Re: Vijesti iz Bantustana: PALA PROIZVODNJA, USPORILA POTROŠNJA

by Guest 31/5/2017, 23:44

glas uhljeba wrote:treba povećat štednju

što ljudi i država manje kupuju a više ostavljaju za budućnost to tvornice više proizvode i više radnih mjesta otvaraju

ne može se rasti na konzumerizmu, rast temeljen na potrošnji nije održiv
manje potrošnje a više štednje stvara stabilnost

ti..se to zajebajes,ne?? Suspect

by Guest 1/6/2017, 02:29

An Economic Prophet for Our Time

We live in Polanyian times. In his classic The Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi, an economic historian, argued that, contrary to free-market dogma, markets are never natural and are always created by states. "Laissez-faire was planned," Polanyi wrote, but "planning was not." The surprising success of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in 2016 made Polanyi’s work especially fresh and current. He argued that markets were corrosive to community life, reducing human beings to commodities, and called the spontaneous reactions of people to defend communities from the damage done by unfettered markets the "double movement."

The global financial crisis increased interest in socialist ideas, as well as right-wing populism. Both can be seen as part of the "double movement." "Fascism," asserted Polanyi, "like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function." Historians of capitalism, such as Sven Beckert, have taken note, observing the Polanyian creation of markets, critical theorists like Nancy Fraser deploy Polanyi’s idea of "fictitious commodities," and development economists like Dani Rodrik argue that social protection has to be offered to communities exposed to the corrosive winds of globalized capital.

Yet despite the growing relevance of Polanyi’s ideas, until now he has never been the subject of a comprehensive biography, making it difficult to situate his ideas in the historical contexts that produced them. This is especially important because the radical social democracy he espoused has all but vanished from global politics. But the cosmopolitanism of Polanyi’s life posed a real challenge to researchers: Born in 1886, he spent a formative decade in Vienna, then divided working years between England, New England, and Canada. His was, as his biographer, Gareth Dale, argues, a "twentieth-century" life, full of the dislocations of dark years of violence. (He died in 1964.)

Dale, a scholar of politics and history at Brunel University, bases his Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left on wide research and interviews with Polanyi’s relatives, and the result is informative and intelligent. The biography also suggests Polanyi may be a better prophet for our time than he was an analyst of his own.

Dale narrates Polanyi’s life through a series of internal contradictions. Born into a Jewish family, Polanyi came to identify strongly with Christian morality. He was a supporter of peasants but lived an almost entirely urban life. He has become one of the 20th century’s best-known social democrats but disliked much of the social democracy of his day. He was a humanist — as Dale puts it, "in the sense that he held that anything that violates human dignity should be subjected to theoretical criticism and practical obstruction" — but he frequently defended Stalin’s Russia, and he married a Bolshevik. He is remembered as a warm and generous friend and colleague but took himself to task in a letter to his brother as an "impossible person" who suffered periodic bouts of serious depression.

A Life on the Left narrates Polanyi’s personal life, gives a sense of the intellectual environments in which Polanyi moved, and shows how his thinking emerged from his engagement with his time and circumstances. This is carried off in a kind of forward march, alternating between the personal and the intellectual, without much scene-setting or rhetorical flourish. The approach ends up giving equal attention to Polanyi’s minor and major works: The writing of The Great Transformation is passed over in a few pages. The biography, therefore, is probably not the best introduction to Polanyi’s thinking, though Dale has already written a fine one of those with Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market (2010).

The experience that most contributed to the development of Polanyi’s radical social democratic ideas was his time, from 1919 to 1933, in "Red Vienna" — the only major European city to be controlled by a labor party. Public schooling and housing proliferated, along with socialist clubs and associations, as well as teetotalers’ societies and folk-dancing groups. Polanyi, who believed in moral uplift and workers’ education, was thrilled. The socialist workers’ movement, he thought, had helped create the flourishing of Christian values among working people and what he described as a "mentality of responsibility and leadership." But by 1933 Austria had become increasingly authoritarian, and he was forced into exile in England, whose intellectuals he admired and whose market society he did not.

In England, he struggled to find secure employment. He taught adult-education courses at the Workers’ Educational Association and did a lecture tour of the United States. Like many in England’s "Christian left" he was surprisingly forgiving of the Soviet Union. In the 1930s, he defended the Moscow Trials, which framed innocent people for crimes against the state. Polanyi’s own niece was forced into solitary confinement and false confession in the U.S.S.R., (becoming part of the inspiration for Arthur Koestler’s anti-Communist classic Darkness at Noon) yet Polanyi insisted that she had been treated "by the most fair judicial methods." For good and for ill, Polanyi always remained suspicious of anti-Communism and of Western propaganda throughout the Cold War. Dale’s description of Polanyi’s conflicts with his brother Michael, a chemist who participated in the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom, crackles with rare tension.

Polanyi’s employment conditions were always precarious — he could be the patron saint of today’s contingent academics. Early in his career, he survived by writing book reviews for an Economist-like magazine. He wrote The Great Transformation in residence at Bennington College in Vermont on a short-term grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, and afterward he returned to England. In the 1950s, he taught at Columbia University, but McCarthyism kept his Communist wife out of the United States, and so he turned down more stable job offers and retired to Toronto, where they could be together.

Perhaps this lack of stability contributed to some of the inaccuracies in his work. Important passages in The Great Transformation depend on his account of the early 19th-century Speenhamland system of rural welfare, but his portrayal was based on anti-Speenhamland political propaganda. Specialists pointed out the problems to him, even at the time. Similarly, Polanyi’s chapter on ancient Athens in Trade and Market in the Early Empires, which he edited late in his career (he saw Athens as essentially a forerunner to Red Vienna) was singled out by a reviewer for its inaccuracies. Even The Great Transformation was met with mixed reviews when it was released.

But, in the end, Polanyi’s errors matter far less than his singular contribution. His rediscovery since the 1980s stems from The Great Transformation’s powerful rebuke to the idea that all social problems can be solved by the application of unfettered markets. Polanyi’s thought is an effective antidote to the thinking of Reagan, Thatcher, Ayn Rand, and even "Third Way" Democrats. But Polanyi’s continued relevance lies also in his commitment to solving the problems of market society by rejecting fascism and instead working to expand freedom under socialism, which he describes as "the tendency … to transcend the self-regulating market by consciously subordinating it to a democratic society." To those for whom Polanyi has become an intellectual or political inspiration, Dale’s biography is a landmark. It is a reminder of the ways in which Polanyi’s social democratic thought was rooted in his participation in social democratic culture and institutions, which were once robust and are only now being rebuilt. We live, again, in Polanyian times, and they show every sign of lasting.

http://www.chronicle.com/article/An-Economic-Prophet-for-Our/239211