economics

Join Common Struggle in Boston for to study and build together around the Housing Monster, a new book from prole.info.

Saturday, November 3rd
6pm
Encuentro 5, 9 Hamilton Place, Boston, MA
Facebook Event

This will be our second session. We will be discussing the second half of the book, including the following sections:

The subprime mortgage crisis that erupted in the United States has transformed into a global financial crisis. This crisis, which is being spun as a simple recession, is in fact one of the most serious crises since the 1929 Great Depression. As such, capitalism, on the brink of bankruptcy, has called on the State for help and is demanding that workers pay for the crisis by having their income reduced. As we can see by the rising numbers of unemployment and households struggling to survive, no one is left unharmed.

Numerous experts and economists have intervened to offer solutions that would, they hope, rehabilitate capitalism. They argue that the causes of this disaster are outside or foreign to capitalism. We do not agree. Let's be clear and identify what we believe are the true reasons behind this crisis that affects us all.

Social systems don't live forever. They have their own internal contradictions, which produce systemic crises. Capitalism is no different; someday it will end. The question we are addressing is whether it will be followed by barbarism, mass death, and barrenness, or by a better world. The current crisis is not only one of greatly increased attacks on the working class and oppressed people but is also a fundamental crisis of the system itself. We cannot predict the demise of the system, something in which the working class and oppressed people must also play a conscious part. We can, however, state that this is the most serious crisis of capitalism since the 1930's--and that one was only "solved" by World War II.

An understanding of today's world crisis must begin at the end of that previous crisis.

by Wayne Price

Anarchism has been challenged for its supposed lack of vision about post-revolutionary society. In particular, Michael Albert challenges the great anarchist Malatesta. Actually Malatesta did have a post-capitalist vision. it was not a formal model but a set of ideas which were to be developed through experimentation, flexibility, and pluralism. The highpoints of his political life are outlined. His ideas are contrasted with that of other great radicals.

The second most important problem for anticapitalist radicals is how to get from here to there; that is, how to get from a capitalist society to a good society. The first problem is where do we want to go--what we mean by a good, noncapitalist, society. Working together with Michael Albert, Robin Hahnel has spent years on this first problem, developing a model of what a good society might be like, or at least how its economy might work. In a series of books and essays (e.g., Albert 2000, 2005; Albert & Hahnel 1983, 1991), they have thought out how an economy might function which is managed by its people rather than by either private capitalists or bureaucrats--an economy managed through bottom-up democratic cooperation, rather than by either the market or centralized planning. They call this "participatory economics," or "parecon" for short. Their model involves coordination by councils of workers and consumers to produce an economic plan. I will not go into it now; it is further discussed in Hahnel’s current book. In my opinion, their model has enriched the discussion of what a socialist anarchist society might look like.