the protests are getting angrier.”
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the World Health Organization is a Chinese psy-op, of course. just normal brain stuff.
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Ultimately, the intellectual and political project of MMT reduces to a form of Keynesianism as
@GeoffPMann
understands it: an internal critique of liberalism which takes the national state as the only institution capable of resolving the antagonisms inherent in the market.
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Worth noting that virtually all the things Ho-Fung Hung points to here as signs of impending doom -- zombie firms, rising debt-to-profit ratios, a lack of productive investment, and security displacing economics -- all apply w/ equal force to the U.S.
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Discipline & Punish gets all the attention for its famous opening, but the opening of the Order of Things, with the Emperor’s Encyclopedia from Borges & the close reading of de Vazquez’s Las Meninas, is hype af. one of the most badass intros to a work of theory imo
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If Levi-Strauss was right that his project was basically Kantianism without the transcendental subject, then the whole 30-year reign of post-structural, post-subject theory was just a series of footnotes to LS, and more fundamentally, to Kant.
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@Yutopia_ba
a philosophy and political theory that was very amenable to critical intellectuals during the neoliberal period. she was an ardent anti-communist who affirmed civil society against the state and argued for politics as its own ontological reality not reducible to economics etc
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But the politics of MMT are innocent of any materialist analysis or assumptions, amounting to a kind of repetition compulsion that can only denounce the received wisdom, over and over again, instead of analyzing it. So it's totally idealist.
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as the global economy deteriorates, inter-imperial economic warfare will steadily worsen, which will accelerate the deterioration. This is happening not b/c of some policy failure, but b/c in capitalism the "solution," raising productivity, is also the source of the problem.
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Important Bloomberg article on worsening global trade constraints. It is becoming more and more likely that world moves towards a manufacturing over-production crisis. Given the current structure of its economy, China effectively...
via
@economics
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value is at its core a speculative category in the same way that Freud's unconscious is, and its explanatory & critical force works in a similar way
What Marxist take will have you like this?
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The capitalist state is not defined by the direct rule of financial/commercial interests, but rather by the radical, formal separation between state and market, public and private, that it presupposes, and that allows it to go to work on a purely technical, abstract "economy."
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As Knapp himself put it in The State Theory of Money, the fiscal and monetary governance of enlightened officials can put an end to "the confusions and errors of the class struggle." The rationality of MMT stands and falls with the alleged rationality of the nation state.
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A materialist analysis would look at the social and historical foundations of the ideology of sound finance etc., and would explain and critique its persistence by locating its plausibility to ppl in the way this form of society reproduces itself.
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...in large part b/c banks also issue the currency, so the gov. is not the sole issuer of it. And so on. But MMT doesn't worry about this, b/c as the founder of chartalism, Friedrich Knapp, put it over a century ago, the monetary system itself is an administrative phenomenon.
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like a super-condensed neutron star expressing all the pathologies and contradictions of American liberalism, packed into a couple sentences
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b/c it is from the standpoint of the state, this vision of government as the universal arbiter that can resolve the problems of a confused and conflictual civil society purely by technical means rules out a critical, historical analysis of the form of the state itself.
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since apparently people wanna talk about MMT again I'll go ahead and tap the sign
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...but if this is the extent of the political analysis, then it obscures an understanding of the how the neutral, abstract form of the capitalist state, with its scientific expression as economics, itself expresses the global and irrational class rule of capital.
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Phil Mirowski is forever writing books that chide the left for not taking economics seriously and dismissing it as a ridiculous quack science that then go on to exhaustively demonstrate how economics is indeed a ridiculous quack science
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Most commentary on the return of industrial policy in the U.S. sees it as either a national move beyond neoliberalism, or a continuation of it by other means. In contrast, this is an analysis of its causes and consequences as a global phenomenon.
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Outstanding ep here covering a lot of ground. But I was struck by how the central problem driving the entire program of Bidenomics and the escalation with China, namely a global crisis of capital accumulation, was only briefly mentioned by
@DanielaGabor
at the very end. [1]
This new
@thedigradio
ep is a really important discussion and debate on Bidenomics—the new industrial policy, the energy transition, the New Cold War with China, and more. With
@DanielaGabor
,
@tedfertik
, and
@70sBachchan
.
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MMT points out that a gov. issuing & borrowing in its own currency can't run out of money and need only focus on inflation as its spends to full employment & price stability; its critics object that this is misleading b/c the same gov. can't control its currency's exchange value,
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Through rational statecraft, and if they just jettison the outdated nostrums of "sound finance" and debt/deficit hysteria, politicians and officials could run the economy in an equilibrium based on full employment and price stability. The trick is to overcome this mental block.
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quite stunning, tbh. the U.S. turning itself into a global pariah state at a rapid clip
For the first time, more people in Southeast Asia prefer that their countries align with China over the U.S., according to findings of an influential new survey published by the
@ISEAS
in Singapore.
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The dispute, almost entirely technical, revolves around concepts like chartal money, functional finance, & sectoral accounting, and whether their interpretation by MMT writers can justify the policies they support without running into serious economic difficulties.
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A gov. that has "monetary sovereignty" can, in principle, construct the legal and institutional framework for its currency so that exchange rates and inflation are not a problem. This is where capital controls, financial regulation, and the jobs guarantee all come in.
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“The percentage of economic output that workers receive as compensation has been shrinking for decades, not just in the US but worldwide, and no one knows why.”
who’s gonna tell him
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U.S. total industrial production has basically flatlined since January 2022…
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what not to read to understand the history of Western capitalism
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as the world drifts ever further into belligerent nationalism, it's important to recall that ten years ago Occupiers in the US, Arab Spring revolutionaries, and the European Movement of the Squares were all expressing solidarity with each other as they faced columns of riot cops.
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The U.S. discussion around "Bidenomics" focuses on its domestic part over its foreign policy side. In reality this gets it backwards: the new industrial policy is a byproduct of the U.S.'s broader campaign to kneecap its competitors, prompted by an expiring global system.
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i feel like people want keynes to be this iconoclastic cool political writer who attacks outdated dogmas of economics and politics etc. and ignore the cringe technocratic fantasies that drive it, but they are both there
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MMT understands the main problem to be the outdated dogma of sound finance economics, which is fueled and propagated by powerful interests who have a chokehold on the government. The power of money over politics is of course real...
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With the passing of the left-populist moment (if indeed that's what is happening now) it might be useful to take stock of how it was supposed to work as a theory. This was the object of Laclau and Mouffe's influential work, which seemed to many for a time to be right.
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Great overview from
@adam_tooze
on the sentimental education of two technocrats whose task is now to bury the policy consensus they helped install in the first place.
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future readers of Marx will be relieved to learn that his whole complex, multi-level account of how value relationships translate into the ordinary perception of prices can simply be replaced with some contemporary management theory
contrary to common misconception, the Industrial Revolution was actually about product differentiation, branding, McKinsey consultants
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@gabrielwinant
think it fits well in the broader pattern of unexpectedly good domestically & atrocious internationally
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vibes are bleak right now but if you wanna dig into some analysis join this convo tomorrow night on the regime formerly known as neoliberalism and its afterlives, with
@nikhil_palsingh
@redmaterialism
@brouillettese
& myself
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In the coming months and years the fate of human civilization will hinge on whether the fragments of the left spread across the world can somehow act to arrest the spiraling vortex of nationalist, neo-imperial aggression that threatens to engulf us all.
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@re_colston
there are a lot of epistemological similarities between the concepts of value & the unconscious imo
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The increasingly sterile debate about whether MMT is right or wrong is pointless, because it is already the organic ideology of the post-neoliberal crisis state. The “monetary sovereign” has to spend like mad to stabilize the monetary system, so ideas are adapted to this reality.
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the US state - at least the Dem wing of it - has entered an "in the long run we are all dead" Keynesian moment: act now & deal with the consequences later. the question now is: will it extend to the main, underlying problem of chronically anemic labor productivity growth? can it?
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ppl rightfully puzzled by Harvard economists equivocating around monetary & fiscal policy, especially when they claim to recognize secular stagnation etc. Some of this is status anxiety & gatekeeping for sure, but it also reflects a deepening incoherence in the U.S. state itself
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fun fact: MMT was “conceived” by hedge fund guy Warren Mosler in convos with Donald Rumsfeld and Art Laffer, the Rasputin of Reaganism. i’m going thru Stephanie Kelton’s new book & she doesn’t mention this when she talks about its origins, for some reason
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in an otherwise miserable timeline it’s a true pleasure to get to read two outstanding new books on the political economy of automation by my friends
@abenanav
and not-on—tweeps-rn Jason Smith (
@profitratedown
). hoping to write up some critical notes on both soon
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don’t really know that much about NJR beyond his dumb opinions about Marx, but if you see socialism as mainly a matter of having a particular moral attitude or ethical code, then it’s not that surprising when your “socialism” just turns out to be small business petty tyranny
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when I arrived in grad school in 2007 with Marxist sympathies I was told that such ideas were passé and that the new, sophisticated, cool thing was to try to build a critical theory out of language. it sounded implausible but I was like, OK w/e let's see how it goes
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solid thread
When they write the history of this era, one of the strangest chapters will be devoted to Uber, a company that was never, ever going to be profitable, which existed solely to launder billions for the Saudi royals.
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Paul Mattick's take on Bidenomics as a response to the legitimation crisis of the moment
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The stunning impact of Bidenomics: adjusted for inflation, U.S. private investment in capital goods has been collapsing without interruption since 2017
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the main reason academics lean left - now as always - is simple: a basic understanding of history encourages a critical attitude toward the status quo, b/c it reveals the present as the outcome of a struggle for power. file it under the cultural contradictions of capitalism.
Later this week, I'll be discussing the question of how to increase viewpoint diversity in academia. I have some ideas, but meanwhile, I'd love to hear yours. Thoughts?
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@lib_crusher
the transformation of Tucker Carlson from bowtie-wearing dweeb getting owned by liberals to the post-neoliberal reincarnation of Father Coughlin is certainly one of the strangest careers of our time
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one of the greatest pleasures of finishing a writing project - besides the fact that the torment of actually writing it is over - is you can read whatever you want again
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In the end, the only way out is a transnational strategy for labor that connects the interests of workers in the Global North with those in the Global South, articulated through a language of power about our shared, common fate. There are no shortcuts.
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this makes some of the right connections b/t expanding state involvement in the economy and stagnating growth, but doesn’t get why it’s happening in the first place: private capitalism has become so weak it can only survive thru gov support
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quite a sharp little book. notably, Veblen’s acct of business cycles is based on the aging out of industrial capacity when new, more efficient tech/firms are introduced, and the competitive pressures that creates - a market-based theory Brenner tried to present as “marxian”
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It's time to
#Raisethewage
for over 200,000 workers in Cook County. A living wage is a right, not a privilege
@PplsActionInst
@RoseAnnDeMoro
67% of low-wage workers in Cook County are women; more than 1/2 are people of color. Poverty wages are racist and sexist
#RaiseTheWage
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for Yglesias, the desires of "society" = the desires of its most powerful economic and political interests. the liberalism of previous eras at least claimed to be skeptical of authority, now liberals openly admit their ideas are just mystifications of ruling class interests
I think a big part of the "crisis" in the liberal arts comes down to the fact that the people who teach these classes no longer want to do what society wants them to do and expound on the greatness of our civilization.
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new Cold War, new global Volcker shock
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Pretty excited to announce I've accepted a book contract with the London-based publisher Reaktion Books as the next addition to its "Field Notes" series, edited by Paul Mattick. It's tentatively titled "No Going Back: a Critique of Economic Nationalism." Should be fun.
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Michael Lind is a "bourgeois Marxist" in the way Max Weber was: he cloaks a moralizing yearning for national solidarity -- i.e., class collaboration -- in the language of class conflict. basically just garden-variety liberalism that tries to be a little more serious about power.
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can confidently state that reading Ballard’s “High Rise” while living in a high rise during a lockdown in which you can’t do anything but dwell on your slowly eroding sense of reality does indeed hit different
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Thanks to everyone who read & responded thoughtfully to this. It's a (very rough & condensed) summary of a chapter in a book I'm working on, so it leaves out a lot. But I'll try to address the extant responses here.
In the controversy around Modern Monetary Theory, both its advocates and its critics (for the most part) take MMT at face value as a theory of money, and so go back and forth about whether it gets money right. What they both miss is that MMT is really a theory of the state.
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The result is a kind of schizo state, ideologically incoherent and increasingly incapable of governing. The U.S. comes to resemble more than anything else a world central bank with a country vestigially attached to it.
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It's up to us to articulate a vision of the future and organize & move the masses to fight for it. And, as Mike D. also said, or at least implied, this has to be based on a global analysis. This is the only way we'll prevent the worst from coming to pass.
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Editor to designer: "For this important article about China what I want is a header image suggestive of an angry Communist panda"
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imagine just embarrassing yourself like this on here every damn day like it’s nothing
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Globally, the dollar’s main function is to uphold this transnational class structure, which is the real referent when the Fed or Treasury officials talk, in earnest, about the need to “safeguard the stability of the financial and monetary systems.”
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this is from the review of the newest Foucault-caused-neoliberalism book. but like, did these guys even read those lectures? do they think that Foucault’s description of neoliberal governmentality as a form of biopolitics is an *endorsement* of it?
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the hidden injuries of class. i grew up poor, and feel like the nervousness and barely subdued state of panic of that experience will permanently be burned into my body and mind, like a reflex
I spent most of my 20s and 30s really broke and precariously employed so I was always like 2 steps from having to take deep breaths to calm down about money worries. I think that slowly started to end maybe 3-4 years ago. It's very easy to flip back to that headspace tho like for
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Why does it have to? For better or worse the dollar is world money, so the U.S. gov has to provide enough currency and debt to satisfy the world demand for dollar assets. It doesn’t borrow or tax to spend; it spends and borrows in order to keep the global monetary system alive.
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The growing scale and intensity of these policies over the last decade is why MMT has only recently come to be taken seriously, despite having been around since the early 90s. The objective, structural context of policy has changed, so it no longer appears as crackpot nonsense.
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at a deep level i think the automaton quality of US liberal militarists is probably an unconscious symptom of the outsize proportion of military Keynesianism in the economy, unproductive but locked in thru a bloated, gigantic global apparatus running on autopilot
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Great stuff from
@EricLevitz
& glad to see the market socialism debate picking up again. But I think we should be skeptical of that concept, b/c it overlooks the actual forces fusing the U.S. state with finance into a new administrative monstrosity. (1/3)
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as others have said, everyone protesting in Russia today is an absolute hero
About 1,000 people at this anti war protest right now. These are taking away protesters indiscriminately. I was briefly detained even though I was saying repeatedly I’m a journalist.
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BJP getting washed in Kerala by communists, love to see it
The DSA IC congratulates the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and its coalition partners in the Left Democratic Front on their historic victory in the Kerala state elections, with Keralites re-electing the Communist-led coalition while BJP won zero seats in the state assembly.
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The rhymes of the period from the 1890s to 1914 with the present are unmistakable. At the same time, there are important differences, like the degree and structure of global economic interdependence, that still give us some time. Let's not waste it.
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