DISPATCHES FROM MOON OF ALABAMA, BY "B"
This article is part of an ongoing series of dispatches from Moon of Alabama
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n the same day the British Labour party announced the election of a center-rightt new party leader to replace the much denigrated socialist Jeremy Corbyn, the Financial Times(!) calls for the socialist policies Corbyn had planned to implement.
From today's FT editorial headlined:
Virus lays bare the frailty of the social contract (also here)
If there is a silver lining to the Covid-19 pandemic, it is that it has injected a sense of togetherness into polarised societies. But the virus, and the economic lockdowns needed to combat it, also shine a glaring light on existing inequalities — and even create new ones. Beyond defeating the disease, the great test all countries will soon face is whether current feelings of common purpose will shape society after the crisis. As western leaders learnt in the Great Depression, and after the second world war, to demand collective sacrifice you must offer a social contract that benefits everyone.
...
Radical reforms - reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades - will need to put on the table. Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investments rather than liabilities, and look for ways to make labour markets less insecure. Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the elderly (1) and wealthy in question. Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.
Amen to that.
There was a time when I regularly bought the FT weekend edition to read the economic discussions in it. The weekend edition also has a section that is titled "How to spend it". The newest luxury cars are tested and the greatest estates are discussed in it. I never had a craving to buy any of the things that section promoted. I thought that the snobbish section title was probably meant to be ironic.
Now the FT has finally found the right content for that section.
This editorial is a sea change. We will quite soon experience more of it.
Notes
(1) While we agree with the content of this post-as usual—we find that MoA is missing an important point. The original quote, "the privileges of the elderly and wealthy in question" packs a huge error and conceptual injustice. First, while it is proper and long overdue to speak of ending the privileges of the wealthy—not to mention the privileges of the super wealthy elites (0.0001%)—the same cannot be said about "the elderly", as this is category comprising some of the rich and many more of the most poor and vulnerable in capitalist societies. What is needed is to approach this issue from a class perspective, according to income levels and personal wealth. Obviously, to a bourgeois writer, that kind of distinction does not come naturally. Overall, we think MoA is much too optimistic about this FT editorial.
COMMENTS SAMPLER
Actually the FT has always had a rather reasonable, rational attitude, as opposed to the right-wing dross you get from most of the British press. It's only a pity that it's nearly all behind a paywall, and there's not enough of interest for me to pay a subscription. So it's less of a sea-change than one might imagine.
Posted by: Laguerre | Apr 4 2020 18:06 utc | 3
re vk 2
Corona is a far more radical crisis than any we've seen for many year. I wouldn't be confident in saying how things are going to go. The main issue likely to be affected is inequality, the lowering of which was a great consequence of the post-war period.
Posted by: Laguerre | Apr 4 2020 18:17 utc | 5
Bravo for The Financial Times. Common sense and the recognition of reality appears to have finally, if not belatedly, made some inroad into the thinking of that fossilized bastion of upper class conservatism in the UK. Now all we need is some sort of similar action in the boot licking US main stream media. But don't hold your breath. As readers of MoA know, 2020 is a presidential election year and the two leading candidates consist of a serial liar, hypocrite, and intellectual moron, and a dementia plagued nincompoop who in couple of years will probably be a candidate for a rest home. In short, logic and reality have yet to cross the pond westward to the fossilized political elites that reside here.
Posted by: GeorgeV | Apr 4 2020 18:20 utc | 6
I posted this link on an earlier thread. This might be a more appropriate place for it:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/why-coronavirus-could-spark-capitalist-supernova/
Incidentally it speaks volumes for b's essential generosity of heart that he calls Sir Keir Starmer- the Director of Public Prosecutions who protected at least two high profile Police murderers from justice and a member of the trilateral commission, as well as the prime mover in the betrayal of Brexit voters that led to the defeat in the 2019 General election -a member of the Centre Right. They guy is an unreconstructed Blairite and probably on the US payroll.
Posted by: bevin | Apr 4 2020 18:26 utc | 7
As to the FT is this not a Japanese owned paper? And might this not be reflected in this deviation from raw neo-liberalism?
Posted by: bevin | Apr 4 2020 18:28 utc | 8
Wow. The day after Corbyn to steps down.
https://twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/status/1246045571879706626
Posted by: mpn | Apr 4 2020 18:34 utc | 9
Here's the public letter by illustrious European scholars (in Italian):
To give my honest opinion, this letter is astonishing. Astonishing by the level of intellectual decay of the European intelligentsia. It's like, they can't even perceive the immediate reality surrounding them, completely delirious.
And, of course, their practical solution to all the problems they list is simple more money. More of the same.
I remember when I first begun to read foreign media (both mainstream and alternative). I had immense expectations: as a third worlder, I thought I had a lot to learn and very little to contribute to what people from the First World would publish, post and comment. I was completly wrong.
--//--
@ Posted by: GeorgeV | Apr 4 2020 18:20 utc | 6
I don't think the FT did "common sense". They always were the vehicle of the class-conscious bourgeoisie and, as such, they always had a less filtered editorial line.
Their editorial simply states the obvious: if the present dominant system wants to remain so, it must restore its hegemony. And hegemony requires both brute force (monopoly of violence) - which they already have, and consensus (i.e. the dominated want the dominant to dominate them). Consensus requires, evidently, the proverbial carrot.
Doesn't mean it will happen.
"b" is Moon of Alabama's founding (and chief) editor. This site's purpose is to discuss politics, economics, philosophy and blogger Billmon's Whiskey Bar writings. Moon Of Alabama was opened as an independent, open forum for members of the Whiskey Bar community. Bernhard )"b") started and still runs the site. Once in a while you will also find posts and art from regular commentators. You can reach the current administrator of this site by emailing Bernhard at MoonofA@aol.com.
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There are a lot of reasons the reforms the FT (and many others) are promoting won't happen and/or won't work. The explanation is too long to put it here, but I'll just highlight the main ones:
1) just because capitalism was able to reform once, it doesn't mean it has an infinite and indefinite capacity to do so. History doesn't repeat itself;
2) the years that followed the 1929 depression were sui generis in History, mainly for the fact that there was a real alternative at the table - namely, socialism, led by the USSR. That alone put immense pressure on the capitalist classes in the West, as it gave the working classes unparalled leverage in class negotiations. Remember: not every war results in a war economy - after WWI, capitalism continued as usual, and would culminate with the aforementioned 1929 crisis.
3) a new technological paradigm already existed, ready to be exploited by capitalist reproduction, namely, electricity. It was all a matter of creative destruction to happen so this new technology could massify and subsititute the old productive paradigm. There's no analogous to electricity now (the capitalists are betting on: nuclear fusion, "renewable energy", gene editing, nanotechnology, quantum computing an artificial intelligence - none of them are nearly ready for capitalist exploitation as was electricity in the 1930s); in other words, creative destruction (i.e. mass extermination of other human beings and human infrastructure) will not work right now;
4) the capitalist world post-2008 is a system that is suffering from historically low profit rates. Profit rate is the lifeblood of capitalism. To compensate low profit rates, capitalism resorts to financialisation, which increases debt. High debt - specially, corporate (private) debt - means that there's a "hole" the system would've to get out before starting to invest again. That's why the USG's USD 6 trillion package didn't work, but just fuelled unemployment: business had to hoard the money to keep their debt rolling. No investment was made, and, even if the governments force the implementation of welfare states, it will be at the cost of the private sector's profit rate - it would be the euthanasia of capitalism;
5) because of financialisation, the headquarters of capitalism - also called the First World - was heavily deindustrialized. What I want to mean here is that most industry is now located in China. That means the governments of the First World are weaker than ever: even if they wanted to reindustrialize, they wouldn't be able to, at least not in the short term;
6) creative destruction is harder nowadays than in the 1940s for two reasons: a) the scale of destruction needed is bigger than ever, as capitalism is bigger than ever (because the vital space of the ex-USSR was freed up after 1991); and b) we live in a world of nuclear weapons, which elevate the level of destruction to human extinction. Put it in other words: the very concept of creative destruction is self-erasing itself, as it is converging quickly with the the act of the extermination of the homo sapiens itself.
Posted by: vk | Apr 4 2020 18:05 utc | 2