The monetary sovereignty of the federal government makes the scarcity discourse not just ideological but false. The constraint is not financial; it is political. The question is not whether the United States can afford to rebuild Flint, reopen rural hospitals, or guarantee housing. The question is whether the political coalition that controls the state can be made to prioritize those outcomes over the continued accumulation of capital. That is not a technical question; it is a political question. And political questions are answered not in economics journals but in the streets, in the legislatures, and in the struggle for a different distribution of power.
Correct on monetary sovereignty—but the key contradiction is class, not accounting. The state can fund social repair at scale, but it is structurally oriented toward protecting asset values and capital accumulation. So the real constraint isn’t “can it pay?” but “whose interests does it serve when it spends?”
What's complained about in the post is exactly the nation the Founding Fathers wanted and designed eg one in which the state would do nothing to impede the accumulation of wealth.
Independence was incited to a large extent by the Crown's limited attempt to crank down the slave trade. Unacceptable to the American colonists because the most important part of the economy.
Along with that was expansion eg stealing of the indigenous peoples' land. When the colonists' aggression in stealing the land incited the French and Indian War. The Crown defended the colonists and then dared to tax them for the incurred expense. The colonists -- more specifically the monied elite -- took offense, further fueling the push to independence.
And then when independence came, there was no benefit for the majority of people. This, reflected in large part the Constitution pre-Bill of Rights was focused only on how the oligarchy's state would function. A case can be made that that was the correct way to go at the time, but not a good case.
The concept unaddressed is the ancient law of nature: The people get the kind of state the masters impose or, at best, allow. The only alternative to that is if the people fight (which is where the American revolution was arguably revolutionary). We here in the US don't fight. And we're so submissive in not fighting that far from us have yet to suss out that, as a rule, there hasn't been a justifiable reason to vote Republican on the national level. Reader, IMO it takes a pathetically small amount of energy to do that little fighting and... well, here we are. (The post-Clinton/post-DLC national Democratic party is similar but not identical.)
"Rural America is a colony, and its economy is a colonial economy. The business of America has been largely and without apology the plundering of rural America, from which everything of value-minerals, timber, farm animals, farm crops, and 'labor' has been taken at the lowest possible price."
Very good analysis. As a product of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, I can tell you that the critique via Marxist ideological terms is spot on..
What I can also say is that Marxist ideology doesn’t really work in reality. The ineptness and nepotism of all systems ends up shining through a lot brighter. The village idiot is rewarded with veto powers over others, the state establishment of quotas and false metrics results in all sorts of problems.
It is as far from a meritocracy as imaginable.
Any criticism of state apparatuses is met with harsh punishment and jail sentences.
Marxism offers a valid tool to critique corporate fascism but it doesn’t offer a functional solution. That’s my experience anyway and that which was put forth by Jean Baudrillard in his book’Mirror of Production’ in which the central critique is that Marxism cannot break from Capitalism as it is stuck in the same productivist logic.
It doesn’t offer a different perspective and life is still based on work/value/production.
Life is beyond a dollar value, it is the single most precious thing in the universe.
There is nothing rarer and yet.. it is reduced to wages.. under capitalism or communism.
It's a Marxist socialist-capitalist mixed economy, no? Doesn't it encourage the vaunted free-market like competition between companies, but with state direction of particular production, something along those lines?
China did what to become good and productive proletariat?
They became the best capitalists imaginable under direct orders from their government to do so.
The so called communist party became the single largest capitalist corporate structure in the nation. And indeed they are successful and have uplifted more people from poverty then there are Americans.
China is a socialist state with a state-directed socialist market economy operating under strict political and strategic control of the Communist Party. Capitalist relations exist, but they are embedded within a system where the commanding heights—finance, land, energy, and long-term planning—remain under state control. That distinction matters.
Calling it “the largest capitalist corporation” flattens the real contradiction: capital accumulation exists, but it is politically managed, disciplined, and periodically constrained by the state rather than allowed to rule autonomously as in liberal capitalism.
And yes, the material outcome is undeniable: the largest poverty reduction in human history, achieved through industrialization under a state that never fully relinquished macro-control over development.
The disagreement isn’t about whether markets exist. It’s about who commands them.
I’m very cognizant of what China is about.. But thanks for the added info.
My basic criticism of Communism (and Capitalism) holds (and Baudrillard nailed it in 1973): the two are ultimately the same with one having more state controlled checks and balances while the other has unbridled greed running rampant. Both are based on reducing the human being to modes of production in which the upper echelons reap the rewards of the peasants/workers.
Both systems are artificial human social constructs designed to control the masses. Neither is really about enjoying the gift of life, the single most precious thing in the universe.
Saying capitalism and socialism are “basically the same” because both organize society is like saying a landlord and a tenant are the same because both live in a house. The question isn’t whether structure exists—it’s who holds power within it.
they are the same because they both view humans in terms of productivity. learn to parse. i was very specific in my statements.
no straw man arguments please.
if you ever have a chance to read Mirror of Production - J. Baudrillard 1973. Do so.. Quite fascinating. For me his most prophetic work is Simulacra and Simulation - 1981.
Simulacra: the sate of reality in which the description of reality is more real than reality itself.
If this doesn’t describe our modern times in a nutshell, I don’t know what does. He and his cadré of French intellectuals, who were socialists at the core, were describing our current social conditions some 40 years ago.
1) how to learn more of positive actors, concealed theories, and real applications of living economies and humane humanity (sharing resource lists are a great way!)? and
2) how to break through to media with information they cannot ignore and must present to the broader public for informed discussion?
What gets William Murphy or William Murphy ideas into acronym headlines and interviews by invitation? Assuming our William Murphy isn't already either famed cleric from this fresh search.
The depth of crisis we are now experiencing takes the measure of our unwillingness to monitor processes, restraint and accountability that prevent such crises occurring with such chaotic and blinding intensity. We have been operating outside the boundaries of sustainability, accountability and essential integrities for too long. For the West a certain finality looms large.
The monetary sovereignty of the federal government makes the scarcity discourse not just ideological but false. The constraint is not financial; it is political. The question is not whether the United States can afford to rebuild Flint, reopen rural hospitals, or guarantee housing. The question is whether the political coalition that controls the state can be made to prioritize those outcomes over the continued accumulation of capital. That is not a technical question; it is a political question. And political questions are answered not in economics journals but in the streets, in the legislatures, and in the struggle for a different distribution of power.
Correct on monetary sovereignty—but the key contradiction is class, not accounting. The state can fund social repair at scale, but it is structurally oriented toward protecting asset values and capital accumulation. So the real constraint isn’t “can it pay?” but “whose interests does it serve when it spends?”
The system does not prioritize capital over life - it prioritizes some lives over others.
Nobody of influence and authority cares.
The United States is well on the way to becoming a glorified version of Brasil. The present situation in Brasil suits the elites there just dandy.
‘Mismanaged neglect’ to be precise.
Fallen empire, death and deception is home.
A few lacuna in the post, excellent as it is.
What's complained about in the post is exactly the nation the Founding Fathers wanted and designed eg one in which the state would do nothing to impede the accumulation of wealth.
Independence was incited to a large extent by the Crown's limited attempt to crank down the slave trade. Unacceptable to the American colonists because the most important part of the economy.
Along with that was expansion eg stealing of the indigenous peoples' land. When the colonists' aggression in stealing the land incited the French and Indian War. The Crown defended the colonists and then dared to tax them for the incurred expense. The colonists -- more specifically the monied elite -- took offense, further fueling the push to independence.
And then when independence came, there was no benefit for the majority of people. This, reflected in large part the Constitution pre-Bill of Rights was focused only on how the oligarchy's state would function. A case can be made that that was the correct way to go at the time, but not a good case.
The concept unaddressed is the ancient law of nature: The people get the kind of state the masters impose or, at best, allow. The only alternative to that is if the people fight (which is where the American revolution was arguably revolutionary). We here in the US don't fight. And we're so submissive in not fighting that far from us have yet to suss out that, as a rule, there hasn't been a justifiable reason to vote Republican on the national level. Reader, IMO it takes a pathetically small amount of energy to do that little fighting and... well, here we are. (The post-Clinton/post-DLC national Democratic party is similar but not identical.)
Did I say here we are? Here we are.
"Rural America is a colony, and its economy is a colonial economy. The business of America has been largely and without apology the plundering of rural America, from which everything of value-minerals, timber, farm animals, farm crops, and 'labor' has been taken at the lowest possible price."
— Wendell Berry
Phil Neel’s “Hinterland” is a great book on this topic as a lived experience in the fractured geography of my own region. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/H/bo28433484.html
Very good analysis. As a product of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, I can tell you that the critique via Marxist ideological terms is spot on..
What I can also say is that Marxist ideology doesn’t really work in reality. The ineptness and nepotism of all systems ends up shining through a lot brighter. The village idiot is rewarded with veto powers over others, the state establishment of quotas and false metrics results in all sorts of problems.
It is as far from a meritocracy as imaginable.
Any criticism of state apparatuses is met with harsh punishment and jail sentences.
Marxism offers a valid tool to critique corporate fascism but it doesn’t offer a functional solution. That’s my experience anyway and that which was put forth by Jean Baudrillard in his book’Mirror of Production’ in which the central critique is that Marxism cannot break from Capitalism as it is stuck in the same productivist logic.
It doesn’t offer a different perspective and life is still based on work/value/production.
Life is beyond a dollar value, it is the single most precious thing in the universe.
There is nothing rarer and yet.. it is reduced to wages.. under capitalism or communism.
“What I can also say is that Marxist ideology doesn’t really work in reality.”
Since 1979, China has uplifted over 850 million people out of extreme poverty in the world’s largest Marxist socialist-mixed-economy.
It's a Marxist socialist-capitalist mixed economy, no? Doesn't it encourage the vaunted free-market like competition between companies, but with state direction of particular production, something along those lines?
China did what to become good and productive proletariat?
They became the best capitalists imaginable under direct orders from their government to do so.
The so called communist party became the single largest capitalist corporate structure in the nation. And indeed they are successful and have uplifted more people from poverty then there are Americans.
China is a socialist state with a state-directed socialist market economy operating under strict political and strategic control of the Communist Party. Capitalist relations exist, but they are embedded within a system where the commanding heights—finance, land, energy, and long-term planning—remain under state control. That distinction matters.
Calling it “the largest capitalist corporation” flattens the real contradiction: capital accumulation exists, but it is politically managed, disciplined, and periodically constrained by the state rather than allowed to rule autonomously as in liberal capitalism.
And yes, the material outcome is undeniable: the largest poverty reduction in human history, achieved through industrialization under a state that never fully relinquished macro-control over development.
The disagreement isn’t about whether markets exist. It’s about who commands them.
I’m very cognizant of what China is about.. But thanks for the added info.
My basic criticism of Communism (and Capitalism) holds (and Baudrillard nailed it in 1973): the two are ultimately the same with one having more state controlled checks and balances while the other has unbridled greed running rampant. Both are based on reducing the human being to modes of production in which the upper echelons reap the rewards of the peasants/workers.
Both systems are artificial human social constructs designed to control the masses. Neither is really about enjoying the gift of life, the single most precious thing in the universe.
Saying capitalism and socialism are “basically the same” because both organize society is like saying a landlord and a tenant are the same because both live in a house. The question isn’t whether structure exists—it’s who holds power within it.
no.
they are the same because they both view humans in terms of productivity. learn to parse. i was very specific in my statements.
no straw man arguments please.
if you ever have a chance to read Mirror of Production - J. Baudrillard 1973. Do so.. Quite fascinating. For me his most prophetic work is Simulacra and Simulation - 1981.
Simulacra: the sate of reality in which the description of reality is more real than reality itself.
If this doesn’t describe our modern times in a nutshell, I don’t know what does. He and his cadré of French intellectuals, who were socialists at the core, were describing our current social conditions some 40 years ago.
Cogent analysis. Spot on. Thanks or this and for the excellent reading list. Really good work.
Thanks.
This is a great example of dialectical materialist analysis done in a concise way that goes straight to the point.
Two questions:
1) how to learn more of positive actors, concealed theories, and real applications of living economies and humane humanity (sharing resource lists are a great way!)? and
2) how to break through to media with information they cannot ignore and must present to the broader public for informed discussion?
I'll answer #2--the author just did that.
Really? We're not overwhelmingly fans here?
But you prompt a real question.
What gets William Murphy or William Murphy ideas into acronym headlines and interviews by invitation? Assuming our William Murphy isn't already either famed cleric from this fresh search.
https://www.google.com/search?q=William+Murphy
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=william+murphy&t=brave&ia=web
Or maybe: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=39YTM9AAAAAJ&hl=en
!!
War is making us poor! Stopping the imperial war machine is the first step . . .
https://warismakinguspoor.com/a-nation-at-peace/
The depth of crisis we are now experiencing takes the measure of our unwillingness to monitor processes, restraint and accountability that prevent such crises occurring with such chaotic and blinding intensity. We have been operating outside the boundaries of sustainability, accountability and essential integrities for too long. For the West a certain finality looms large.
Well written. This topic deserves more attention. Just another reason we need community ownership of resources and wealth
Great topic