Alternative Economics: Reversing Stagnation

AUTHORS INDEX

Attac: network and portal of alternative economics in Germany and Austri

Marc Batko: Portland Oregon translator of alternative economics and liberation theology

Joachim Bischoff: editor of Sozialismus and prolific writer

Franz Garnreiter: member of isw-editorial staff

Sven Giegold: member of the Green fraction in the European Parliament

Ulrike Herrmann: economics editor of taz newspaper and author of Hurrah! We Can Pay for the Crisis and The Victory of the Economy

Andreas Kolbe: former economics editor at Deutschland radio

Tomasz Konicz: critical economist living in Poland and author of many articles and books critical of finance capitalism

Helmut Martens: author and professor of sociology living in Dortmund

Mohssen Massarat: professor of politics and the economy at the University of Osnabruck

Michael Schwendinger: Austrian economist at the blog arbeit wirtschaft

Ulrich Thielemann: formerly professor at the University of St Gallen (Switzerland) and founder of the MeM alternative economics think tank

Ernst Wolff: critical economist and author of The IMF as a Superpower: Chronicle of a Predatory Attack (2014)

Karl Georg Zinn: taught economics at the University of Aachen from 1970-2004 and author of Social Market Economy and Lessons of Keynesianism

SHORT DESCRIPTION (400 words)

The anthology Alternative Economics: Reversing Stagnation includes 3 translator’s introductions, 3 poems from the translator, 12 articles by Tomas Konicz, 1 article by Ulrike Herrmann, 1 article by Helmut Martens, 1 article by Franz Garnreiter, 1 article by Sven Giegold,, 1 article by Karl Georg Zinn, 1 article by Ulrich Thielemann, 2 articles by Mohssen Massarat, 2 articles by Joachim Bischoff, 1 article by Andreas Kolbe and articles by Attac and the Rosa Luxemburg foundation..

Mainstream market-radical economic theory has led to exploding inequality, cynicism and resignation and has no answers to mass unemployment, growing precarity, global warming and the rights of nature. The time is right for alternative economics, for economics that is part of life, not a steamroller crushing creativity and self-determination.

The market is not self-healing or a panacea but a necessary and helpful instrument after political questions are answered: what kind of society do we want? How can public necessities remain public? How can people be active participative citizens and not mere cogs in the machine? How can nature be protected and nurtured and not trivialized as a free good, external or sink?

Alternative economics is a vital corrective to market radicalism and neoliberalism with unfettered deregulation, privatization and liberalization of markets. While neoliberal mythology insists higher profits bring more jobs and greater investments, profits soar and investments fall by the wayside. Profitable companies speculate on foreign currencies and buy back their own stock while rewarding managers and CEOs with bonuses. As lessons from the 2008 financial meltdown, the financial sector should be shriveled and the public sector expanded.

The 2008 financial crisis led to the destruction of millions of jobs and the destruction of trillions in wealth. The risk managers turned out to be risk creators. The deregulation of the banking industry, the corruption of the rating agencies and the indifference of the federal government enabled speculation to eclipse productive investment. All corporate and personal achievement depends on state investment in roads, schools, hospitals, food safety, water quality and airwaves. Changing economic priorities and policies is vital to fair distribution and generalized security. All people should be assured a basic unconditional income. The 26 community centers in Vancouver Canada have a cushioning and multiplying effect. In times before Reagan, they were bursting with counseling and surrogate classes and living proof that the future can move to generalized security. Reduced working hours could be seen as a socioeconomic investment ensuring long-term health and expanding time sovereignty.

LONG DESCRIPTION (1100 words)

The financial sector should be shriveled and the public sector expanded. The myths of self-healing markets, efficient financial markets, nature as a free good, external and sink, infinite growth in a finite world, quantitative growth and the exact sciences eclipsing qualitative growth and the human sciences (history, literature, play, language, sociology, political science, philosophy) and private opulence next to public squalor (cf. John Kenneth Galbraith) must call us to rethinking - individually and collectively.

Alternative Austrian, Swiss, Polish and German economists can alert us to the bankruptcy of austerity policy and fiscal policy aiding capital at the expense of workers and the environment. The future economic policy must be regional and decentralized. A post-materialist economy is possible as we transition from excess to access and more to enough. Work, health, strength, security and happiness can be redefined. The rights of nature can be respected in a future of moderation, equality and freedom.

More and more is produced with fewer and fewer workers. Work and income have uncoupled as people cannot survive on their earnings from work and depend on credits and loans. Reducing working hours is a response to increased productivity and is the only way to assure everyone of the right to meaningful work. Reducing working hours, as Michael Schwendinger explains, is a socio-economic investment that protects long-term health interests and gives people more time sovereignty

Peter Ulrich is a Swiss economist. The economy must be embedded in society. Society must not be embedded in the economy.

Ulrich Thielemann is a Swiss and German economist. Profit making is not profit maximizing. Studying economics today is like brainwashing.

Tomasz Konicz is a Polish economist. The 30 year crisis is not an Obama crisis. Wages were stagnant for 35 years. Credit was expanded. Families worked 3 or 4 jobs. Health care, education and housing became unaffordable. The US became a black hole for the global economy.

Personal performance always depends on the work of past generations and state interventions. Americans fall to a new feudalism with the deserving and undeserving, fear-mongering and racism. Pragmatism or market religion often replaces vision, principle and courage. Confusing speculation and investment makes the next crisis inevitable. Wall Street banks spent $10 billion in campaign contribution and lobbying ensuring corruption, weak financial deregulation and shifting private losses to public taxpayers.

Profits soar and sovereignty is lost. The TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) threatens democracy and the constitutional state. The Investor-State dispute settlement mechanism elevates corporations to the status of nation states. These three judge panels are fronts for corporate investors. 600 corporate lobbyists are discussing the TTIP; senators and the public are denied any transparency! Philip Morris is suing Uruguay and Australia for lost profits through health warnings. A Swedish energy corporation Vattenfall is suing Germany for 1 billion euros for ending nuclear power too quickly! The lessons of NAFTA were repressed: the US trade deficit soared to $180 billion and one million jobs were lost.

How perverse and shameful to ignore facts and blatant failure, to give speculators a free pass for the 2008 crash, to shift costs to workers, the disabled, pensioners and the poor! In post-democracy representatives do not represent the public welfare or public interests. Do you think public spirit will fall from the sky without redistribution from top to bottom? Lies are bitter fruits of the unchecked market economy normalizing corruption and cowardice. The human future is really the welfare state where cooperation and competition reinforce each other. The market radical or market fundamentalist are caught in a false triumphalism and decry the welfare state as Bolshevism.

That globalization will benefit everyone is a deadly myth. According to the neoliberal myth, higher profits would lead to greater investments and more jobs. In truth, corporations used soaring profits to speculate on foreign currencies and buying back their own stock!

The US economy amid outsourcing and financialization is kept alive through foreign investments, social security, Medicare and suffers with false identities, the world sheriff, the empire exploiting colonies and continents through free investment trade agreements, military bases and indirect threats.

The implementation of social security insurance drastically reduced the poverty rate in the US. The country is strengthened when fellow citizens escape poverty. Most of the money paid in SSI benefits is immediately cycled back into circulation, further stimulating the economy and thereby benefiting all of us. August 14 was Social Security’s 80th birthday and July 30 was Medicare’s 50th birthday.

All personal and corporate success depended on state investments in schools, roads, hospitals, food safety, water quality and airwaves. The Schwabian housewife is a misleading model. Debts to an individual household are different than debts to corporations and states. Debts to corporations and states are necessary to create the infrastructure for future economic activity.

Political will and political motivation are necessary to break with inertia, corruption and lip service. Creating affordable housing and meaningful living wage jobs can’t be left to the market or neoliberal theory. Profit making is different than profit-maximizing. The neoliberal model promotes profits, not investments (Nikolaus Krowall). Private opulence exists alongside public squalor as John Kenneth Galbraith decried in the 1960s.

Don’t hate the media; become the media. Hope is in alternative media, intercultural learning, breaking out of the box of conformity, herd instinct and selfishness. Fear of the unknown and fear of the future can be overcome as prejudice and illiteracy can be overcome in the event of understanding, the fusion of horizons (cf. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method). Fear mongering and fault finding are false securities like cheap grace and cheap citizenship. The church (as in Nazi Germany) can become a husk of hypocrisy and barbarism, a bastion of self-righteousness where social justice and the in-breaking reign of God are trivialized. Our own logs of militarism and exploding inequality must be recognized without magnifying the specks in the eyes of others.

We are called to be subjects in a future that is open and dynamic, not closed and static. We are invited to abundant self-critical and interdependent life, not a 2-inch world of Ponderosa and Mr. Cartwright, an insular world where nothing is learning of difference and other cultures. where wars of aggression and adventure are normalized and where the outside of the cup is cleaned and the inside remains filthy. We sit here stranded and do our best to deny it, the executioner’s face is always well hidden where hunger is ugly and souls are forgotten, a hard rain’s goin to fall (Bob Dylan www.dylanradio.com).

The unexamined life isn’t worth living (Socrates). Truth wells up and cannot be imposed. Soren Kierkegaard saw truth as inwardness wounding indirectly from behind. Self-righteousness is the grand delusion, said theologian Eberhard Juengel. Self-interest means that our will and our perception are curved in ourselves, Martin Luther warned. Narcissism is the unhealed epidemic where Narcissus falls in love with his reflection in the pond and drowns (cf. Janet Twenge on www.booktv.org and Chalmers Johnson Nemesis). The ego must die for the self to be born!

TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD

By Marc Batko

THE NEOLIBERAL INDOCTRINATION

Neoliberalism serves as social indoctrination. It tells the poor and weak they are responsible for their misery. It does its utmost to prevent the true extent of social poverty from reaching the general public. The health system despite ever greater expenditures becomes increasingly inhuman, social work erodes, a re-feudalization boom rages along with de-democratization, and investors aim at privatizing the public education system. When the poor and weak blame themselves for social inequality (low motivation, negative attitudes etc), the state and businesses escape their responsibility to contribute to education, community and the infrastructure. Minds are fogged and controlled by neoliberal media, focus on the trivial (celebrity news and sports fixation) and psycho-techniques make resistance against this inhuman ideology largely impossible.

As low profits led to the explosion of the financial sector and financialization around 1980, the financial meltdown of 2008 led to the discrediting of neoliberalism. Homo oeconomicus fades away as an economic theory along with market fundamentalism and market radicalism. Market failure and state violence epitomized by Enron’s expansive accounting method and the aggressive wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria should be lessons if the future is to be worth living.

We live at the close of the neoliberal rollback where universities became profit centers, health care becomes a privilege not a right, where climate change and protection of labor and the environment are ignored in trade agreements while foreign investors can sue states for real and imaginary profits. The threat of lawsuits for lost corporate profits will have a chilling effect on labor and environmental protection.

The people are too big to fail, not the banks. Risks and bailout costs were shifted to taxpayers. When neoliberalism is rolled back and Orwellian distortion of language and democracy is ended, poverty will be ended through the exercise of true democracy. System change, not climate change is the imperative.

As capitalism grows, inequality grows. Capitalism is an inequality machine (cf. Thomas Piketty). Corporations are sometimes more powerful than nations. In addition to buying back their own stock, corporations store $7 trillion in tax havens and deny local, national and international responsibility and liability. A hundred years ago, the French socialist Jean Juares warned: Capitalism contains crisis as rain clouds contain rain.

PHILOSOPHY AND THE SEARCH FOR ORIENTATION: THE FUTURE GUIDES THE PRESENT

Striving for utopia is the hope and motivation of the present. The present transcends itself only when it includes hope and promise. The poor live in two worlds, the world of hope and the world of misery, while the rich live in only one world where the future is only a repetition of the present. Life and reality are not linear or self-evident but pluralist and dependent on interpretation. True wealth is manifest in a larger consciousness of interdependence, empathy, historical awareness and humble openness to liberation.

The future should be anticipated and protected in the present, not extrapolated from the present (cf. Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope). The penultimate draws its strength from the ultimate (cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison).

We find ourselves at the end of an epoch without clear signs of the new epoch. How can citizens be promoted and not reduced to consumers? How can the state ensure the food, housing and health necessities and not set corporate welfare and corporate profit above everything? How can education emphasize critical thinking and sustainability and be strengthened with money from a reduced pentagon and a downsized financial sector?

ALTERNATIVE ECONOMICS: REDUCING WORKING HOURS, EXCHANGING ROLES AND COMMUNITY CENTERS

Community centers could be a third way beyond the state and the market. Vancouver B.C. has 26 community centers, some with swimming pools that take your breath away. The Carnegie Community Center in the poverty-stricken Downtown East Side is subsidized by the province. There hope is restored and becomes concrete in the real functioning mosaic of interdependence and love of life. Inexpensive meals of casseroles, a library quickly filled to the brim, a computer room offering everyone 3 hours of daily computer use, a basketball gym, a game room, a TV room, a theater and counseling and class opportunities are a life-giving antidote to the non-stop consumerism and cajoling of one-dimensional neoliberal profit worship. The community centers have a cushioning and multiplying effect enabling both working and unemployed to feel integrated and welcomed in the community.

Free Internet books and publishing ebooks at Smashwords.com are examples of the new person-oriented alternative digital economics. The gate is taken away from the gatekeepers; ebooks have a 30% share of new books today that has stabilized over the last 3 or 4 years. People are reading on screens and not only on the printed page. Openculture.com gives us 700 free movies (including the 1915 Alice in Wonderland), 700 free ebooks and 450 free audio books (including George Orwell’s 1984). How can anyone be hard-nosed with 700 free movies? Super Amigos is a free Mexican movie from 2007 where the activist refuses anything packaged, goes up against bestial bullfighting, homophobia and eviction of seniors.

Access could replace excess; enough could replace more. The one thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history. The bomb changed everything except the way we think (Albert Einstein). Work, strength, health, power and nature must be re-conceptualized to avert re-feudalization, destruction of democracy and corporate destruction of the environment. As we move into a digital knowledge-based society, qualitative growth can replace quantitative growth. Instead of gazing at the stories of office buildings, we could become storytellers living double vision, universal and particular history.

Music, dance, poetry and literature deserve important places in a post-material decommodified world. The military-industrial complex and the horror of never-ending war must give way to multicultural interdependence, forgiveness, empathy, surprise, mystery, play and environmental caring.

Reducing working hours, exchanging roles and community centers are vital in a post-growth, post-fossil and post-autistic economy. Person-oriented work and investments in labor-intensive sectors could mark our transition and end exploding inequality.

The demonized social state can be re-discovered as the future of humanity. We are fulfilled in the other, in expanding possibilities and awareness, not in amassing things. Lakes are more than anti-freeze and mountains are more than landfill.

The state should be the support of the majority, rescuing those who fall under the wheel and blocking private interest from eclipsing public interest. When the government trusts citizens, citizens trust government, said Justin Trudeau, the new Canadian Prime Minister. Can we promote the welcoming spirit and not the spirit of fear in a multi-polar world in a future that is open and dynamic, not closed and static? How can the future become a future of generalized security? How can food, housing, health care be human rights and not privileges? How can sharing replace hyper-individualism, narcissism, self-righteousness and class immunization?

The state is different than a business or a household. The state can become indebted and borrow money from the future so future generations can share the benefits of social investment. Bernie Sanders wants to return people’s taxes in the form of infrastructure and education rather than transfer hundreds of billions to military contractors and he wants to regulate Wall Street and break up the big banks. Two ways the bomb changed everything is that weapons can be de-stabilizing and security cannot be only military.

Without regulation, there would be no healthy forests or fish in the lakes. Markets are not self-healing or panaceas but tools helpful after fundamental political questions are answered democratically: What kind of society do we want? How can competition and cooperation strengthen each other? How can the market, state and work be redefined? How can nature be protected as our partner and our hope and not reduced to a free good, external or sink?

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

by Marc Batko

The old gives way to the new as the snow gives way to the spring (Rilke). The swan that floats and doesn’t sink represents the intransitory in the transitory (Heidegger). The penultimate depends on the ultimate (Dietrich Bonhoeffer). "The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing (Oscar Wilde).

THE NEOLIBERAL ROLLBACK CONFUSED THE GOAT WITH THE GARDENER

The brutal epoch of the neoliberal rollback is ending. State, labor, business, and social myths have caused re-feudalization and destruction of democracy, exploding inequality, insecurity for labor, degradation of the environment and a depressed and cynical populace. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Occupy and Bernie Sanders resisted these myths in their different contexts. In the 1930s Roosevelt brought the economy from ruin to new life by creating four million jobs in two months and building thousands of miles of roads, bridges, schools, hospitals and community