Serfdom Is Better Than What the West is Heading For | Ian Welsh

One of the things that we forget about Feudalism is that serfs had rights: economic rights. They had the right to farm common land, they had the right to take wood from common forests, they had the right to live where they had lived before.

This is not to say that they were free, they certainly were not. But they were not slaves; they had access to, as it were, capital: what they needed to grow their own food, shelter themselves and clothe themselves.

We have an overly grim view of the Middle Ages, but, in various periods and various places, serfs, let alone freeholders, lived quite well. Much of what we associate as the worst of the Middle Ages actually happened either in the Dark Ages or in the Renaissance. For example, torture really takes off in the Renaissance, because as Stirling Newberry has pointed out, torture chambers and so on take a lot of iron and they didn’t have it to waste in the Middle Ages.

Late serfdom (after the Renaissance) was pleasant enough for serfs that they had to be forced off their land: The factories were worse. In factories, they lived shorter, sicker lives and worked far more. Capitalism is based on dependency—on wage laborers needing to work for someone else, or their lives are miserable or short. (Marx’s “whip of hunger”.) It is voluntary only in the sense that you can offer your labor to anyone willing to pay, not in the sense that you can opt out of the system and have anything approaching a decent life.

Today, if you lose your job and you’re an ordinary person, you can’t support yourself. If the government, friends or family don’t give you what you need, you have to beg for it. If you don’t get it, you die. Homesteading laws and laws which allowed people to take unused or underused property and use it to support themselves have been drastically weakened.

Complete story at - Serfdom Is Better Than What the West is Heading For | Ian Welsh

The 4th Media » Capitalism: Killing Earth and People at Home & around the World and All for the Making of Dollars

‘I see a bad moon rising

I see trouble on the way

I see earthquakes and lightning

I see hard times today’

John Fogerty, Bad Moon Rising (1969). John Fogerty’s classic rock song ‘Bad Moon Rising’, from the 1960s, could be the foreboding soundtrack for what is rumbling in America’s Midwest today.

Earthquakes have now become a daily occurrence in Oklahoma and other Midwest states. In the past, a baseline incidence of quakes was two or so a year. Now, the region is experiencing over 500 a year, according to official seismological records. So far, there hasn’t been “a big one”.

Most of the quakes have registered around 3 to 5 on the Richter Scale. But it seems only a matter of time before the Earth lashes back with deadly force.

A report this week in the Washington Post tells of widespread structural damage and personal injuries from the “swarm of earthquakes” that residents in Oklahoma are having to endure. With trepidation, ordinary people are fearing that a final calamity is crescendoing.

“The earthquakes come nearly every day now, cracking drywall, popping floor tiles and rattling kitchen cabinets. On Monday, three quakes hit this historic land-rush town [Guthrie] in 24 hours, booming and rumbling like the end of the world,” reports Lori Montgomery for the Post.

“After a while, you can’t even tell what’s a pre-shock or an after-shock. The ground just keeps moving,” says one resident. “People are so frustrated and scared.”

Complete story at - The 4th Media » Capitalism: Killing Earth and People at Home & around the World and All for the Making of Dollars

Vladimir Suchan: Logos politikos: Facing Capitalism's Big Reset and Fascism: What Is at Stake in Ukraine

A new article by Joshua Tartakovsky, "Israel and Ukraine: Ridding the Nation of the Undesirables," which draws parallels between Palestine and Donbass, on the one hand, and Israel and the Nazi regime in Kiev, on the other hand, made me neglect my duty to look at posts packed with clichés and to reflect on some of those bigger issues, which get lost in the haste of news and issues of the moment.

The category of the undesirables evokes another historical and political category--that of superfluous people. This category not only accompanies like a shadow the history and musings of modern political economy, but it was also part of theorizing about "totalitarianism" after World War II.

Producing much of superfluous money in the hands of the few (reportedly the value of derivatives is now about $2,000 trillion from $500 trillion in 2008), our late capitalism under its neo-liberal and neo-conservative form has also produced a critical mass of the so-called superfluous people, as seen from its one-eyed, narrowly focused greed.

This is not only means that one needs to be pay careful attention the mention of "superfluous people," one of the give-way terms dropped here and there by Hannah Ardent in her big and also admittedly strange book "The Origins of Totalitarianism."

The financialization of capitalism thus leads not only to financial bubbles. It also leads to the final forms of capitalism--as if back to its beastly form. After all, if Hobbes' Leviathan, the modern state, is anything, it is a beast. And so is Machiavelli's Prince.

And when the capital beast of the system feels that there are both simply too many people and too many people who might cause a trouble, it starts seeing all around itself or at least in a number of places too many of "superfluous people." The "natural balance" of the "market" needs to be restored. It needs to be "reset." Literally, that means "setting back." Or, as fascism also insisted, back from too much democracy and from too much of the Enlightenment.

That's when the system brings in a world war or fascism. Or something similar.

Complete story at - Vladimir Suchan: Logos politikos: Facing Capitalism's Big Reset and Fascism: What Is at Stake in Ukraine

The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats - Nick Hanauer - POLITICO Magazine

Memo: From Nick Hanauer
To: My Fellow Zillionaires

You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies across a range of industries—from itsy-bitsy ones like the night club I started in my 20s to giant ones like Amazon.com, for which I was the first nonfamily investor. Then I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I’m no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can’t even imagine. Multiple homes, my own plane, etc., etc. You know what I’m talking about. In 1992, I was selling pillows made by my family’s business, Pacific Coast Feather Co., to retail stores across the country, and the Internet was a clunky novelty to which one hooked up with a loud squawk at 300 baud. But I saw pretty quickly, even back then, that many of my customers, the big department store chains, were already doomed. I knew that as soon as the Internet became fast and trustworthy enough—and that time wasn’t far off—people were going to shop online like crazy. Goodbye, Caldor. And Filene’s. And Borders. And on and on.

Realizing that, seeing over the horizon a little faster than the next guy, was the strategic part of my success. The lucky part was that I had two friends, both immensely talented, who also saw a lot of potential in the web. One was a guy you’ve probably never heard of named Jeff Tauber, and the other was a fellow named Jeff Bezos. I was so excited by the potential of the web that I told both Jeffs that I wanted to invest in whatever they launched, big time. It just happened that the second Jeff—Bezos—called me back first to take up my investment offer. So I helped underwrite his tiny start-up bookseller. The other Jeff started a web department store called Cybershop, but at a time when trust in Internet sales was still low, it was too early for his high-end online idea; people just weren’t yet ready to buy expensive goods without personally checking them out (unlike a basic commodity like books, which don’t vary in quality—Bezos’ great insight). Cybershop didn’t make it, just another dot-com bust. Amazon did somewhat better. Now I own a very large yacht.

But let’s speak frankly to each other. I’m not the smartest guy you’ve ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I’m not technical at all—I can’t write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now?

I see pitchforks.

Complete story at - The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats - Nick Hanauer - POLITICO Magazine

The Argentina Debt Case | naked capitalism

By Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics and Chairperson at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Originally published in Frontline (India)

Almost everyone now knows that the world of international finance is not a particularly robust one, nor is it particularly just or fair. But it has just got even weirder and more fragile, if this can be imagined. A recent ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, refusing to hear an appeal by the government of Argentine against a decision of a lower court on a case relating to its debt restructuring agreement with creditors over a decade ago, is not just a blow against the state and people of Argentina. It has the potential to undermine the entire system of cross-border debt that underlies global capitalism today.

The case has its origins in the 1990s, when the government of Carlos Menem fixed the Argentine peso at the value of one U.S. dollar, through a currency board arrangement that restricted base money supply to the amount of external reserves and sought to increase its spending through the build-up of external debt. This was obviously an unsustainable strategy, which exploded in a financial crisis in 2001, bringing on a major devaluation of the currency and a default on around $100 billion of external debt.

In 2005, the government of Nestor Kirchner, which had then managed to revive the economy to some extent, offered its creditors debt swaps that significantly restructured the debts. Since Argentine bonds were anyway trading at a fraction of their face value in the secondary market, this deal, which reduced the value of the debt by nearly 75 per cent, was acceptable to most of the multinational banks and other creditors. (Since unpaid interest is added on to the principal and compounded, the actual face value of the debt in such cases is typically much more than the amount originally borrowed or lent out.) Indeed, creditors holding 93 per cent of government bonds participated in the debt swaps of 2005 and 2010.

However, a tiny minority of creditors held out and refused to accept the negotiated settlement. These then sold their holdings to hedge funds (in this case known as “vulture funds” that take on distressed assets in the hope of recouping a higher value from them). One of the most prominent of these funds in the Argentine case is NML Capital, a subsidiary of Elliot Capital Management, which is run by U.S. billionaire and major Republican party donor Paul Singer. This fund has a history of using aggressive tactics to force struggling sovereign debtors to pay the full value of debts that have already been deeply discounted by the market. In the past, it has successfully sued the governments of Peru and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Ever since it bought Argentine bonds at around 20 per cent of the face value in 2008, it has been pursuing the case both legally and physically. In 2012, it hired mercenaries to detain and try to seize an Argentine ship where it was docked off the coast of Ghana; at another time it even attempted to grab the Argentina Presidential plane from an airport—as “collateral” for its supposed holding of debt. Legally, NML Capital and another vulture fund, Aurelius Capital Management LP, have been pursuing a case in a New York district court, demanding full payment on their debt, of the value of around $1.5 billion. It has been estimated by the Argentine government that this could amount to a return of more than 1600 per cent on the initial investment made by these vulture funds.

In 2012, U.S. District Judge in New York Thomas Griesa ruled in favour of the hedge funds, which was both extraordinary in law and devastating in its potential implications not just for Argentina but for finance in general. The Argentine government appealed against it, but this appeal has now been dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Consider just some elements of this U.S. court decision. First, it is based on a peculiar and unprecedented interpretation of the pari passu (equal treatment) clause, which holds that all bond holders must be treated alike. The courts have interpreted this to mean that a sovereign debtor must make full payment on a defaulted claim if it makes any payments on restructured bonds. So if the bondholders who agreed to restructure 93 per cent of the Argentine debt are being paid according to their agreement, then the other resisting bond holders must also be paid the full value of their debts!

Complete story at - The Argentina Debt Case | naked capitalism

Capitalism’s Deeper Problem | Perspectives | BillMoyers.com

Recent press reports refer to troubling price increases for such assets as real estate, government bonds, companies targeted for acquisition and artwork. A New York Times front-page headline read “The Everything Boom, or Maybe the Everything Bubble.”

Yet while asset prices soar, the production of goods and services, employment and workers’ incomes are not recovering and resuming growth. Instead, Western Europe, North America and Japan are stuck in a longer, deeper crisis than almost anyone expected. Millions have left the labor force. Wages, benefits and job security are declining; the so-called “middle classes” are evaporating. Having promised “recoveries,” desperate governments inject massive new quantities of money into their economies. What they accomplish most are fast-rising asset prices.

Given their persistent economic problems, consumers cannot borrow or spend more. Businesses neither borrow nor productively invest all the new, cheap money because they could not sell the extra output to distressed consumers. Instead, the newly injected trillions enable the speculation that drives up asset prices. The owners of those inflating assets celebrate a “recovery” that bypasses most of their fellow citizens. The Great Recession lumbers on.

To understand this puzzling and dangerous situation requires digging deeper than most current discussions of our economic problems. The global crisis since 2007 has captivated discussion about capitalism as a system. Yet we are faced now with more than just this latest of capitalism’s endlessly recurring “downturns” (or recessions or depressions). We see combined an extremely serious downturn in most of capitalism’s old centers, extremely unequal growth in its new centers and a resurgent global speculative bubble. This points to a deeper, worldwide problem that now challenges and threatens contemporary capitalism.

From its beginnings as the emerging, dominant class structure in 18th century England, capitalism concentrated production geographically in what were or became urban areas. This persisted as capitalism spread through Western Europe, North America and Japan. Capitalist growth in urban areas not only drew food, raw materials and laborers from the surrounding countryside, it also generated deepening divisions between town and country. The workers who gathered in industrial towns eventually mobilized and fought successfully for rising wages rarely matched by rural incomes. Urban laborers became an organized, disciplined, productive and relatively well-paid working class.

Complete story at - Capitalism’s Deeper Problem | Perspectives | BillMoyers.com

Disastrous Effects of the Restoration of Capitalism - Ukraine

(Original Title) - Theses on Ukraine

The root cause of the crisis in Ukraine is to be found in the disastrous effects of the restoration of capitalism. The destruction of the planned economy was a tremendous setback not only from the point of view of the economy, but also from a social point of view.

From the ashes of the planned economy emerged a brutal capitalist regime, based on the large scale theft of state property by different gangs of crooks and Mafiosi, the oligarchs, which came to control the economy and as a result, the political system.

Mafia-style capitalism resulted in endemic instability with western imperialism taking advantage of the crisis in Russia to exert their influence over the Ukraine, unsettling the balance of power in the region for a whole period, thus creating the conditions for the present crisis.

Some of the oligarchs thought their interests were better served with an alliance with the West, others were aligned with Russia, but their overriding motivation was the maximisation of profit at any cost, through legal and, mostly, illegal means. On this basis it was impossible to establish even the semblance of a functioning bourgeois democracy. One corrupt and authoritarian bourgeois regime followed another.

At the end of 2013 the then president Yanukovich decided to suspend, at the last minute, the signing of an association agreement with the EU, and decided instead to sign a deal with Russia. Up until that point he had ruled in the interest of the oligarchs and followed an IMF inspired programme of further privatisation and austerity cuts, alienating popular support for his rule even in the South-East of Ukraine where most of his electoral base was.

The only reason he broke with the West was because he thought he could get a better deal from Russia. After the collapse of Stalinism, German capitalism followed a policy of expanding eastwards and was prepared to spend large sums of money to ensure its domination in the region. But in 2013, in the middle of the most severe crisis of capitalism in Europe, it was no longer so keen to spend the amount of money that would have been required to absorb into the EU Ukraine (which was facing a deep economic recession). Yanukovich tried to play the West against Russia and vice-versa in order to get the best deal.

His decision not to sign the treaty with the EU was the spark for the movement which became known as Euromaidan. The movement had a certain degree of mass support amongst those sections of the population (mainly the West and Centre of the country) which looked towards the West, with the illusion that somehow by linking up to the EU their living standards would rise or they would experience a repetition of the Polish “miracle”. This was a reactionary illusion, but one which was able to mobilise a section of society in protests against Yanukovich.

Complete story at - Theses on Ukraine

A class analysis of the Ukrainian crisis | Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

By Viktor Shapinov, translated from the Ukrainian website Liva (The Left), translated by Renfrey Clarke for Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

June 13, 2014 -- The social and class origins of the Ukrainian crisis have not been well researched. Attention has been focused mainly on the political side of events, and their socio-economic basis has been allowed to drop from sight. What were the class forces behind the overthrow of the Yanukovich regime, the installing of a new regime in Kiev, and the rise of the anti-Maidan and of the movement in the south-east?

The crisis of Ukrainian capitalism

The Ukrainian crisis is not a unique national phenomenon. For a number of reasons, Ukraine has been a “weak link” and has become the first victim of the collapse of the economic model based on the rule of the dollar as the world reserve currency and on the stimulation through credit of consumer demand as a mechanism of economic growth.[1] Ukraine’s economy has been among the most vulnerable in the context of the global crisis, and this has resulted in a split within the ruling class and in a fierce political struggle that has been visible now for several months.

The economy of Ukrainian capitalism acquired its form in the course of the collapse of the Soviet economic complex, the privatisation of socially owned property, and integration into the world market. These processes had the effect of degrading the economic structure of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which in terms of economic development had ranked 10th in the world. Ukraine in Soviet times had a complex, developed economy in which a leading role was played by machine building and the production of goods with a high degree of added value.

Integration into the world market led to the collapse of the high-technology sectors. “While the economy of the USSR was oriented toward satisfying the needs of production and personal consumption within the country, and developed in a more or less complex and rounded fashion, Ukraine’s capitalist economy is ‘formatted’ in line with the demands of the world division of labour. The main victim of this process has been knowledge-intensive production – machine building, light industry, output of machine tools, instruments and radio-electronics, and the production of turbines, aircraft and automobiles.”[2]

Once complex production had been destroyed, the role played by the export-oriented raw materials sector and by sectors with a low degree of added value took on a catastrophically high level of importance. The owners of enterprises in these sectors formed a layer within the oligarchy that has controlled the bulk of the country’s economy throughout almost the entire period of “independence”. This layer, oriented toward the production of raw materials for export, has ruthlessly exploited the productive potential inherited from the USSR. As a result of its economic position, the Ukrainian oligarchy has not only been uninterested in developing the country’s internal market, but in many cases has also taken a predatory attitude to its own productive assets, preferring to export capital to offshore havens instead of using it to develop production. A total of more than $165 billion has been taken out of Ukraine and invested offshore.[3]

The model of the peripheral export economy had a “cannibal” character, and was based on consuming the inheritance from the Soviet Union. Even before the onset of the global economic crisis, ferrous metallurgy – the “locomotive” of Ukraine’s peripheral economy, providing 40-50 per cent of exports – showed “obvious structural weaknesses: outmoded technologies, high labour intensity (producing a ton of steel in Ukraine required 52.8 work hours, compared with 38.1 in Russia and 16.8 in Germany), high energy consumption and dependence on foreign (mainly Russian) energy sources. So long as prices were high these weaknesses were not of decisive importance, but any worsening of the conjuncture made them a serious threat.

Complete story at - A class analysis of the Ukrainian crisis | Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

US Capitalism on Heat again for War > Strategic-Culture.org - Strategic Culture Foundation

When capitalism is in crisis, war is always an imminent danger. History shows us this to be case. The two biggest conflagrations ever, the First and Second World Wars – claiming total deaths of around 80 million – were both presaged by economic collapses in the capitalist system.

This is what makes the present juncture in international relations so disturbing. The American-centered capitalist system is once again choking to death from deep social malaises of poverty, unemployment, vast income inequality, and with that, stagnation in the productive economy. The tendency, as in the previous depressed economic times of the early 1900s and 1930s, is to go to war in a desperate act of “creative destruction”. Rationally and morally perverse, war nevertheless makes logical sense to the capitalist system as a way of clearing its choking contradictions. Depraved, yes to be sure, but that’s the ineluctable logic of the profit system.

One illustration of how deeply in crisis the capitalist system has once again become is the story of fake towns that the Pentagon is building across America. These towns are being used to train the US army in techniques of “urban warfare”. One such place was recently reported as newly opened as a training facility in the state of Virginia. The “model town” took six years to plan and two years to build at a total cost of $96 million, according to a report in Britain’s Daily Telegraph…

The Pentagon facility, covering 300 acres, is a replica of other cities that one might typically find across the US. It has residential houses with gardens, schools, places of religious worship, a sports stadium, banks, and even a five-storey embassy. The replica town has also been built with an underground subway and train station, complete with real, working trains.

The only thing missing from the picture are human beings. No one actually lives in this military model town in Virginia and others like it elsewhere in the US. These fake urban centres are to be used solely by the Pentagon to conduct ground troop and helicopter assaults on the various premises.

Complete story at - US Capitalism on Heat again for War > Strategic-Culture.org - Strategic Culture Foundation

Cut-Throat Capitalism: Welcome To the Gig Economy | Alternet

May 27, 2014 |

The media are all abuzz with the changing nature of work. Exciting words like “creativity” and “adaptability” get thrown around, specifically in connection to the shift away from steady, full-time employment to a freelancer-dominated, gig economy. Proponents of the gig economy, from Thomas Friedman to bright-eyed TED pundits, tout it as a welcome escape from the prison of the standard workweek and the strictures of corporate America. Working on a project-to-project basis will set you free, they tell us. Wired magazine has called it "the force that could save the American worker.”

But when you’re actually stuck in it, the gig economy looks quite different.

Consider the New York Freelancer’s Union: According to a report in the New York Times, 29 percent of the union’s New York City members earn less than $25,000 a year, and in 2010, 12 percent of members nationally received some type of public assistance. Turns out that life with no health benefits, vacation pay or retirement plan is not a rosy picture.

Writing for Fast Company, Sarah Kessler, who went undercover to hustle for work in the gig economy, put it this way:

“For one month, I became the ‘micro-entrepreneur’ touted by companies like TaskRabbit, Postmates, and Airbnb. Instead of the labor revolution I had been promised, all I found was hard work, low pay, and a system that puts workers at a disadvantage.”

Complete story at - Cut-Throat Capitalism: Welcome To the Gig Economy | Alternet

The American Dream turns into a Global Nightmare - Paul B. Farrell - MarketWatch

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — The American Dream? Now a Global Nightmare? A ticking time bomb, a lethal virus spreading worldwide, could destroy the entire world, backfire, take down America and capitalism? Yes.

But, first, a little history: Five years ago Bill Gates and his Billionaires Club asked that question. But gave up. Here’s why.

Gates’ billionaires essentially asked: What do you think is the single, biggest ticking time bomb that will eventually take down global economies? The absolutely biggest one with a trigger mechanism that can ignite, set off a nuclear chain reaction that will throw a permanent wrench in global economic growth, ending capitalism, potentially destroying modern civilization as we know it.

Yes, that one. The one that — if not solved soon — renders all efforts to solve all other problems in the world irrelevant, futile and virtually impossible ever to solve. Yes, that one. What is the “big one?” Several alternative predictions have also been reported:

• Global wars? Pentagon warns warfare will define human life by 2020.
• Big Oil? Bill McKibben’s “End of Nature” prediction could ignite soon.
• Capitalism? Many progressives see capitalism destroying democracy.
• Inequality? Pope says inequality is the root of all social problems.
• Climate warming? 2,000 UN scientists warn humans are killing Earth.
• Technology? Robert Gordon says we can’t stop GDP falling to 1%.

Biggest risk? Guess again: Not warfare ... not the inequality... not energy resource depletion ... not global warming ... not out-of-control capitalists ... yes, all are important, all part of the domino effect, the chain reaction as the global clock winds down to zero.

Complete story at - The American Dream turns into a Global Nightmare - Paul B. Farrell - MarketWatch