Cause this disconnect between the whole crashing global economy thing and the rising stock market is real frickin weird my guys
No, this is capitalism working just fine. Remember that the stock market isn't a reflection of the economy, it's a reflection of the most concentrated part of the economy that's owned by the ultra rich. What you're seeing is an increasing consolidation of wealth by the 1% - which is what capitalism was designed to do
This is definitely a new phenomenon for the stock market and the real economy to be this disconnected. I think it's because all the true believer stock brokers realized that what they do really is just pure speculation and they can totally ignore the actual economy (as opposed to previous speculation where I think many of them believed the stock market in some way correlates with reality).
The Dig podcast had leftist economist (yes that's a real thing apparently) Yanis Varoufakis on where he talks about how this is the decoupling of financialized capitalism from the capitalist economy, how it is unprecedented and what it might mean. Good listen if you have the time.
He considered his project to be a critique of "political economy" (the economics of the time), but to do that critique he had to become an expert in it, so functionally yes, technically no.
I mean if I write a book about how the theory of evolution is wrong doesn't that still make me a biologist?
In the early USSR there was a big doctrinal fight about the specific theory of evolution that would be accepted. I bet I could convince people here not to believe in modern evolutionary biology by telling them Stalin didn't agree with it.
Sort of. This one is tricky because people do that to make themselves seem like experts when they're not. Good example is Anne Applebaum. She is a journalist with no academic history credentials. But she puts herself out there as a historian. Her work is insanely biased garbage about the gulags and Ukrainian famine. Actual academic historians who themselves are no fans of communism have pointed out the errors in her work - errors that wouldn't be there if she had actual training as a historian or even just less biased. But that doesn't stop the media from using her as the "historical expert" on the Soviet Union.
Going off my memory... Applebaum sets out to show that A) Stalin intentionally starved the Ukrainians, and B) communist ideology was also a big part of the famine and is something intrinsic in it.
Actual historians dismiss A completely. Stephen Kotkin, a Princeton historian, wrote the definitive work on Stalin. He is most definitely not a pro-communist or pro-Stalin. But he and other real historians reject this idea of an "intentional" famine, it's completely nonsensical and there's not really an evidence for it.
Point B is also not among the scholarly consensus about the famine. Basically, most actual historians boil it down to some combination of factors: environmental, the general impact of mechanization and industrialization, how the USSR specifically implemented these reforms, and the Kulaks destroying things intentionally. How much emphasis you place on each factor depends on which historian you're talking to. I think most cite the environmental factors as very significant. I do think there's certainly some blame re: how the Soviets implemented collectivization, but frankly I think history shows the processes of agricultural mechanization and industrialization is brutal. The USSR and China both did in a few years what capitalist economies did over many decades. But importantly, I don't think most historians regard the famine as some broad indictment of communism, as Applebaum does. Certainly the fact that there weren't really any significant famines afterward in the USSR or China would lend credence to that this was more trying to squeeze all these important changes into a narrow timeframe.
The beef with Applebaum is she clearly knew the story she wanted to tell and then tried to build the evidence around that. If you want to go after consensus opinions of actual historians fine, but you're probably just going to embarrass yourself as Applebaum did. Don't pretend your hit piece is actual scholarship. Of course journalists can write on history. Barbara Tuchmann is the gold standard for this. But importantly, Tuchmann wasn't trying to prove her own views. She was a real journalist and approached he job as a retelling the real histories. This was the opposite approach of Applebaum.
"Guns of August" and "SPQR" are my favorites, though if you're not into WWI or Rome respectively, you may not be as interested in those.
If you did it as a biologist, sure. Marx's perspective was wider than the field of political economy though. Like, for example Lature commented on a lot of science, and was proficient in it, but is usually recognized as a philosopher / anthropologist and not a scientist.
Marx is usually read as philosophy, but he would have rejected that, arguing that philosophers only reflect on the world, whereas he was both reflecting on the world and changing it in a dialectical process.
He would have wanted to be called a scientific socialist and not a philosopher.
Thanks. Link for lazy:
https://media.blubrry.com/thedig/content.blubrry.com/thedig/The_Dig-EP_269-Varoufakis.mp3
I listened to it yesterday. Good stuff. He also pointed out that he wasn't confident that what comes after capitalism will be better.
The Dig is incredible. Daniel’s questions are amazingly-well posed and meaningful, drawing out the essence of leftist thought from the interviewees.
Amazing things are possible when you put the federal government's ability to create money to use. It's no big mystery, just really fucked up.
We could currently be using it to help people, but instead we're just keeping the stock market flush with cash.
Of course, you should also have to tax that money out of the economy too, or else eventually there may be bad inflation.
The economy is dying and the stock market is it's brain activity on DMT.
Sometimes I muse on the idea that our current era is almost like the movie "the sixth sense", and when the history books are written the context will spell it out more clearly.
Capitalism died in 2008. The trauma of it was just too much to accept...and so we just kept on going like nothing had changed. Lonely confused ghosts wandering about simulating what used to be our daily lives. Eventually enough of us will move on to the next stage....and then....those times will be VERY interesting.
It's the hegelian repetition, the owl of Minerva flies at midnight and all that. We will know capitalism has died only in hindsight.
The stock market reflects the companies that are getting rich off of the pandemic though right? Or no?
Yes, but that's really only a few of them - some medical suppliers, Amazon and other online stores, etc. They're a big sector, to be sure, but not enough to push the needle this far.
Oh hi neighbor. You must live in the cool zone with me. How's your apocalypse going?
So basically an ourobouros of bailouts and buybacks that's almost certainly a deliberate scheme to keep the zombie shambling just past election day
The silver lining is that now regular people are starting to get that a good stock market doesn't mean the economy is actually doing good.
want to scalp them
Why not at least want to convince them? Learn a couple disgusting facts about what that line is really indicating. That is the combined value of the private equity that was used to tear apart the american middle class. How about something like "that line is how just many democrats the republicans can buy".
This is Mitt Romney's shell corp, Bain Capital, funding the next generation of "democratic" leaders.
https://ibb.co/N9JSDLJ
https://ibb.co/fdT1cgG
https://ibb.co/VNybJ77
https://ibb.co/9G6MjSJ
Sorry, I'm just as pissed off but I actually think we can make a different with facts. We've been convinced to retweet bad opinions and fake articles instead of doing real research. Check out www.opensecrets.org and see who's buying your favorite nazi and vilify them on twitter. It's much more valuable than us just complaining about it.
next time no one nothings at nothing im not going nothing at nobody
You made threats without names. coward.
Haven't read it, but Capital Is Dead. Is This Something Worse? by McKenzie Wark (who I love, she's awesome) might interest you.
Ooohhh, I like this idea of just linking the libgen link every time I recommend a book.
While the sock market might be decoupled from production I believe it does reflect (superimposed with some other bubbles) the expectation of capital that no socialist policy or threat to profits can be organized by the labour classes of the powerful countries.
This means that having the greatest recession and a huge pandemic, and still only mostly neoliberal welfare social democratic solutions without attacks on the wealth or means of productions of the capitalists was an experiment with the result that socialists are weak. That governments don't reign in, but try to stabilize and continue as it goes as long as people don't revolt.
We could see the difference between the US, UK and Sweden and Germany, Netherlands and France (later on) and Vietnam, China, Honkong.
We could also look at ressource starved countries like South Africa to see how this crisis would play out in the US in 50 years time.
(Small disclaimer: China showed that it is able to enact huge centrally planed policies and listens to science, this is a show to the world economy that they as part of its capitalist motor will not be slowed down)
