THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM: A RADICAL CRITIQUE.
(5.11.06)
This is a 50+ page radically critical analysis making clear why we cannot develop a satisfactory and sustainable society unless we eventually change to a very different economic system. (See The New Economy.)
Our economic system is the basic cause of most of the serious problems evident in the world, especially the damage to the environment, the poverty and deprivation of the Third World, armed conflict and the social breakdown in the richest countries. The central faults in the system are:-- a) making production for profit within a free market the basic social mechanism, thereby producing grossly unjust and inappropriate development and distributions, and b) making limitlessly affluent living standards and economic growth the goals, and thereby ensuring that our society is grossly ecologically unsustainable. . |
Contents:
1. GROWTH;
This economy must have growth.
The Limits to Growth Analysis of our global situation.
It is a “growth and trickle down” rationale.
The volume of wasteful and unnecessary production is enormous
(but essential).
Growth here often causes loss there.
Growth creates or intensifies all the big global problems.
The environment problem
As the economy grows the quality of life falls!
2. PRODUCTION FOR PROFIT
WITHIN A COMPETITIVE MARKET.
This economy fails to do what is needed, just or ecologically sustainable.
Profit ignores need.
The marvellous free market
“The market makes the most efficient allocations.”
The freedom of enterprise
“Move over pal – Find something else to sell."
What regulates? The market, or needs and rights.
Endless, mindless, un-winnable competition.
Privatisation.
Public vs private ownership of firms
Unemployment
Payment for work.
Work.
Lousy work
Wages
Inequality
Deprivation and social breakdown FIX
Globalisation
Origins, nature and effects.
The grab by the corporate super-rich.
Third World “development”
Imperialism.
Class war.
The morality of the market is unacceptable.
3. MONEY, CAPITAL, INTERST, DEBT.
Interest,
Debt.
The money creation and banking system.
4. ECONOMIC THEORY.
The distortion; the warped understand that results.
Some of the essential definitions built into conventional economics are
viciously misleading.
Taking the GDP as the important measure.
Acceptance of the market as the basic mechanism.
The human nature assumptions within the theory.
It is not a general theory of economics; it is only about a capitalist
economy.
Economic theory as part of capitalist ideology.
We should therefore study POLITICAL ECONOMY, not economics.
Economists.
We should be very angry.