\t\t\t\tOne of the emerging discussions is what will the post-coronavirus world look like both within nations and across nations. There is a growing thread about the worries of increased state authoritarianism as governments have imposed an array of restrictions. There is also an increasing debate about the need for nations to return to enhanced national self-sufficiency to avoid the disruptions in the global supply chain that the pandemic has created. In 1933, John Maynard Keynes gave a very interesting lecture on this topic in Dublin. In this blog post, I consider that lecture and assess its currency in the contemporary setting.
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There is a growing thread about the worries of increased state authoritarianism as governments have imposed an array of restrictions.<\/p>\n
There are valid questions to be answered in that context and I haven’t much to add by way of my expertise on that topic.<\/p>\n
As a citizen, we want the smallest state footprint that is consistent with a functioning society.<\/p>\n
But, equally, the reality is that the capitalist system is now on state life support systems and will remain that way for some time.<\/p>\n
Further, the challenges ahead, in part, have to address the pre-pandemic exposures that four or more decades of neoliberalism have left us with.<\/p>\n
I refer to the rising and unsustainable inequalities in society.<\/p>\n
I refer to the chronic wastage of labour resources as governments deployed the unemployed and the underemployed in a quest to limit the capacity of workers to organise so they could pursue reasonable rates of wages growth.<\/p>\n
The result has been an indecent redistribution of national income towards profits, which has forced households to take on unsustainable levels of debt to maintain material standards of living.<\/p>\n
I refer to the growing casualisation of labour and lifestyles that exploit the vulnerability of the ‘gig’ economy workers which will, ultimately, if not reversed, will lead to one of the largest intergenerational rip-offs in human history.<\/p>\n
And in terms of material standards of living, I refer to the challenges of climate change, which is another of the large intergenerational rip-offs that neoliberalism has left us with.<\/p>\n
And, if the scientific evidence is robust (and I think it is), then the climate challenge may not even be an intergenerational issue – it affects us now in visible and damaging ways.<\/p>\n
Fires raging all around the world.<\/p>\n
I read over the weekend this Reuters report (August 21, 2021) – Rain falls at Greenland ice summit for first time on record<\/a>.<\/p>\n The ice sheet is melting and the ocean levels are rising.<\/p>\n I refer to the dysfunctional nature of our essential services – telecommunications, water, energy, transport, banking – which have failed to meet the claims that were made when the privatisation vandals started to sack public assets and transfer massive wealth stores to the top-end-of-town.<\/p>\n They will have to be brought back into public ownership and control.<\/p>\n In various ways, we have been ripped-off by these privatisations and outsourcings.<\/p>\n All of these challenges will not be resolved by the so-called ‘market’, which was a code word that the neoliberals used to condition us into believing that the great solutions of world problems lay in the pursuit of private profit and the radical reduction in state intervention.<\/p>\n But as I have noted previously neoliberalism did not do away with the state – rather, it reconfigured the state to work as an agent for capital rather than a mediator in the conflict between capital and labour.<\/p>\n The point is that all of the challenges above and those that I have not mentioned that are also beckoning will require larger not smaller government.<\/p>\n The climate challenge, alone, will require new government ventures, massive spending and significant tax and other impositions on our use of disposable income to ensure that there is non-inflationary space to accommodate that increase in public spending.<\/p>\n We have to come to terms with that shift in society, which will force a fundamental transformation in our production and consumption patterns.<\/p>\n And then there is the pandemic and the challenges our health and public security systems have to meet.<\/p>\n There is a large network of related systems that make up that aspect of our lives – the hospitals, the quarantine systems, the food distribution systems, transportation systems and rules, housing and building designs, borders, medical research, bio-security, land clearance policies, and the rest.<\/p>\n All will be dependent on increased state intervention.<\/p>\n So when the lockdown protests march around during a raging pandemic that is largely impacting negatively on the lowest income citizens, the most vulnerable citizens – chanting freedom, I only hear ‘freedumb’.<\/p>\n We do have to be mindful and attentive to authoritarian governments who might, under the veil of dealing with the pandemic, seek to impose unnecessary limits on our individual freedoms.<\/p>\n But we also have to get used to the fact that the neoliberal agenda, which tried to convince us that the state was no longer an integral institution in our well being and outsourcing welfare concerns to private, profit-seeking capitalist firms was the way to maximise our well-being, is dead.<\/p>\n Dead and there is no return for that failed ideology.<\/p>\n That is one place where our activist pressure has to be focused on – constantly rejecting that myth.<\/p>\n Which is one reason why we should be becoming cogniscant of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as a basis for understanding the economics that underpin the discussions surrounding these great challenges that are ahead.<\/p>\n One of the themes that the pandemic has provoked is the idea of national self sufficiency.<\/p>\n In dealing with the pandemic, nations have found themselves highly exposed to global supply chains and punitive trade arrangements.<\/p>\n We have heard about relative minor issues relating to supply of protective medical clothing and masks etc, which are relatively easy to resolve in a relatively short time.<\/p>\n Australia is now in chaos as the Delta variant spreads among a largely unvaccinated population.<\/p>\n Why unvaccinated given we are one of the wealthiest nations?<\/p>\n Well, become our stupid federal government decided to ‘save money’ (yes, that again) by not buying a diverse stock of available vaccines last year and now we have found ourselves dramatically short of vaccines and the supply will not be resolved until later this year.<\/p>\n Other nations, without the same capacity to buy unlimited quantities of vaccines, sold under prohibitive intellectual property rights held by gouging international firms, have very little access to vaccine stores.<\/p>\n There are many other cases where global supply chains have become compromised.<\/p>\n It seems that the ‘free trade’ mantra, where we were led to believe that it didn’t matter if we had become reliant on other nations for essential goods and services, because that reliance would be ‘efficient’ and lead to the lowest cost supply has not exactly worked as plans.<\/p>\n Australia has also faced a changing geopolitical environment (hostility between the US and China), which has led the Chinese to stop importing many Australian exports.<\/p>\n So much for ‘free trade’.<\/p>\n We also know that ‘free trade’ leads to transfers of real wealth from poorer nations to richer nations, aided and abetted by punitive IMF and World Bank practices in the poorer nations.<\/p>\n The pandemic has also emphasised that localism provides advantages to nations, which resonates also with some of the environmental challenges ahead – for example, making our food supplies more locally produced again – in neighbourhood gardens etc.<\/p>\n While there are still advantages in working in tandem with other nations and exchanging our talents and innovations to ensure that we have a shared sense of equality, the pandemic has heightened our sense of self-sufficiency.<\/p>\n We need to share with others, which makes the decisions of pharmaceutical companies to profit enormously from the vaccine production and distribution reprehensible.<\/p>\n But we also need to think local and look after the citizens in our countries.<\/p>\n We need to develop capacities to produce more locally – to ensure high-paid and high productivity jobs are supported – and to ensure we are not reliant on international supply chains that increase our exposure to calamities like the pandemic.<\/p>\n At the onset of the pandemic in Europe, various leaders started to echo these sentiments.<\/p>\n Le Figaro article (April 2, 2020) – Thierry Breton estime n\u00e9cessaire l’\u00e9mission d’obligations pour faire face \u00e0 la crise<\/a> – reported on statements made by the European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton about the way in which the EU could meet the challenges of the pandemic.<\/p>\n It said:<\/p>\n \nThierry Breton a par ailleurs reconnu que “la question que nous pose cette crise c’est qu’on est peut-\u00eatre all\u00e9 trop loin dans la mondialisation et la globalisation”.<\/p>\n La question, a-t-il ajout\u00e9, se pose notamment sur la sant\u00e9 (m\u00e9dicaments et mat\u00e9riels m\u00e9dicaux) mais aussi sur les “domaines industriels strat\u00e9giques” et sur l’agriculture.<\/p>\n “Je suis convaincu que notre relation au monde apr\u00e8s cette crise sera diff\u00e9rente.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So “the question posed to us by this crisis is that we have perhaps gone too far in globalization and globalization”.<\/p>\n And the question arises no only in relation to health supplies, but also in the strategic industrial fields and in agriculture.<\/p>\n Around the same time, the German Chancellor was talking about this issue in relation to medical supplies (Source<\/a>):<\/p>\n \nIn view of the fact that this market is currently based in Asia, I think it is also important that we learn as an experience from this pandemic that we need a certain amount of sovereignty or at least a pillar of domestic production here too.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n National self-sufficiency.<\/p>\n It is not the first time these debates have arisen.<\/p>\n As I noted last week, in April 1933, John Maynard Keynes delivered a notable address at the University College Dublin on the idea national self-sufficiency, which in the context of the times and political developments in the Irish Free State, gave support to the increasingly nationalist emphasis of the new Prime Minister – \u00c9amon de Valera <\/a>.<\/p>\n When the Fianna Fail (The Warriors of Destiny) party was elected in 1932 in the Free State, the new President of the Executive Council (that is, Prime Minister) – \u00c9amon de Valera<\/a> – ramped up the nationalist economic approach, as part of a strategy to reduce the dependence on Britain.<\/p>\n He adopted a protectionist approach, which Keynes approved of in his UCD address.<\/p>\nNational self-sufficiency<\/h2>\n