xipe posted:

COINTELBRO could you describe how what you are advocating is different from eg the BNP election manifesto, ie decent british jobs for british workers etc

i know as fascists they are liars and corrupt but i would like to hear how communists can embrace nationalism and so on. cheers

are communists against workers having well paying jobs? is opposition to powerful transnational capitalist institutions and support for a retrenchment at the nation-state level the same thing as flag waving jingoism?

getfiscal posted:

I don't really understand why large sections of the left have rallied behind "people's quantitative easing" as an antidote to neoliberalism. Especially when both the US and UK have supported radical increases in the money supply and both are holding interest rates very low. If the culprit is profitability then these will have limited sustainability anyway.

it's a whole different thing. in normal quantitative easing increasing the money supply is just that, increasing the available supply, not its actual circulation. it's bottlenecked at the banks. the large supply/low interest rate is meant to induce lending and circulation, but can't force it because of low profitability. low profitability is in turn largely a function of low aggregate demand, which can't really increase without the money circulating, so it's a catch-22

pqe seems to be basically the same as social credit, MMT etc. the government just straight up prints (or types up) money and hires people to build public works or provide public services. interest rates and profitability are irrelevant as the newly created money goes directly into aggregate demand without going through the banking system in the normal way. you can print as much as you want, build as much schools, hospitals, and infrastructure as you want, but at some point you will run into supply constraints and start causing inflation.

it's a good idea

Edited by solzhesnitchin (July 4, 2016 04:29:00)

getfiscal posted:

Yeah I still don't understand MMT I guess. I'll have to read a real book about it I mean, people have tried to explain it to me before and I don't understand why it wouldn't lead to accelerating inflation. I've also seen it promoted where they say that the solution is a "job guarantee" where people are paid below the (normal) minimum wage which seemed odd. One of the main guys who promotes it always seemed mental to me (yelling about "banksters") so I am wary. I have also had bad encounters with some people who promote similar things.

mmt is bunk and most of its supporters are crazy. they don't really understand how national accounting identities work and that leads them to make crazy claims. they don't seem to to have any theory on how to integrate the monetary and real economy, and don't seem to think they need one, so the slippage between the two (inflation) seems to get completely disregarded or dealt with using weird crank theories

the main crazy claim is that printing money will never cause inflation. it's true that it won't cause inflation in a depressed economy because the workers would otherwise be sitting unemployed, machines sitting idle and goods sitting unsold. you can spend the helicoptor money with no inflation up until the point where all those workers and machines are working full time (you've exhausted available supply), and at that point you will just be bidding up the price for the same amount of output (causing inflation).

i think it's a good idea because our economies are generally running way below capacity, and even if you go overboard, a bit of inflation is not such a bad thing. it's generally good for workers and bad for capitalists. it would be a good tool for countries like the uk or greece to use upon leaving a monetary union. it's just not the utopian panacea that the mmters think it is

getfiscal posted:

I created a podcast to take down Chapo Trap House.

https://soundcloud.com/donald-hughes-229196019/the-peacethinker-the-chapo-trap

deadken just announced hes going on that show.w

Constantignoble posted:

i've seen mmt folks repudiate this reading of them, though. it's not "never" without qualification. they might argue that despite its lack of budgetary limits, a job guarantee won't cause inflation, for example. but they've written loads of words (probably fuckin' millions, in the case of mitchell) affirming that beyond the point of full capacity utilization you just get more money chasing the same number of goods and thus a buildup of inflationary pressure. the point is to use automatic buffer stocks (like a JG) rather than arbitrary helicopter drops precisely because they connect in a reflexive and responsive way to the real needs of the economy.

i'm not sure what you object to in their reading of the accounts. is this about the "S = I + (S - I)" dustup some years ago? because yeah that was pretty dumb

honestly their emphasis on the accounting side of things has been a godsend in a profession that's otherwise buried in a ditch in the dead end of equilibrium modeling, game theoretical twiddling and other subjunctive-mood nonsense. (seriously, the economic mainstream factors opportunity costs into the definition of "economic profit." opportunity costs! it's "profit" that's literally impossible to aggregate!)

plus i suspect the mmt people have been a gateway drug for many, since a number of the main voices are either closeted or somewhat-out marxians (like forstater, wray, mitchell)

fair enough, i agree with most of this.. i came into contact with mmters back around 2009 because i like wynne godley, whom a lot of them cite as an authority and claim to base their theories on. i haven't read much of them since then, so i may not be fully up to date, but in my opinion, and the opinion of godley's collaborators and most other post-keynesians, they mangle the theories and promote a lot of misleading ideas. what's novel in mmt is mostly wrong or misleading, and what's correct in mmt is mostly just borrowed from elsewhere, so i tend to focus on the negatives as the distinguishing features of mmt. i can see the merit in it as a basic introduction to keynesian/leftist economics or monetary economics in general

if you look at the job guarantee proposal, i think that the limitations of mmt become pretty clear. so they backtrack from the declaration that there can be no insolvency crisis for a country by pointing out that a sovereign currency issuer can trade default risk for inflation risk by monetizing the deficit. then they argue that the inflation risk can be controlled by only using the printed money to support a counter-cyclical jobs guarantee program where the government hires the unemployed to work at minimum wage.

so.. a) they have admitted that either way there remains a de facto limit on government budgets
and b) their grand solution is... workfare. they have simply replaced the reserve army of the unemployed receiving government benefits that the current neoliberal economic policy (NAIRU) is based upon, with a reserve army of people working for the government as minimum wage temp labour. how is that desirable?

btw, did you happen to post elsewhere under a username starting with "v" a few years back?

ilmdge posted:

owen smith says britain needs nukes in case donald trump becomes president. sorry to all the corbynites, but smith's willingness to nuclear bomb the united states of america makes him the new leading anti-imperialist choice

0B0sFtRTlx4

ilmdge posted:

nuclear bomb the united states of america

hey so hows this coming along, in the works or whats up with this. thanks -"Anonymous"

ilmdge posted:

ilmdge posted:

Sam is a bright young man and a pretty good communist, although not without his personal flaws. I'll be listening to his Chapo House Trap appearance and not solely so I can come back here and give him a good roasting. Have a nice night.

actually so far i havent listened to it because it appears to be behind a paywall. someone post it here, they said the rhizzone is allowed to pirate their content

Episode 29 - London Falling feat. @Sam_Kriss (8/3/16)