Traces the development of my 2017 book published by Pluto Press

The hollowing out of the middle class in the US and beyond

The Post WW2 period was marked by the mass consumption boom and the rise of the ‘middle class’, which is a sociological designation that is intended to say that the working class had segments that had experienced better conditions and outcomes than the labouring cohorts. The fact that Capital (as a class) deigned to concede to the rise of this cohort was due to the threat that the Soviet Union and the increasing interest in Marxism in Western nations during the mid-C20th posed to the on-going hegemony of capital. The solution was to share a bit of the booty out with workers, improve pay and working conditions, and provide the basis for a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy, which would effectively segment the the working class into ‘individual’ elements that could be played off against each other. And to maintain the profits, sales had to expand and what better way than to encourage the ‘middle class’ households to consume like crazy and fill their ever increasing size homes with stuff. That strategy worked for some decades until the middle class and the trade unions started to get too vocal and demand more at which point something had to give. And in the early 1970s, give it did, and with Monetarism running rife in the academy and industrialists plotting to capture the legislatures (think Powell Manifesto), the conditions for neoliberalism were laid. And the next several decades have seem that ideology become dominant and establish a dynamic that is now likely to implode.
Today, I report on dimensions of that implosion.

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Tariffs and more – Part 1

This week, Australia learned that old geopolitical relationships and so-called ‘free trade’ treaties mean little when it comes to US policy. The obsequious way our political class fawns after the US has been a constant sickening element of our national identity for as long as I can recall. When I was a child, we were told by our Prime Minister that Australia was “all the way with LBJ”, a foreign policy that took out nation, against all reason, into the Vietnam War. Now, the US President is demonstrating why a reliance on the US as a ‘good citizen’ of the world is a poor strategy for an advanced nation to adopt. The other interesting aspect of what is going on is that the world is once again entering an experiment that will provide knowledge about the impacts of ripping up free trade agreements and increasing barriers to entry. Theorising is one thing but now we have a practical experiment underway. This is Part 1 of a series on the current debate about tariffs.

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Economics as politics and philosophy rather than some independent science

Last week, I wrote about – The decline of economics education at our universities (February 6, 2025). This decline has coincided and been driven by an attempt by economists to separate the discipline from its roots as part of the political debate, which includes philosophical views about humanity and nature. In her 1962 book – Economic Philosophy – Joan Robinson wrote that economics “would never have been developed except in the hope of throwing light upon questions of policy. But policy means nothing unless there is an authority to carry it out, and authorities are national” (p.117). Which places government and its capacities at the centre of the venture. Trying to sterilise the ideology and politics from the discipline, which is effectively what the New Keynesian era has tried to do, fails. The most obvious failure has been the promotion of the myth of central bank independence. A recent article in the UK Guardian (February 9, 2025) – You may not like Trump, but his power grab for the economic levers is right. Liberals, take note – is interesting because it represents a break in the tradition of economics journalism that has been sucked into the ‘independence’ myth by the economics profession.

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The demise of trade unions as a countervailing power to civilise Capitalism

One of the striking characteristics of the neoliberal era has been the dramatic decline in trade union membership across the world. The decline has also been associated with depressed wages growth for workers overall, increased income inequality, reduced job security, and the rising domination of the ‘gig’ job phenomena. Related trends include rising household indebtedness (as wage suppression has led to use of credit to maintain consumption levels) and reduced housing affordability, etc. Today (December 9, 2024), the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released the latest edition of biannual – Trade union membership – for August 2024 (the latest data available), which shows that trade union membership has grown from 12.5 per cent in August 2022 to 13.1 per cent now. But that modest rise doesn’t hide the fact that trade unions are no longer serving the role as a – Countervailing power – in the labour market. The decline has many drivers and many consequences and I consider that topic a bit in this post.

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The dislocation between the PMC and the rest of the working class – Part 1

A while ago, I caught up with an old friend who I was close to during our postgraduate studies. We hadn’t seen each other for some years as a result of pursuing different paths in different parts of the world and it was great to exchange notes. At one stage during the conversation, she said to me that I had become one of the ‘super elites’, a term that evaded definition but could be sort of teased out by referring to lifestyle choices etc. The most obvious manifestation was the fact that she was visiting my new home in an experimental sustainable housing estate, which apparently marked one demarcation between being an ordinary citizen and one of the ‘super elites’. That group also apparently doesn’t have any power in society like the real elites – the old and new money gang – but is privileged nonetheless. I understand the notion even if it somewhat amorphous. I was reflecting on that conversation as I have been trying to understand why the US voters chose Donald Trump over the seemingly more progressive and decent candidate Kamala Harris. I use that description of Harris guardedly, because if one digs below the surface, even just a bit, it becomes clear that the Democrats were not particularly progressive or decent (Gaza!) at all but more interested in lecturing people they look down on as to how they should behave and look. All that stuff about restoring joy – was really what ‘super elites’ think about and is far removed from the aspirations of the voters who went for Trump. Here are some additional thoughts on that topic.

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IMF surcharges cripple the poorest nations and transfer wealth from the poorest to the richest nations

I am now working in Kyoto again and have a full day’s commitments ahead of me. But as part of my on-going research I have been investigating the conditions under which the IMF extends financial support to the poorest nations. And today I will tell you about the surcharge system which the IMF uses to make it even harder for those nations to repay the already onerous debt obligations that the IMF imposes on them. These surcharges are just another component of the IMF’s extraction system which transfers wealth from the poorest nations to the richest. I have long advocated the abolition of the IMF and a replacement, multilateral institution being created that actually works to help reduce poverty and the redistribute resources from endowed to less-endowed nations without any harsh austerity measures. The challenge is how would that work. I will write more about my ideas on that in due course. But the evidence keeps mounting to justify the abolition. The surcharge system is one part of that evidence suite.

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Delinking and degrowth

One of the issues that some on the Left raise when the topic ‘degrowth’ enters the conversation relates to the sense of elitism from the wealthy nations, which can now indulge in a bit of non-material aspiration amidst the large houses, two-or-three car garages, speed boats, lycra-clad journeys to coffee shops on $10,000 bicycles designed for racing but ridden around the corner … you get the message. The criticism is that such a bourgeois ‘movement’ has no correspondence with the needs and aspirations of citizens living in poorer nations with fundamental development challenges, not the least being food security and poverty. They thus reject the idea as another ‘woke’ issue. There is some truth in what they say but it is an inadequate stance given that the global economy is operating 1.7 times over regenerative capacity and urgent changes are required. That means we have to deal with the notion of dependency between ‘North’ and ‘South’, which takes us back to the colonial relations and beyond, as an integral part of the degrowth agenda. This is where the concept of ‘delinking’ comes in. Here are some preliminary notes on all that, which arise from research I am doing for my next book on these issues (probably coming out first quarter 2025).

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Why is Brussels supporting Ukraine?

It’s Wednesday, and as usual I scout around various issues that I have been thinking about rather than write a consolidated analysis on one topic. Today, I consider the question of why the EU elites are spending billions supporting the Ukraine government against Russia. They claim that Russia poses a major threat to European freedom but given the superior Russian military machine has not taken much territory after 783 days of war I conclude that such narratives are fanciful and deliberately being advanced to hide true motives. I also consider the situation in the Middle East and then offer today’s music segment to restore our peace of mind.

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Book review: Fiat Socialism by Carlos García Hernández

When I was in London recently, I caught up with my good friend Carlos García Hernández, who is a Spanish radical and has a book publishing business – Lola Books – in Berlin, which publishes in English, German, Spanish and Italian. He gave me a copy of his own recently published book (2023) – Fiat Socialism – to read on the way home. It carries the sub-title ‘Achieving the goals of socialism through modern monetary theory’. I promised him that I would write some comments about it once I had taken it all in, even though I had read and sent him comments on earlier drafts. So today that is what I am going to do. At the outset, it is an important book because it addresses many of the misconceptions that Marxists and socialist-leaning people have regularly demonstrated about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). I am in accord with much of the content but depart critically from his endorsement of nuclear energy as a solution to the climate crisis.

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