Deutsche Version

Questions by Reinhard Jellen, Translated from the original German by Joe Keady, Originally published in: Telepolis August 6, 2012, Part 1 of this interview is here; part 2 is here.

During the Keynesian era, the state established itself as an active supporter of economic life through direct and indirect interventions. However, the basic inconsistency between material output and its abstract and crisis-prone valorization in the bourgeois economy was never questioned. As a result, the fundamental dilemma remained: an increase in productivity with unchanged or stagnant rates of accumulation accompanied by a tendency to cut jobs and the increasing erosion of the basis for real accumulation. Weiterlesen »

Deutsche Version

Questions by Reinhard Jellen, Translated from the original German by Joe Keady, Originally published in: Telepolis August 2, 2012, Part 1 of this interview is here; part 3 is here

While both neoliberal and Keynesian theorists prefer to interpret the crisis as a problem of supply- or demand-side valorization, Ernst Lohoff and Norbert Trenkle claim that the bourgeois economy suffered a heart attack with the onset of the IT age when the increasing replacement of human labor with technology crowded exponentially larger numbers of people out of waged labor than it took in while retaining labor as the fundamental source of profit. It is a change that they say can only be compensated with speculative capital, or what is known as “fictitious capital.” Weiterlesen »

Deutsche Version

Questions by Reinhard Jellen, Translated from the original German by Joe Keady, Originally published in: Telepolis on August 1, 2012, Part 2 of this interview is here; part 3 is here

Black clouds on the horizon: With economies in Europe threatening to fall like dominoes and the end of the euro in sight, the political countermeasures seem to be increasingly ineffective despite their absurd dimensions (Germany, for example, is currently committed to an overall liability of € 644 billion). Weiterlesen »

Deutsche Version

Ernst Lohoff and Norbert Trenkle

Walther Rathenaus’ hundred year old dictum “The economy is our fate:” sounds threatening today. The economy, the Holy of Holies of this society and its practical pivot, is out of control. Until recently the economy was regarded as the refuge of a higher reason. Today in reading economic news, we feel regularly transposed into a lunatic asylum. Since the subprime crisis brought the global financial markets to the edge of collapse in the fall of 2008, the world economy has only been stabilized for the short-term. The political movers and shakers and their economic sages had hardly proclaimed the “end of the crisis” in an instrumental optimistic way when new bad news was at the door. As soon as one fire or troublespot was buried with new masses of fresh money, the fire blazed at two or three other corners of the capitalist world system. Through the emergency nationalization of rotten credits, a policy of the cheapest money and massive state indebtedness, governments and central banks successfully averted the threatening global economic collapse. However they only prepared the next, even greater crisis. Now the bursting of the state bubbles threatens to drag the world economy to the brink. Weiterlesen »

Deutsche Version

Ernst Lohoff

Euro-skeptics are not the only ones who believe that Europe should say goodbye to the euro – some social liberals do as well. And instead of an anti-capitalist critique, there is a kind of economic neo-nationalism with traces of cultural bigotry spreading on the left. Weiterlesen »

Deutsche Version

An Interview with Moishe Postone

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Deutsche Version – Versione Italiana

Norbert Trenkle

Parts of the left are attributing the current global economic crisis to political causes. Neoliberalism, so the argument goes, with its total deregulation of markets and particularly the radical increases in freedom accorded to the financial markets, has failed. Now, they claim, we are approaching an era of regulation and control by the state, and our task is to influence the forms it will take. The central demand is for the rolling-back of the influence of finance capital and a strengthening of the real economy, which in turn should itself be reformed both ecologically and socially. Whether or not this will succeed is treated primarily as a question of the balance of social power and of political mobilisation.

However, this analysis overlooks the fundamental character of the global crisis. Weiterlesen »

Deutsche Version – Versión española – Version française

On the underlying causes of the current financial crisis.

Norbert Trenkle (May 2008) Weiterlesen »

Deutsche Version

Maria Wölflingseder

The new magic formula against poverty, unemployment and all other grievous dislocations is: “Invest in Social Capital. Enjoy immediate profit, the personal surplus value of voluntary activity. You, dear entrepreneur, create social and ecological surplus value.” Sociology has discovered “social capital” as a wonder cure. Weiterlesen »

Deutsche Version — Version française — Versión española — Nederlandse versie — Versione italiana — българска версия

Why the collapsing of the financial bubble is not the fault of “greedy bankers” and why there can be no going back to a social welfare capitalism

A new version of the “stab in the back” legend of the 1920s and ‘30s is making the rounds: “our” economy has supposedly fallen victim to the limitless greed of a handful of bankers and speculators. Gorged on the cheap money of the U.S. Federal Reserve and backed up by irresponsible politicians, these greedy bankers have–so the legend goes–brought the world to the edge of the abyss, while honest people are made to play the fools.

Nothing could be more contrary to fact Weiterlesen »