Corporate Profitability

Mark Thoma notes the historic high levels of Corporate Profitability.

Economy built for profits not prosperity, by Lawrence Mishel, EPI: Newly released data on corporate profitability for 2012 show the continuation of historic levels of profitability despite excessive unemployment and stagnant wages for most workers. Specifically, the share of capital income (such as profits and interest, which are hereafter referred to as ‘profits’) in the corporate sector increased to 25.6 percent in 2012, the highest in any year since 1950-1951 and far higher than the 19.9 percent share prevailing over 1969-2007, the five business cycles preceding the financial crisis. …

Could the US economy be undergoing a fundamental change as it moves resources from Department II to Department I? If so, we should see a greater capital investment.

But the fundamental problem remains: the consumption can only be realised through wages and salaries. Since these, in total, are decreasing, then total consumption must fall as well. This means that profits must eventually decline as well.

Can an economy consist entirely of Department I?

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Michael Mann on power

Dan Little reviews Michael Mann on power.

Little describes Mann's model as follows:

One of the generalizing frameworks that he uses throughout all four volumes is what he refers to as the "IEMP model" of social power: ideological, economic, military, and political. He believes that these aspects of social reality are largely independent sets of institutions and processes, and they create different though complementary sources of power for individuals and groups within a given state of society. Here is the thumbnail he offers for each of these four high-level features of social power in Volume 3:

Ideological Power derives from the human need to find ultimate meaning in life, to share norms and values, and to participate in aesthetic and ritual practices with others. (V3, 6)

Economic Power derives from the human need to extract, transform, distribute, and consume the products of nature. Economic relations are powerful because they combine the intensive mobilization of labor with very extensive circuites of capital, trade, and production chains, providing a combination of intensive and extensive power and normally also of authoritative and diffused power. (V3, 8)

Military Power. Since writing my previous volumes, I have tightened up the definition of military power to "the social organization of concentrated and lethal violence." (V3, 10)

Political Power is the centralized and territorial regulation of social life. The basic function of government is the provision of order over this realm. (V3, 12)

In Marxist terms, economic power would refer to the control of the means of production. The state would encompass both military and political power. While the superstructure would include both the state and institutions of ideological power such as organised relgion, educational institutions, and the mass media.

The superstructure acts to protect the economic power of the ruling class. The material basis for these manisfestations of power is in the control of the means of production.

It is the division of society in classes that drives history. Mann is working at the edges, not at the centre which is class warfare.

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Gays and Lesbians: Sucked in by the Far Right

Ted Rall writes that Gays and Lesbians: Sucked in by the Far Right.

Rall opines that:

The sad truth is that the LGBT movement has abandoned its progressive roots. It has become a conservative movement.

Italics in original

Rall further argues that the LGBT used to challenge marriage, the nuclear family, and militarism:

Back in the 1970s, Michael Warner reminds us in his 1999 book “The Trouble with Normal,” gays weren’t trying to assimilate into the toxic “mainstream” cultures of monogamism and empire. Instead, they were pointing the way toward other ways of life.

The Socialist Alliance's policy on LGBTI says that:

We live in a society which attempts to dictate sexual preference and gender identity through promoting the gender stereotypes and homophobic attitudes which underpin the heterosexual nuclear family, and by promoting marriage and the nuclear family as the only legitimate model for relationships. Lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, trans people and intersex people suffer oppression because their lives are a challenge to the nuclear family which is an economic cornerstone of capitalism.

The policy on Marriage and Civil Unions says that:

In other countries civil unions have been offered to the LGBTI community to placate the movement for equal marriage rights. This is not the situation in Australia, where even civil unions have been suppressed by the federal government because they “mimic marriage”. It is for this reason that the Socialist Alliance supports civil unions but will continue the campaign for marriage . Civil unions are not a substitute for marriage rights.

Because of the opposition, gay marriage is a progressive issue in Australia. However, as the opposition disappears, and monogamy for LGBTI becomes acceptable, then Rall's arguments about moving the progressive focus back to issues of the mainstream becomes important. It is strange to think that the USA is more progressive than Australia on this issue.

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My Van, My Tardis, My Home

Trevor Brown writes about My Van, My Tardis, My Home (pp.18-19) in The Big Issue #428 (22-28 March 2103).

In this article, Brown laments the detrimental effects of the Occupy Movement on the homeless:

Ripples that spread out from various ‘Occupy’ movements over the past couple of years increased pressure on many of us on the streets. We came under increased attention from law-enforcement personnel who seemed intent on making sure we weren't an advanced guard for groups hoping to take up residence in the middle of cities. The homeless were found ‘guilty by association’; we were caught in the open ground between authorities and Occupiers. The pressure increased: I came under verbal attack by members of the public for the first time. Sadly, activities by the group only disenfranchised the very people they were trying to promote as worthy of help and support.

Emphasis Mine

The backlash against the Occupy Movement has rebounded on the homeless. It has drawn them into a political battle they do not want to be part of. They just want to be able to rejoin society.

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Studying entrepreneurship without doing it

Seth Godin takes a dim view of Studying entrepreneurship without doing it.

Likewise, it is impossible to be a revolutionary without facing the fear and discomfit of belonging to a revolutionary party.

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Why Does No One Speak of America’s Oligarchs?

Yves Smith asks Why Does No One Speak of America’s Oligarchs?

The current narrative about Cyprus portrays the country as a tax-havern for the Russian oligarchs. Smith challenges this narrative.

Smith asks:

…But see another implicit part of the story: that Russia’s oligarchs and “dirty money” are a distinctive national creation. Do you ever hear Carlos Slim or Rupert Murdoch or the Koch Brothers described as oligarchs? To dial the clock back a bit, how about Harold Geneen of ITT, which was widely known to conduct assassinations in Latin America if it couldn’t get its way by less thuggish means? (This is not mere rumor, I’ve had it confirmed by a former ITT executive).

Smith makes the point that the oligarchs in the USA are called elites instead. She writes that Simon Johnson clearly described in his important 2009 Atlantic article, The Quiet Coup, that American was in the hands of oligarchs:

Now Johnson carefully laid the bread crumbs, but so as not to violate the rules of power player discourse, pointedly switched from the banana republic term “oligarch” to the more genteel and encompassing label “elites” when talking about the US (“elites” goes beyond the controlling interests themselves to include their operatives as well as any independent opinion influencers). Yet despite his depiction of extensive parallels between the role played by oligarchs in emerging economies and the overwhelming influence of the financial elite in the US, there’s been a peculiar sanctimonious reluctance to apply the word oligarch to the members of America’s ruling class. Some of that is that we Americans idolize our rich, and the richer the better. No one looks too hard at the fact many of our billionaires started out with a leg up, parlaying a moderate family fortune (for instance, in the case of Donald Trump) into a bigger one, or having one’s success depend on other forms of family help (Bill Gates’ mother having the connection to an IBM executive that enabled Gates to license MS-DOS to them).

Smith concludes:

Confucius said that the beginning of wisdom was learning to call things by their proper names. The time is long past to kid ourselves about the nature of the ruling class in America and start describing it accurately, as an oligarchy.

But the question remains: how does an oligarchy arise from Capitalism?

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What is "critical" about critical realism?

Dan Little asks What is "critical" about critical realism?

Little lists three (3) elements of "critical" philosophy:

1. Critical thinking as emancipatory: This meaning is reflected in Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. "The philosophers have sought to understand the world; the point, however, is to change it."
2. Critique as illusion-destroying: Another dimension of the idea of criticism in the Marxist tradition is the idea of "critique" -- focused intellectual effort to uncover the implicit (and misleading) assumptions of various schemes of thought and policy.
3. Critique as self-creation: This involves the feature of "reflexiveness" that obtains in the social world. We constitute the social world, for better or worse. And the forms of knowing that we gain through the social sciences also give rise to forms of creating of new social forms -- again, for better or worse.

The third point is really a really a realisation of the maxim that the subjective influences the objective, and the objective influences the subjective.

In essence, we are to use critical realism to uncover the reality behind the scenes and change that reality for the betterment of humankind.

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