Great interview on the crisis of capitalism with Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin, Greg Albo

I like that views such as the following are clearly expressed ...

... and, obviously, needs to be said. However, views such as the following ...

... is followed by something like this ...

This is misleading as the group of countries belonging to ALBA (Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Brazil to some degree in non-gov organizing, and so on) seems to be trivialized. That's something the other side would do.

However, it makes interesting reading as long as the Eurocentric, North American centric premises are understood.

Uncle "Capital" : "The rumours of my death are greatly exaggerated. And tell that babbler Fidel that I, in no way, resemble low hanging fruit. Dream on, dipper."

I will agree that the global financial crisis may have signalled the waining of the USA's neoliberal empire, but the final death of it will not come in this century. I don't even think, to be honest, that we have seen the climax of the American empire. I think that the USA is still in it's adolesence. The political and economic power of the USA, in my honest opinion, has yet to be fully realized. The French and British Empires also had this same adolesent period that saw them struggle, and then be reborn more powerful then before. I'm not happy about this, becuase the USA is still that same Manifest Destiny led merchantile nation it has always been. They, and we, are still living our lives of the backs of the LDC's and DC's and this isn't going to change in my life time.

I think America is about where Britain was by the mid 1950s with respect to influence over its former colonies slipping away. The USSA peaked in 1980 wrt being the largest military and economic power in the world. Today America is the largest military power and will increasingly have to choose between maintaining bloated military budgets and funding public sector spending on necessities, or that part of the USA's economy that has little or nothing to do with free market capitalism. The problem for American empire today is that other countries rich and poor are losing faith in laissez-faire financial capitalism, and that their central banks have actually been financing US Military buildup all around their borders and especially so since 1971 with the rise of petrodollar imperialism. Countries like China and Russia and a few more are not so keen on putting their eggs in one basket so to speak with buying more US debt. Something has to give.

Is it my imagination or does Albo makes it sound as if the NDP have been in federal power in Ottawa for too long?

It certainly sounds good that workers in general need to fight back. And Leo Panitch does say that he could go on listing the ways in which neoliberalism has changed the ways in which workers organize and battle for things like living wages and rights etc. Economic historian Michael Hudson says that Marx believed that finance capital would eventually be subordinated to the needs of industrial capitalism, and eventually paving the way for socialism. Marx and others of his century were quite optimistic about the future of industrial capitalism (the older state-capitalism) and how it would lead to worker ownership of the means of production, and socialism.

I believe as Michael Hudson believes that if workers want to regain lost footing in the battle for a better quality of life, we have to do as Marx suggested we do. And that is to fight for democracy. We must win the battle for democracy. And we must fight for a return to industrial capitalism and capital formation in the real economy and not concentration of capital in a parasitic Disneyland economy of finance capital. Hudson says that reading volumes II & III of Capital reveal this to be true in modern times.

And we social democrats will continue to push for government ownership of the responsibilities for funding public programs and pensions etc and not sloughing people off toward increasing reliance on "the market" for necessities like housing and food on the table and annual incomes fit for human beings. And this is basically what the NDP adocatesm which is pushing Ottawa to take back the responsibility for these things they have told Canadians they could no longer afford to finance since 1993-1995. As Marx said people must do, we must fight for and win the battle for democracy. That means working toward unseating those two parties that have had tight grips on federal power ih Ottawa since 1867 through today and non-stop.

From Marx to Goldman Sachs: The Fictions of Fictitious Capital Michael Hudson

The NDP doesn' promise that they MIGHT reverse Liberal Government rollbacks of social gains and funding of social democracy to 1940's levels across Canada. The NDP is promising that they WILL fight tooth and nail to achieve exactly that with enough NDP MP's in Ottawa. And the NDP says that replacing the tens billions of dollars in core funding removed from everything from health care to education is doable. As I was saying before a hundred times in other threads, social funding as well as total federal tax take is well below the OECD capitalist country average. It's been the dynamic duo Bay Street parties in power and sharing power in Ottawa that have made Canada into a rightwing US Libertarian's dream come true. The NDP has done more opposiing of the neoliberal agenda in Canada since trudeau's time in the sun than some people are willing to give them credit for and not naming any names here.

I think that a national opinion poll says you're lacking in imagination yourself, and that Canadians really do want health care and education and uI-Ei-oh? and the post-war social lien in Canada funding at pre Shawinigan Strangler and Paulie Pockets levels. You might turn your nose up at these hard-fought for social gains made by Canadian workers, civil society groups, the CCF and NDP in the last century, but I think you're wrong as to how much Canadians value those gains which made living in a capitalist system bearable for several generations of people in Canada.

All powerful industrial capitalists of Marxian theory have since been overthrown by a parasitic financier elite over the last 35 years or so which Marxists never expected might occur. Down is now up and vice versa. It's a new world order and class struggle redefined by finance and banksters. How can trade unionists wield the same bargaining power today with so much of the real economy offshored, sold off and pawned off? What we have today is oligarchy and class struggle even farther behind the eight ball than Marx predicted, N. Beltov. Workers need to get in the game and stop pointing to social democrats as being responsible for the neoliberal voodoo and place blame directly on the shoulders of those two Bay Street parties that tied Canada's economic wagon of fortunes to corporate America since St Laurent and Diefenbaker through to Mulroney and Chretien. The arithmetic of the thing is simple - we need Venezuelan style MMP to catapult Hugo Chavez of the North into the halls of power, and not in Winnipeg but Ottawa where we have enjoyed Washington style lobbying and rightwing think tanks bending the ears of our useless senators and politicos since Brian Mulroney.

Well N.B. may prefer this quote from Hudson's Critique essay, because he, too, comes down on social democratic and Labour parties:

I like Panitch's call for nationalising the means of money creation and credit. I also like Jack Layton's knowledge of marauding capital. I think Layton would be a good guy to have in Ottawa in the event that there is a political challenge to international capital.

You and Saruman the White, Ryan!   Quite the capitulating pair, having "lived too long and seen so much in so few years"! Thirty something?

Well I believe Marxian insight is required to understand what's happening today. Basically neoliberalism is another version of laissez-faire state capitalism, or that which failed in North America after a 30 year run by 1929. Marx described contradictions inherent to both industrial as well as financial capitalism. Marx didn't believe that the parasitic form of capitalism would overthrow industrialism due to the destructive nature of finance and usury. What rightwing ideologues have done since 1980, which was to prop-up finance and banking at the expense of productive labour economies in a number of countries defies all logic. But this is what has unfolded over the last 30-35 years or so. As Michael Hudson and others have said, I don't believe there will be a real economic recovery of western world capitalism until a massive write-down of debt takes place on a scale of the financial deal between nations that took place by the latter half of the 1940s at Bretton Woods. The inherent contradiction today is exactly how Marx described it but with world wide debts integrated in what is now a globalizing economy and exceeding whole nations' ability to repay them. It's a giant Ponzi scheme gone bad. What can not be repaid won't be. There will be a major overhaul of the international monetary system within the next ten years with the current political capital of neoliberal ideologues on the wane everywhere. Change for better or worse is in the pipeline I believe. But generally they prefer small and profitable war as a solution to crises of capitalism as opposed to world war as the latter tends to lead to chaotic upheaval and most importantly,  revolutions.

Could you explain why your age group tends not to vote?  Is the defeatism a general malaise of the twenty-somethings?

p.s.  Be well. 

To be honest GV I don't know. I've voted since I was of age and truth be told, the first thing I did when I turned voting age was joined the NDP and sought out the federal contituency association to figure out how to become a member. It baffles my mind that people have the opinion that because they have the right to say no, that means they should. Voting is an obligation, a responsibility and the malaise or disinterest that follows around the twenty-something group continues to keep me in awe.

I think Ryan may not realize the scope of the crisis of neoliberalism today. And it's not just one crisis or one over-inflated bubble but a number of them. I think that they believe the conservative right and centre-right are going to regain their former electoral glory of phony-majority support just as soon as the North American and western world economies come out of this swan dive. It won't happen without a major overhaul of the financial system. Liberals/Liberal democrats and Conservatives and Republican conservatives in power or phony opposition are going to face crisis after crisis until such time as a new international monetary deal. There will be no inflating their way out of it this time. It's finished. Kaput. As in game over insert another loonie and no more false economies to buy voter support with. There will be no more sweetener added to the neoliberal kool aid. Their lawnmowers have been running on ginger ale all along, wink-wink say no more eh.

I edited to address Ryan and not N.B. I'm not too sure of what N.B. thinks about the current crisis except to let us know perhaps that the NDP deserve the usual 20 lashes and no soup.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch... our colonial administrativeship in Ottawa continues handing the country over to rich Americanos, banks and money speculators.

Hey let's go throw eggs at "the moustache" who has a shiny head. And if we throw rotten eggs, it should really get things rolling for the proles.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/nationalising-banksi-t137695/index.html

Financial National-Democratization

"Even the Financial Times now warns in its editorials that it may not be possible to avoid much longer the issue of really taking the whole banking system into public ownership, given its current dysfunctionality. Indeed, there has long been a strong case for turning the banks into a public utility, given that they can't exist in complex modern society without states guaranteeing their deposits and central banks constantly acting as lenders of last resort." (Leo Panitch)

It is interesting to note the market-socialist David Schweickart referred to and approved of the same editorial alluded to by Leo Panitch, one by Willem Buiter, a professor of European political economy at the London School of Economics and the former head of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development.  In The end of American capitalism as we knew it, Buiter wrote:

Is the reality of the modern, transactions-oriented model of financial capitalism indeed that large private firms make enormous private profits when the going is good and get bailed out and taken into temporary public ownership when the going gets bad, with the taxpayer taking the risk and the losses?

If so, then why not keep these activities in permanent public ownership?  There is a long-standing argument that there is no real case for private ownership of deposit-taking banking institutions, because these cannot exist safely without a deposit guarantee and/or lender of last resort facilities, that are ultimately underwritten by the taxpayer.

Even where private deposit insurance exists, this is only sufficient to handle bank runs on a subset of the banks in the system.  Private banks collectively cannot self-insure against a generalised run on the banks.  Once the state underwrites the deposits or makes alternative funding available as lender of last resort, deposit-based banking is a license to print money.

That suggests that either deposit-banking licenses should be periodically auctioned off competitively or that deposit-taking banks should be in public ownership to ensure that the taxpayer gets the rents as well as the risks.  The argument that financial intermediation cannot be entrusted to the private sector can now be extended to include the new, transactions-oriented, capital-markets-based forms of financial capitalism.

It should be noted that "bank runs on a subset of the banks in the system" vs. "generalized run on the banks" refers to fractional reserve banking; banks keep only a fraction of deposits in highly liquid reserves, lend out the rest, all the while being legally obligated to redeem all deposits upon customer demand.  For all the rhetoric by Milton Friedman, the rest of the Chicago School, the Austrian School further to their right, and other right-wing economists on fractional reserve banking as the main culprit behind debt bubbles, they miss the point: under the present financial system, the amount of public control over M0, M1, M2, and the entire money supply generally is almost non-existent.  A national-democratized financial monopoly beyond even the limitations of the former Gosbank SSSR (USSR State Bank), along with the extension of this public monopoly on money supply control into the general provision of commercial and consumer credit, is the only way towards achieving at least substantive public control over the money supply.  It is also the only way to make substantive inroads against the massive behemoth of derivatives trading.

In early 2009, political economist Paulo L dos Santos went further in addressing the appropriate purchase prices based on the market capitalization of these financial institutions, particularly those in trouble:

There is a simple, rational alternative that needs urgent public discussion.  Expropriate the banks - or, for those partial to more diplomatic language, nationalise them at the market prices that would prevail had the public not poured hundreds of billions into them.  Then run the banks under the sole imperative of stabilising the financial system and paving the way for economic recovery, with no constraints imposed by the need to attract private capital or maintain future private franchise value.

Expropriation would lower the fiscal impact of state intervention.  It would also curb the massive hoarding currently taking place as banks try to build up capitalisation levels.  State banks could maintain lower capital reserves - after all, the only thing maintaining public confidence in the solvency of banks are state guarantees.  This would allow additional room for credit creation, and render recent interest rate cuts effective.

State banks would also be able to provide relief on the debts currently saddling many households, helping provide a welcome boost to aggregate demand.  Lastly, state banks could curb the more egregious practices of private banks: exorbitant account, overdraft and transaction fees; interest rates on credit to households; gains made on trading and own accounts at the expense of retail savers; and, of course, bonuses.

These measures are unlikely to be taken by currently dominant political forces, even though such policies are neither socialist nor in themselves steps towards socialism.  They are just rational attempts to stop the current economic bloodletting.  Economic recovery will require taking on the long-term systemic economic imbalances that conditioned the current meltdown.  Those include falling real investment by non-financial corporations, mediocre productivity growth, growing private provision of pensions, health and education, and rising inequality.  Addressing those issues will require significant socialist inroads into the functioning of the economy and dramatic political changes.  They also require an integrated, long-term understanding of the current crisis and secular developments in the real economy.  Stay tuned.

Many have tried to contrast the role of financial capital with that of the older industrial capital, usually by resorting to some form of ethics.  Keynes himself openly distinguished between the "entrepreneur" and the "capitalist" (financiers, short-sellers of shares and similar speculators in derivatives and currency exchange, etc.), but the market-socialist David Schweickart made the most obvious point in his book Against Capitalism about the system inherently joining the two:

It is true that some capitalists innovate, reorganize, and manage, but it is also true that many do not.  This fact, if not its ethical implications, is acknowledged by most economists; it is reflected, for example, in the standard distinction between interest and profit.  Profit is the residual accruing to the entrepreneurial after wage, rental, and interest accounts have been paid.

The basic problem for one trying to justify capitalism (noncomparatively) is precisely this category: interest, a return that requires neither risk nor entrepreneurial activity on the part of the recipient.

Time preference need not enter into the explanation of the capitalist's behavior any more than the entrepreneur's.  If Marx and Weber are right, the motivational structure for the paradigmatic capitalist is accumulation, not consumption.  Moneymaking becomes an end in itself.  The capitalist qua capitalist invests now not to have more to consume later but to have more to invest later.  As Marx puts it, "Accumulate, accumulate.  That is Moses and the prophets."

One last aspect of financial national-democratization should be touched upon, and indeed it is about an ethical position as much as it is about the numerical difference between assets and liabilities: equity.  In several pre-industrial societies, there were taboos against charging interest on loans or - to use an older word - usury.  There were also equitable rules on secured loans.  For example, Exodus 22:25-27, Deuteronomy 23:20-21, and rabbinical literature prohibit the charging of interest to Israelites (except when a life is in danger) as well as the using for loan security items needed by the poor among them to survive (garments needed by the poor among them to survive cold nights or flour-making millstones, but other items are implied as well) - quite a contrast to the Catholic-imposed privilege of charging usury enjoyed by medieval Jewish usurers but for the convenient purpose of anti-Semitic scapegoating later on, and certainly a contrast to the financial practices of modern Israeli society!  Meanwhile, the anti-usury Islamic finance has a Sumerian precedent which could be applied today, free of pork and alcohol limitations and applied especially towards venture (read: vulture) capital activities: agreements between the de facto creditor and the de facto debtor whereby the latter would manage the new business venture and the former would invest in the business venture, assuming typical business risk to income stability but deriving income in the form of profits.  To revisit what Santos discussed above, a national-democratized financial monopoly should be more than capable of absorbing, say, the higher risk to income stability posed by small cooperatives or small-business proprietorships as it effectively nationalizes those debtors' operations in the financing agreements - only to effectively re-privatize them as equitable profits (and not interest) due the monopoly reduce that monopoly's ownership positions.

I know what you mean about more billionaires and more concentration of wealth. But it's finished. Speculators and financial crooks are feeding off a dead corpse. The EU is bankrupt and so is Wall Street. It's finished. It's just a matter of time before people catch on and start protesting globally. The neoliberal experiment lasted about as long as laissez-faire capitalism did in North America by 1929. It's kaput. As Nicholos Sarkozy said about "le laissez-faire"(neoliberalism) to the Americans and Brits in '08, "C'est fini!"

What we need the left needs now is the same as it needed before WWI and WW II, which is a united front. A united front of greens and social democrats, Marxists and liberals, and even democratically minded conservative voters, have to get it together and oppose fascism. Look what they did to Italy, In the 1920s and 30s, Italy was home to one of the strongest left wing contngents in the world. They had Marxists and socialists, communists, liberals and social democrats. But they failed to unite because of infighting and their own damned stupidity, and not to mention the fascists supported by the west and working behind the scenes. Berlusconi is wading in corruption charges and general incompetence. They aren't even worried about it, because they know that some fascist bastard is waiting in the wings to takeover from where the Italian billionaire leaves off, and likely a fascist lineage from Mussolini, like Gianfranco Fini. The same is true in the US, they have elections bought and paid-for for the next several decades. The left must unite under one banner. The only real opposition to fascism is socialism.

Viva la revolucion!

Great essay, Jacob Richter. Nationalise the banks! And we are part of the way there already as the Bank of Canada is still nationalised. Our stooges simply don't use it for its intended purposes.

I heard from someone that there are 50 year mortgages in Calgary and Alberta. That's insane.

Excellent comments, SiamDave.

It's not the 'creating money out of thin air' that's a problem, it's allowing this money to be created and controlled by private individuals, and charging interest on it, that is the first part of the problem. I go into this in some detail in the essay, and won't repeat it all here - but the systemic inflation we have experienced the last 30 years, essentially halving the purchasing power of the average income, is a direct result, as are the massive government debts upon which we have paid a couple of trillion in interest in Canada alone, and which are used as the basis of robbing us blind and cutting every program of use to the average citizen.

The second part of the problem is that there is no effective regulation on the creation of the money by private banks - sure there are 'regulations' of various sorts, but as I noted earlier, the meltdown of the entire global financial system due to massive overcreation of credit recently shows pretty clearly that the regulations are a lot of show and no substance. Not surprising - politics attracts venal people, and the people with the money long ago figured out the best investment of all was in purchasing governments. Second most important investment is the media, to control what the people are told about what is happening. Mushroomland. 

The whole idea of money needs to be rethought, and that is what I am doing in the coming-soon essay. But you can get a pretty good idea of where I'm coming from in the What Happened essay - http://www.rudemacedon.ca/what-happened.html . For starters. Any comments on problems with my ideas in that essay would be welcome.

I'll let the comment on the Austrian school pass - it's obvious you have not read the essay, or you'd know better.

I'll read it and post in on other boards for discussion.

I have noted that too, but what's wrong with dusting the Gosbank SSSR books off from the shelf for how to control the money supply?

You didn't link to your essay earlier.  Otherwise, I stand corrected re. my Austrian remark. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosbank

Gosbank (Russian: Госбанк, Государственный банк СССР, Gosudarstvenny bank SSSR-the USSR State Bank) was the central bank of the Soviet Union and the only bank whatsoever in the entire Union from the 1930s until the year 1987. Gosbank was one of the three Soviet economic authorities, the other two being "Gosplan" (the State Planning Committee) and "Gossnab" (the State Committee for Material Technical Supply).

The Soviet state used Gosbank, primarily, as a tool to impose centralized control upon industry in general, using bank balances and transaction histories to monitor the activity of individual concerns and their compliance with Plans and directives. Gosbank did not act as a commercial bank in regard to the profit motive. It acted, theoretically, as an instrument of government policy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sberkassa

In the Soviet Union the system of "State Labour Saving Offices" (государственная трудовая сберегательная касса) was instituted in 1922. The first was opened in February 1923, in Petrograd.

Eventually, Soviet sberkassas were outlets of the only Soviet bank, USSR State Bank, or Gosbank until 1988 and Sberbank (USSR Savings Bank) after the "perestroika" of the Soviet bank system.

Additional functions included accepting various payments, e.g., for public utilities or fines, and depositing salaries.

Since the system of consumer credit was virtually absent in the Soviet Union, in order to make a major purchase an ordinary Soviet citizen had to save for a long time. Therefore, like postal savings systems in other countries, the system of sberkassas was a form of government debt, a system where the Soviet state borrowed from the population.

It's only a problem if you are the borrower. Sounds pretty good for the lenders.

Rich people lend money, and poor people borrow money.

Want to get rid of poverty? How about we abolish interest rates for a start?

- I missed that one, I was responding to "..but what's wrong with dusting the Gosbank SSSR books off from the shelf for how to control the money supply?.."

I'm very novice when it comes to monetary policy, only really knowing about the history of Bretten Woods, the goald standard but not understanding underlying ecnomic theory. Am I wrong in assuming that if we suddenly nationalized our monetary system that investors would react fearfully and start pulling out of our economy fearing the state apparatus is getting too involved?

From post 29, the comment you refer to, I think:
"..To revisit what Santos discussed above, a national-democratized financial monopoly should be more than capable of absorbing, say, the higher risk to income stability posed by small cooperatives or small-business proprietorships as it effectively nationalizes those debtors' operations in the financing agreements - only to effectively re-privatize them as equitable profits (and not interest) due the monopoly reduce that monopoly's ownership positions..."

- I think what the major problem here, as in various other proposals, is trying to make some 'friendly socialist-type' tweaks to an existing capitalist infrastructure, when what is needed is getting out of the box altogether, and thinking about what an economic system designed from the top down (actually for social-democrats, from the bottom up, I guess would be more appropriate wording..) for the benefit of 'we the people' rather than enabling a capitalist rulership would look and function like. This is one of the problems with Keynes and other similar writers - they do not actually talk about anything 'socialist', it's only the far right wing 'nutbar' faction that things anything this side of Atilla is 'socialist' that calls anything remotely trying to be fair to 'we the people' or in some way trying to rein in the capitalists as 'socialist' - but as we all should know, simply being labelled something by someone who is out to discredit one does not make it so. Keynes et al were more 'capitalist light' in nature - the system of elite rule with the capitalists around the top of the pile was ok to these people, they just had some kind of idea that the peasants should be treated nicely, whilst the farrighters figure the peasants are no more than animals whose labour can be appropriated - work em til they die and then kill em off or whatever - who cares. Let em eat cake. And that is how most of the debate is structured today - and one of the things we really need to stop doing is letting our opponents frame the debate. Lakoff dimly understands this, but he is taking baby steps when he needs to be standing a bit taller and looking outside of the box altogether.

But in a non-capitalist economy, a truly democratic economy (no capitalist economy is democratic, it's a prime exemplar of an oxymoron, really - true socialism, on the other hand, is, more or less, democratic by definition), of course, would be simply creating a money-credit supply available to all people on an equal basis, basically interest free - we might want to add a small administration fee as we do to many government services, or not, a detail that could be worked out - but the idea of paying any interest on this "our" money is simply a non-starter - interest is a tool of bankers-capitalists (like physics and math, they are closely inter-related) to appropriate the wealth created by others. (one of many such tools, of course, not the only one).

Hmmm - having started right in with a small rant, but not completely tangential, I find, upon reading the quote, I don't quite understand what you are getting at here - why, for instance, do you think there would be, in a nationalized-bank economy, a "... higher risk to income stability posed by small cooperatives or small-business proprietorships ." ? I don't see this at all - if anything, a national bank, at least as I see it operating in the interest of we the people rather than avaricious capitalist bankers, would be much less likely to lead to small business defaults (no interest, more patience) - and second, even if a few small businesses default on loans - how is that going to destabilize a massive national money supply and a national economy based on high diversity in every way? Esp when any real property created by the defaulted loans ipso facto becomes 'our' property, to be turned to useful purposes with a minimum of fuss? Again, I think at least part of the problem is trying to paint a socialist face on a capitalist beast, when you need to slay the capitalist dragon and let the socialist butterfly finally emerge from its cocoon. Or, to put it another way, paraphrasing Albert somewhat, you cannot create a new system using the old paradigm. Or something like that. And we do, indeed, I believe, need a completely new system - capitalism is for adolescents, socialism for adults. It's time we grew up.

This para from Compensation and Capital Flight suggests a controlled, rational process in the age of the economic imperative:

"In the 1970s, German-born Swedish economist Rudolf Meidner outlined a similarly protracted plan to increase the level of working-class savings and to translate it into social investment for sustaining real wage growth and at least the limited Keynesian definition of "full employment." Companies with more than fifty employees would have been required to redistribute, on an annual basis, twenty percent of company profits as non-tradable shares to be held by wage-earner funds organized on a regional and not union-level basis. Naturally, the Swedish bourgeoisie mobilized well-funded opposition towards this decades-long plan to peacefully liquidate them as a class within decades."

But you would have to explain to the worker whose pension is dependent on the health of those companies, why their value bottomed out with this plan, whether they left or stayed. Probably the political party promoting it would not intimidate their opposition in the polls.

Apparently international capital challenged a British Labour government in the late 1970s. The Brits backed down in the face of capital flight. It's been said since then that money speculators at the time were actually shitting their pants in fear that British Labour would not back down. The fledgling international monetary regime at the time needed to make an example of at least one nation, and Britain's Labour government fit the bill for them. Not very often will a government break ranks and challenge the neoliberal financial regime, except for Asian countries. China has government control of its central bank and several investment and construction banks. India has a state-owned bank and is said to be loaning money to businesses and people hand over fist today in spite of the recession here in the western world. Kevin O'Leary of Lang and O'Leary CBC said last night that China's economy will dominate for many years to come and is where everyone should be invested. China's is now the world's second largest economy and will be the largest within 10 year's time. What we are seeing now is a new world economic order of things emerging. Ancient China and India etc were once the largest economies in the world. They will be again, and I think whatever we do here in Canada, we should think about trading freely with the rest of the world and driving some hard bargains for our valuable resources. We should process as much of our resources here as we can within a sustainable and environmentally friendly scheme of things. But this giving our stuff away for a song to corporate America is the road to serfdom for Canadians and the rest of the world. Canada could be a world leader with the right people in Ottawa.

I should note that the posted section is not the updated version.  The section is called "Towards Exclusively Public Purposes, Compensation, and Capital Flight," and the paragraph reads as follows (to be consistent with the flavour of political programs):

In the 1970s, German-born Swedish economist Rudolf Meidner outlined a similarly protracted plan for the increase of real social savings and investment (in turn for, among additional and exclusively public purposes, sustaining real wage growth and the least the limited Keynesian definition of "full employment"), by first means of mandatory and significant redistributions of annual business profits, by private enterprises with more workers than a defined threshold, as non-tradable and superior voting shares to be held by geographically organized worker funds; the respective specifics are twenty percent of business profits (and no net loss rebates, the exact opposite of "privatize the gains, socialize the losses" bailouts), fifty employees, and regional and not union-level organization of wage-earner funds.  Naturally, the Swedish bourgeoisie mobilized well-funded opposition towards this decades-long plan to peacefully liquidate them as a class within decades.

Hypothetically it should matter re. pensioners; the so-called "pension fund socialism" is merely being bought out by the Meidner plan, and what should be compared is this: wealth redistribution vs. time redistribution.  In exchange for wealth redistribution from future funds, the current savings is increased in the here and now.  Besides, I have another idea on how to tackle the "pension fund socialism" problem, but I have yet to write about simply having the state taking over all pension funds to secure pensioners' wealth - since in reality current funds are used to fund pensions and not saved or invested funds.

Also, polls don't matter when strategic issues are at stake.  The Swedish Social-Democrats did lose, but that's because they were a center-left party and not a left party.  It is up to parties like Die Linke, the Parti de Gauche, the JCP, the PSUV, the KKE, etc. to stop being myopic about socialist transformation and raise issues like the one above.

I feel drawfed by the amount of information being put out here and definatly have realized the lack of knowledge I have as regards the current direction of this topic. Any books you guys would recommend to get me up to speed and perhaps be able to engage in such a conversation in the future without resorting to rhetoic.

After reflecting on this topic a long time, I've come to the conclusion that capitalism, while a highly exploitative and destructive practise in its own right, is merely an outgrowth of the real problem.  The real problem is greed and an inability of people to control their appetites for goods and services.  Those of us in wealthy countries ought to be spending our resources helping the poorer countries and looking for ways to lower our impacts on the planet instead of growing our economies.  But we're not.  And we can only partly blame capitalism for that.

I also think that economics is a failed science.  Economists are good at answering simple questions like what will a leather shortage do to the price of boots but it's been an abject failure as an instrument of public policy.  The practise of aggragating all activity into a single number (the GDP) and the fixation on orienting most public policy towards inceasing that number regardless of the real costs has to be the single most destructive influence on the world over the past century.

Could China Already Be World's Largest Economy? Globalresearch TV video

In the context of what I wrote, labour vouchers, electronic labour credits, non-circulable labour credits, etc. are part of an overall computerized system of planned production and distribution based directly on labour time, in addition to the scrapping of capitalist and petty-capitalist private property relations.

- the elephant-in-the-living-room question is - who is doing the planning? The problem with 'capitlalism' isn't just the name - it's the whole idea of 'those who control' and 'those who do as they're told' and etc - it doesn't matter what you call it. 'Planned' has some pretty worrisome implications to anyone who's looking for 'democracy' - that is to say, *real* democracy, not one of the many pretend versions .....

True.  One Amadeo Bordiga was quite economically more communist than most of the far left today, but emphasized technocratic planning over this post-monetary as well as post-capitalist system.