Kapitalizam 101

“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.
 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.”

“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.”

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

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’.”

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 & Critiqu

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“.

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.

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.

 The mid-20th-century economist Simon Kuznets

Sirs je u poslednje vreme preživljavao uglavnom zahvaljujući milionskim kreditima iz investicionog fonda svog predsednika i izvršnog direktora Edvarda Lamperta, ali je prodaja opadala, kao i prihod u gotovini.

Ipak, univerzalni osnovni dohodak je ćorsokak. Najčešće korišćeni protivargument je, naravno, problem finansiranja. Troškovi nisu kvantifikovani, ali nema sumnje da će biti visoki. Još nije izvesno kako bi trebalo oporezovati ukupne dohotke i bogatstva da bi se obezbedila potrebna sredstva. Radikalna transformacija sistema socijalne zaštite uvođenjem univerzalnog osnovnog dohotka bila bi finansijski rizik bez presedana.

Ali finansijski aspekt tog pitanja čak i nije najvažaniji argument protiv osnovnog dohotka. To je zavodljiv i sladak otrov koji ljudima na marginama društva donosi korist na račun srednje klase. Osnovni dohodak ukida pritisak i smanjuje motivaciju za aktivno traženje posla među siromašnima i dugotrajno nezaposlenima. Bogate to verovatno neće koštati više nego stari sistem, a sigurno će im pomoći da umire socijalnu savest. U tom slučaju, dalji rast socijalne nejednakosti više ne bi bio skandalozan, jer bi svako imao osnovni prihod, makar i na granici siromaštva. Upravo tu se kristalizuju tri ključna argumenta protiv bezuslovnog osnovnog dohotka.

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.

How pharmacy benefit managers morphed from processors to predators

David Dayen
March 28, 2017

Only 10 companies control almost every large food and beverage brand in the world.These companies — Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg's, Mars, Associated British Foods, and Mondelez — each employ thousands and make billions of dollars in revenue every year.

In an effort to push these companies to make positive changes — and for customers to realize who controls the brands they're buying — Oxfam created a mind-boggling infographic that shows how interconnected consumer brands really are.

Here's a further breakdown of the companies that own the brands and products we use every day: