"The contributions to the Forum refer to Simon Clarke’s ‘two stages of the same project’, as Clarke explained regarding Marx’s work. They make apparent that Clarke’s initial intellectual contributions to the critique of political economy, form analysis, value theory, theory of the state and money were essential to his later understanding of the collapse and metamorphosis of the former URSS State Socialism into a capitalist form, and his analysis of the political implications of such transformation on labour relations, working-class interests and class struggle in Russia, other Eastern European countries, China, and Vietnam."

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03098168231171635

"In short, the U.S. economy will suffer enormously in a large-scale trade war with China, which the current levels of Trump-imposed tariffs, at more than 100 percent, surely constitute if left in place. In fact, the U.S. economy will suffer more than the Chinese economy will, and the suffering will only increase if the United States escalates. The Trump administration may think it’s acting tough, but it’s in fact putting the U.S. economy at the mercy of Chinese escalation.

The United States will face shortages of critical inputs ranging from basic ingredients of most pharmaceuticals to inexpensive semiconductors used in cars and home appliances to critical minerals for industrial processes including weapons production. The supply shock from drastically reducing or zeroing out imports from China, as Trump purports to want to achieve, would mean stagflation, the macroeconomic nightmare seen in the 1970s and during the COVID pandemic, when the economy shrank and inflation rose simultaneously. In such a situation, which may be closer at hand than many think, the Federal Reserve and fiscal policymakers are left with only terrible options and little chance of staving off unemployment except by further raising inflation."

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/trade-wars-are-easy-lose

"It’s a myth to think of the US as uniquely free from monetary and fiscal constraints. The US has special powers to issue debt and find willing purchasers, of course, but freedom to issue debt is not the same as freedom to spend. In 1978, the world’s central banks were prepared to abandon their dollar reserves if the US continued to pursue an inflationary politics, as it did under Carter. So in the supply-side view, the US as dollar hegemon is quite limited in the kinds of spending it can support. Off the table is anything that’s too redistributive or liberating—welfare, or investment in free education and health care—because these empower labor and the poor.

By contrast, spending on defense, police, and prisons was fine, as were so-called tax cuts, which are really tax expenditures. The supply siders proposed a budget that was extremely generous in subsidizing financial wealth holders—creating these government-subsidized markets for capital gains—and extremely austere in subsidizing wages or spending on the poor. I think this captures the real motives behind the business revolt of the 1970s. Despite appearances, supply siders weren’t screaming for less government; they were screaming for government to subsidize capital income on a new basis. Hence this shift from industrial profits to capital gains."

https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/against-the-people/

Wow! I didn't known that McChesney was a rock critic once upon a time. RIP :-(

"Robert W. McChesney, the lion of anti-corporate media scholarship, is dead at the age of 72. He was, for decades, probably the most prominent academic critic of American media from the left, focused on all the ways our idealized vision of a “free press” was actually hampered by the power of big business, the wealthy, and government.

McChesney came from my favorite subgenre of media scholars: those who had a career in working journalism before entering the hallways of academe. He was a sports stringer for UPI and — even more hardcore — an ace ad salesman. In 1979, he was founding publisher of The Rocket, the Seattle alt newspaper that would become the bible of the Pacific Northwest music scene, including being the first to write about Nirvana.1

Ironically, his primary contribution to The Rocket’s editorial ethos seems to have been to convince its staffers to cover mainstream acts (AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Rush) alongside all the local indie bands they preferred — all “so that advertisers would believe that 100,000 people actually read our magazine…[we] participated in launching The Rocket not because we cared that much about music, but because we cared that much about publishing.” Not the early career you might expect from the man who’d become the country’s chief critic of corporate media ownership."

https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/03/robert-w-mcchesney-americas-leading-left-wing-critic-of-corporate-media-has-died/

"The debate over whether to take Trump literally or seriously is over. He has now learnt how to be the tyrant he always wished to be. That took a while. But, with the help he has received, he is there. His administration is engaged in a comprehensive assault on the American republic and the global order it created. Under attack domestically are the state, the rule of law, the role of the legislature, the role of the courts, the commitment to science and the independence of the universities. All these were the pillars on which US freedom and prosperity rested. Now, he is destroying the liberal international order. Soon, I presume, Trump will be invading countries, as he proceeds to restore the age of empires.
(...)
It seems inevitable that these tariffs, plus the uncertainty created by the unanchored, and so unpredictable, new policy environment, will damage the world and US both now and in the longer term. Our economies are far more open than ever before. Sudden and huge increases in protection will have correspondingly bigger economic effects than before. Stock markets are surely right to guess that a good part of today’s productive capital stock will turn out to be scrap: continued market turmoil is likely.

This offers a perverse kind of hope. The attempt by Trump and his associates to undermine the republic would take time. It is now more likely that he will run out of it. Imagine that as a result of all this turmoil, the economy indeed falters and so the Republicans are hammered in the midterms. This would make the Maga project far more difficult to carry out. Who knows? US institutions might begin to show a little backbone. Above all, the next presidential election might actually be a fair one.

So long as Maga dominates the American right, the US potential for unpredictable, irrational and pernicious behaviour will remain. That is, alas, a huge gift to China."

https://www.ft.com/content/d96d4a44-2b75-4222-b77a-afe72c1b9174

"The US doesn't have enough qualified tool-and-die makers and other skilled tradespeople to produce the machines that will make the goods that Americans want to buy. New tradespeople can be trained, but acquiring these skilled trades is a process of many years. For the US to reshore its manufacturing, it needs substantial, sustained public investment in capacity-building: loans and grants to train workers and investment in basic research and other non-market goods needed to recover the US manufacturing base.

America should do all that, but if it wants to try, it needs a robust, predictable, orderly system of government to build upon. It needs the kind of reliable and orderly processes that make people feel safe about changing trades and going back to school. It needs imports of goods from overseas that can be used to restart the US manufacturing capacity that can replace those imports.

But in a market like this one, dominated by monopolies who needn't fear the Trump-gutted FTC, DOJ and CFPB; where cartels have captured their regulators; where Doge-style chaos spreads existential terror about the future, tariffs will only raise prices, without any significant re-shoring or capacity building. The Trump tariffs are a gift to giants like Nike, who have the logistics sophistication to exploit loopholes, demand preferential rates from shippers and brokers, and to pass on costs to their customers. Any domestic company that seeks to compete with Nike will not have these advantages. For Nike – and other dominant companies – the Trump tariffs are just another moat, another obstacle which they can hurdle, but which stops smaller competitors dead in their tracks:"

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/07/it-matters-how-you-slice-it/#too-big-to-care

"Trump’s erratic tariff actions, alongside his reversal of the former bipartisan policy on Ukraine, has already had indirect results. In alleged defense against the American turn, Europe and Canada have both donned the nationalist mantle of sovereignty and given Trump one of the main changes he has called for: an increase in their military expenditures so as to correct America’s disproportionate share of NATO’s military costs. Since American firms will also get a good share of the increased military expenditures abroad, the bloated US military-industrial complex will get a further boost.

As well, it may be that the uncertainty created over access to the US market likewise has method in its madness: corporations may now bias future global investments and supply chains to locate in the US “just-in-case.” This is of general concern but hits home especially in Canada since it is so close, so already integrated, and with costs relatively comparable.

Underlying all this lies the primary question at the core of Trump’s agenda. Paraphrased, it asks: “Why, if America is the world’s dominant power, does it accept such a disproportionate share of globalization’s burdens and receive such an unfair share of the benefits?” The framing of America’s status in these over-wrought terms adds a further method-in-madness: misdirection."

https://socialistproject.ca/2025/04/man-who-would-be-king/

"Silicon Valley’s celebration of reading has blended very badly with the worship of power. The problems of the Silicon Valley canon, and increasingly of Silicon Valley itself, reflect the problems of a monoculture, in which people have converged on a particular definition of greatness built around engineering prowess and large-scale social disruption. That highlights some of the possibilities of technology, while occluding others.

Perhaps, instead of remaking America so that it reflects the Silicon Valley ethos, we ought to rebuild Silicon Valley’s internal economy to include some of the diversity and creativity in the society that surrounds it. The engineer’s focus on simplifying and solving problems can be of great value, so long as it is leavened by a deep appreciation of the richness and complexity of the systems that it looks to transform. Without that, it is liable to result in disaster."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-21/to-understand-doge-look-to-the-tech-industry-s-reading-list

"By popular request, it’s the Ordinary Unhappiness Severance episode! Abby, Patrick, and Dan reflect on the hit show from the perspectives of political economy and libidinal economy, from Adam Smith to Adam Scott to Karl Marx to Mark S and beyond (with plenty of Freud and workplace war stories along the way). What ensues is less about answering plot mysteries (although spoilers abound) than it is about exploring how the show poses questions about repression, the division of labor, alienation, and more. What does working do to us as individuals, as co-workers, and as political subjects? How do our workplaces and their rituals channel our desires and our anxieties, shape our personas, and even divvy up our basic experiences of space and time? What are the psychic wages of maintaining “work-life balance” and what interventions – technological, chemical, and ideological – do we rely on to “make it work”? Does living under capitalism mean that we have always already been severed, and what should we expect about the limits, and the possibilities, of prestige television when it comes to representing the paradoxes and foreclosures of capitalism itself?"

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2131830/episodes/16917156

For anybody interested in #PoliticalEconomy, or the international order, this is really fun https://open.substack.com/pub/paulkrugman/p/the-price-of-peace-a-conversation?r=7ackg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

"The output of new fusionism was and continues to be virulently, nauseatingly racist. One prominent figure in the movement gleefully recalled watching a peer tell “a black intellectual that his race’s problems might be caused by an hereditary IQ deficiency.” Another, Richard J. Herrnstein, a co-author of the notorious “The Bell Curve,” wrote in a letter to a friend: “It continually amazes me that even biologists deny having eugenic sentiments, as if they were shameful.”

The end goal of such a noxious politics was to enshrine racial and gendered inequalities as inevitable, to outsource the difficult work of democratic dispute to pseudoscientists, and to appeal to the ostensible authority of biology to quash dissent. (Never mind that virtually all credible biologists rejected its assertions.) It was a political movement that aspired to eliminate politics altogether, replacing disagreement in the public sphere with the fatalism of genetics.

“Hayek’s Bastards” can be dense — a risk for any serious work of intellectual history — but it can also be entertaining. Slobodian’s wry commentary offers welcome respite from both the difficulty and the moral odiousness of his subject: He describes a neoliberal economist’s choice to live in an artists loft as “off-brand” and decries the “punitive neo-Victorian tone” of new fusionist books with titles like “The Loss of Virtue.”"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/04/04/hayeks-bastards-quinn-slobodian-review/

"Similar to plebiscites and referendums, direct economics seeks to do an end run around experts and incumbents and communicate straight to individual citizens and voters. It tries to demystify what have long been naturalised processes captured in stock market indices, interest rates and even fiat currency, to expose these as mere tools of the elites in further oppressing the true people.

We can see direct economics in action in three different ways. First is the centralisation of executive power in US President Donald Trump’s tariff policy. The arbitrariness of his tariff announcements is taken as a demerit by many. Yet arguably, from the point of view of direct economics, it is this very arbitrariness that is their strength.
(...)
Direct economics constitutes a powerful attack on existing institutions and people that stand between the citizens and their leaders. Whether its tactics, gimmicks and whims can outlast their tumultuous effects on the conventional markets is something that the next weeks and months will show. So far, the interest rate on US Treasury bills is sliding downwards, and consumer confidence is plummeting too. The gamble of direct economics is that none of this will matter."

https://www.ft.com/content/5d5be168-ada4-4fc2-a213-374334888514

That's what you get when you put a total stooge as the leader of the (soon to be former) most powerful country in the world.

"Not long after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the administration’s economic staff went to work on a daunting task: determining tariff rates for dozens of countries to fulfill the president’s campaign pledge of imposing “reciprocal” trade barriers.

After weeks of work, aides from several government agencies produced a menu of options meant to account for a wide range of trading practices, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Instead, Trump personally selected a formula that was based on two simple variables — the trade deficit with each country and the total value of its U.S. exports, said two of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to recount internal talks. While precisely who proposed that option remains unclear, it bears some striking similarities to a methodology published during Trump’s first administration by Peter Navarro, now the president’s hard-charging economic adviser. After its debut in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, the crude math drew mockery from economists as Trump’s new global trade war prompted a sharp drop in markets."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/04/trump-tariffs-reason-advisers/

"The trade war comes as China is still struggling with deflation, a housing bust and dismal demography. For the past five years the Communist Party has neglected weak consumption and embraced an unwise statism that has cramped the private sector. China has exported its overcapacity, swamping the world with goods, and fostered a spiky chauvinism that unsettles America’s allies both in Asia and Europe.

Despite all this, China enters the new age of MAGA stronger than in Mr Trump’s first term. President Xi Jinping has long argued that America is too polarised and overstretched to sustain its global role. One of his slogans warns of “great changes unseen in a century”. His paranoid nationalism used to seem like dystopian hyperbole. Now that Mr Trump is committing such wanton self-harm and general destruction, it looks ahead of its time.

Mr Xi has been preparing for today’s chaotic world ever since becoming China’s leader in 2012. He has urged economic and technological self-sufficiency on his country. China has reduced its vulnerability to American chokeholds, such as sanctions and export controls. Although its banks still need access to dollars, it now makes most non-bank international payments in yuan.
China’s domestic economy has unrecognised strengths.

Competition and an embrace of technology mean that its industrial firms thrash Western rivals in everything from electric vehicles to the “low-altitude economy”, meaning drones and flying taxis. Viewed from China, Mr Trump’s tariffs will condemn Detroit to 1970s-style obsolescence, just as his crusade against universities will set back innovation"

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/04/03/how-america-could-end-up-making-china-great-again

"Mr Trump called it one of the most important days in American history. He is almost right. His “Liberation Day” heralds America’s total abandonment of the world trading order and embrace of protectionism. The question for countries reeling from the president’s mindless vandalism is how to limit the damage.

Almost everything Mr Trump said this week—on history, economics and the technicalities of trade—was utterly deluded. His reading of history is upside down. He has long glorified the high-tariff, low-income-tax era of the late-19th century. In fact, the best scholarship shows that tariffs impeded the economy back then. He has now added the bizarre claim that lifting tariffs caused the Depression of the 1930s and that the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were too late to rescue the situation. The reality is that tariffs made the Depression much worse, just as they will harm all economies today. It was the painstaking rounds of trade talks in the subsequent 80 years that lowered tariffs and helped increase prosperity.

On economics Mr Trump’s assertions are flat-out nonsense. The president says tariffs are needed to close America’s trade deficit, which he sees as a transfer of wealth to foreigners. Yet as any of the president’s economists could have told him, this overall deficit arises because Americans choose to save less than their country invests—and, crucially, this long-running reality has not stopped its economy from outpacing the rest of the G7 for over three decades. There is no reason why his extra tariffs should eliminate the deficit. Insisting on balanced trade with every trading partner individually is bonkers—like suggesting that Texas would be richer if it insisted on balanced trade with each of the other 49 states, or asking a company to ensure that each of its suppliers is also a customer."

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/04/03/president-trumps-mindless-tariffs-will-cause-economic-havoc

"A trade war triggered by President Donald Trump applying a 25 per cent tariff on all imports could cause a $1.4tn hit to the world economy and dramatically drive up US prices, according to a new study modelling the fallout from a retaliatory spiral.

Econometric analysis of a worst-case scenario, where US trade partners hit back against Washington, shows a Trump-inspired tariff war would cause widespread trade disruption, rising prices and falling living standards.

The study by economists at Aston University in the UK examines how a tariff tit-for-tat forces complex shifts in global commerce, starting in North America between the US, Mexico and Canada, before spilling out into Europe and then the rest of world.

It remains highly uncertain at what level Trump will set “reciprocal” tariffs this Wednesday on what he has called “Liberation Day” — and how affected nations and trade blocs will respond.
To depict the potential fallout, the model examines six escalating scenarios, using bilateral trade data from 132 countries in 2023."

https://www.ft.com/content/c21f29d6-f8c5-4596-8652-42c0be96a269