Weekend reading.
What would you tell six hundred leading German social democrats about their party’s handling of the Eurocrisis?Mark Blyth gives them what for.
Jacobin
Ending the Creditor’s Paradise
Mark Blyth | Eastman professor of political economy at Brown University and the author of Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea
4 comments:
Structural transformation needn't be of the neoliberal. Greece's economy is deeply sick and can't be fixed with only some Keynesian demand stiimulus. Here's an alternative non-neoliberal alternative form of structural transformation for Greece:
1. Tax the oligarchs
2. Redistribute wealth
3. Establish a national full employment target and commitment.
4. Create new public enterprises and cooperatives to achieve that commitment and address many huge and unmet social needs.
And given that Greeks are stubbornly committed to the euro,
5. Create innovative ways of paying people.
Dan - According to some polls, the Greeks aren't all that committed to the Euro. Some in Syriza have (had) irrationally exaggerated views of the cost of leaving it compared to remaining in it. The programs you list are well and good, but they mostly are Keynesian / MMT demand stimulus - according to Keynes, or even his 50s-60s "old Keynesian" epigones. ("Stimulus" is better thought of as "non-strangulation")
#4 isn't just " demand stimulus". It's the creation of a new socialist sector of the economy that operates just as much on the supply side as the demand side.
Redistribution of wealth also goes beyond Keynesian prescriptions, whether old, new or "post". It will have stimulatory effects, but it will have other effects as well.
It's crazy for progressives to develop an allergy to the words "structural transformation" because they don't like what those words mean on the lips of neoliberals. The entire history of left progressive political economy is the history of efforts at structural transformation - some successful, some not.
If ever there was an economy that needed structural transformation, it's Greece.
#4 was Keynes's (& FDR's) Keynesianism, and is the core of MMT. The JG changes the structure of the economy- that's its point.
You seem to identify Keynes/Keynesianism/MMT with the dumbest of 1960s Keynesian fine-tuning, or 1930's pump-priming. In reality, neither the 60s or 30s liberals were as bad in practice as their theories were, which were in turn far above the modern mainstream. All sorts of Keynesians prescribe progressive income taxation / wealth redistribution. I think you are diagnosing allergies that people - MMTers etc - don't have. Syriza is all for your points, but its fear of monetary "innovations", ultimately leaving the Eurozone if need be, can doom everything else, because the Eurocracy hates 1-5 & wants to create a society which makes old-fashioned feudalism look attractive.
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