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Post by Admin on May 11, 2021 21:25:08 GMT
We Can’t Go Back to a Golden Age of Capitalism AN INTERVIEW WITH BRANKO MILANOVIC The dynamics of income distribution and inequality are changing — and only for the worse. Economist Branko Milanovíc speaks to Jacobin about our malaise, and why going back to the “golden age” of capitalism is not an option. jacobinmag.com/2021/02/global-capitalism-inequality-branko-milanovic-interviewThe Serbian-American economist Branko Milanovic is one of the world’s foremost scholars of global inequality and the author of numerous important studies on income distribution. A former chief economist at the World Bank, Milanovic has since dedicated himself to the study of inequality from a global perspective, measuring both inequality within countries and among them. Milanovic’s work has been an instrumental guide to understanding some of the main features of contemporary capitalism. These include a rise in inequality in the West over the last forty years, while at the same time, global inequality has been in decline — thanks in no small part to the rise of the middle classes in China and India; and the different shapes that capitalism has gone through since its origins, delving into its more recent transformations in his latest book. He has also written extensively on the emergence of a new ruling class in the West, one that combines incomes coming both from capital and wages. Although Milanovic sometimes seems to hint that this picture of contemporary capitalism is anathema to Marx’s nineteenth-century understanding of class divisions, his latest book Capitalism, Alone shows him to be perfectly conversant in Marxist analysis and, as its title suggests, attempts to wrestle with the specificity of capitalism as a historical system. Milanovic took a moment to speak with Pablo Pryluka for Jacobin about his recent book and recent world events. PP In your most recent book, Capitalism, Alone, you’ve taken a slightly different tack than in your earlier work. Rather than focusing on inequality, you seem to be more interested in examining the foundations of capitalism itself. It’s curious too that Thomas Piketty also took a similar approach in his most recent book, Capital and Ideology. What led you to shift focus from inequality to an all-encompassing explanation of capitalism? BM I was actually always interested in empirical studies of capitalism, since I was in university. Some of the things that I’m working on now are essentially things that I really wish I had done forty years ago: for example, the relations between different types of income — capital versus labor — and how they interact empirically within society, this is something that I really was always interested in. But in those days, you didn’t have data like that available. You mentioned Thomas Piketty. He made one great contribution, which was bringing back the study of capital and the importance of capital income in income distribution, which had been practically expunged from income inequality studies for a very long time. The basic idea for my recent book, not so different from his, is really to attempt to combine what is sometimes called factorial income distribution with interpersonal income inequality. In working on my book, one thing I started to really notice is that you have more and more households that are what I call “homoploutic.” By that I simply mean that people with high capital and labor income generally end up at the top of the income distribution. When you combine these kinds of advantages (i.e., ownership of capital and labor) with what is called assortative mating — basically, when you marry someone of the same income, educational level, or social status — this leads to the intergenerational transmission of inequality. Basically what I am describing is a dynamic driving the formation of a self-sustaining elite, something I address in the second chapter of Capitalism, Alone. The difficulty with dealing with some aspects of inequality is that they are not in and of themselves controllable or even necessarily bad. For example, if someone marries a person of a similar status, there is nothing wrong with that. But the fact is that when they do that, they are more likely to be rich and to transmit all these advantages to their children, creating a kind of a new aristocracy. And this is a big issue.
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Post by Admin on Aug 9, 2021 15:30:45 GMT
"Mental health and wellbeing are now major concerns for government and big business, as stress, depression and anxiety become widespread in modern societies. But their focus is often solely on the attitude of the individual, which ignores the particular social and economic causes behind such conditions. Here, I discuss with William Davies the psychological demands and effects of neoliberalism and the science of happiness. WD: I think two things are worth focusing on. Firstly, there is the meritocratic ethos of contemporary capitalism, which states that social class is no longer relevant, and therefore everybody ends up with the socio-economic position they deserve. This produces a chronic sense of self-blame, unease, anxiety and self-recrimination, with individuals having nobody to blame but themselves for not being famous, very rich or more attractive. Secondly, we live in a time of psycho-somatic confusion, no longer knowing what to attribute to the ‘mind’ and what to the ‘body’, with the ‘brain’ serving as a medium between the two. Individually, we also of course need to learn how to disconnect better. Unfortunately this is often through other forms of self-discipline, many of which are also co-opted by digital capitalism, such as sleeping, digital detoxing, meditating and so on. Smart phones will surely go down as a historic moment in the expansion of digital surveillance and tracking, vastly expanding the range of activities and thoughts that are digitally captured and mediated, all within two or three years. Institutionally, we would probably be better if certain services and products were simply switched off. We should be honest about the fact that, if ever Facebook were under democratic control, the best thing to do with it would probably be to close it down. This is true for psychological, social and political reasons. We should defend and expand non-surveilled spaces and periods of time, although unfortunately that agenda tends to be a somewhat hipster and/or bourgeois one, of hippy parents wanting their children free from screens and theatre goers tutting phones going off. But the principle is right, and could be pushed further for people’s mental health benefit. We also need to challenge the quasi-military emphasis on control itself, not only the political economy that underlies it.” (CounterPunch) OCTOBER 18, 2017 Mental Health and Neoliberalism: an Interview with William Davies BY JON BAILES www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/18/mental-health-and-neoliberalism-an-interview-with-william-davies/
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Post by Admin on Sept 13, 2021 12:26:55 GMT
Friday essay: searching for sanity in a world hell-bent on destruction May 13, 2021 8.53pm BST theconversation.com/friday-essay-searching-for-sanity-in-a-world-hell-bent-on-destruction-160447According to The Parable of the Poisoned Well, there once lived a king who ruled over a great city. He was loved for his wisdom and feared for his power. At the heart of the city was a well, the waters of which were clean and pure and from where the king and all the inhabitants drank. But one evening an enemy entered the city and poisoned the well with a strange liquid. Henceforth, all who drank from it went mad. All the people drank the water, but not the king, for he had been warned by a watchman who had observed the contamination. The people began to say, “The king is mad and has lost his reason. Look how strangely he behaves. We cannot be ruled by a madman, so he must be dethroned”. The king sensed his subjects were preparing to rise against him and grew fearful of revolution. One evening he ordered a royal goblet to be filled from the well and drank from it deeply. The next day there was great rejoicing among the people, for their beloved king had finally regained his wisdom and sanity. In his 1955 book The Sane Society, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm suggests nothing is more common than the assumption that we, people living in the advanced industrial economies, are eminently sane. Nevertheless, Australia’s Department of Health reports that almost half of Australians aged 16 to 85 will experience a mental disorder at some point in their lives. According to Fromm, we are inclined to see incidents of mental illness as individual and isolated disturbances, while acknowledging — with some discomfort, perhaps — that so many of these incidents should occur in a culture that is supposedly sane. Fromm haunts our self-image even today, attempting to unsettle these assumptions of sanity: Can we be so sure that we are not deceiving ourselves? Many an inmate of an insane asylum is convinced that everybody else is crazy, except himself. In an age now widely described as the Anthropocene, the conventionally held distinction between sanity and insanity is at risk of collapsing … and taking our civilisation with it. Read more: How the term 'Anthropocene' jumped from geoscience to hashtags – before most of us knew what it meant The line shifts over time At least since Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1961), it has been understood that the idea of (in)sanity is an evolving, socially constructed category. Not only does the medical validity of mental health diagnoses and treatments shift with the times, but what has been judged “sane” in one era has the potential to blur into what is not in another — and without announcement. This can disguise the fact that social practices or patterns of thought that may once have been considered healthy may now be properly diagnosed as unhealthy. And while this can apply to individual cases, there is no reason to think it should not also apply more broadly to a society at large. A society might go insane without being aware of its own degeneration. One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to recognise, with Foucault, that power shapes knowledge. If profits and economic growth are the benchmarks of success in a society, it simply may not be profitable to expose a society as insane, and even members of an insane society may sooner choose wilful blindness than look too deeply into the subconscious of their own culture. If our society is not sane — and I find myself pointing towards this thesis — another question follows: what might sanity look like in an insane world? I come to these questions without mental health training or expertise, but simply as an ordinary member of late-stage capitalist society, one suffering in his own way and trying to understand the mental health burdens that accompany our ecocidal and grossly inequitable mode of civilisation. I make no comment on the very real biophysical causes for mental illness, such as chemical imbalances or physical injury. Instead, I reflect, at a “macro” level, on the sanity or insanity of the dominant culture and political economy in contemporary capitalist societies such as Australia, asking how the world “out there” can impact the inner dimension of our lives. Following Fromm’s lead, I inquire not so much into individual pathology, but into what he calls “collective neuroses” and “the pathology of normalcy”. Of course, collective neuroses are not easily observed, for they are, by nature, the background fabric of existence and so easily missed.
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Post by Admin on Jan 13, 2022 16:14:57 GMT
The Beginning of the End of Capitalist Realism BY MICAH UETRICHT Mark Fisher died two years ago this month. He helped us see the collective depression we have all lived in for decades. If only he could have seen that depression finally start to lift. jacobinmag.com/2019/01/capitalist-realism-mark-fisher-k-punk-depressionMark Fisher struggled his entire life with depression. That struggle culminated in his suicide on January 13, 2017. For Fisher, depression wasn’t solely an individual affliction, the result of a miswired brain or an imbalanced chemical or two. As he wrote in several essays in K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016), recently published by Repeater Books, he came to see depression as also a social affliction. And the social has given us plenty to be depressed about over the past four decades. He often experienced his depression as a “sneering” voice inside his head. That voice felt deeply personal, to be sure. But Mark came to see that voice as “the internalized expression of actual social forces.” And those forces “have a vested interest in denying any connection between depression and politics.” Those social forces were tied, no doubt, to the concept he was most famous for: “capitalist realism.” Capitalist realism, he wrote in his book of the same name, is “the widespread acceptance that there is no alternative to capitalism.” It’s not an enthusiastic embrace of neoliberal capitalism — that embrace has long passed, if it ever existed. Rather, it’s a widespread sense of resignation over the foregone conclusion that neoliberal capitalism is the only game in town. “Neoliberalism now shambles on as a zombie,” he writes, “but as the aficionados of zombie films are well aware, it is sometimes harder to kill a zombie than a living person.” Mark saw that resignation to neoliberalism everywhere he looked. And as anyone who picks this book up will see, he looked in many, many places. He saw it in the music of Flo-Rida, Pitbull, and will.i.am, about which he wrote: “It’s hard not to hear these records’ demands that we enjoy ourselves as thin attempts to distract from a depression that they can only mask, never dissipate. A secret sadness lurks behind the twenty-first-century’s forced smile.” He saw the rise of Donald Trump and Brexit as a reaction to that resignation: both represented a “fantasy of nationalist revival,” and however absurd that fantasy was, it at least suggested there is an alternative to capitalist realism. He saw that resignation in the Left, in its stubborn commitment to anarchist and anarchist-inspired styles of action and organizing. Reflecting in 2013 on the “exhilarating outbursts of militancy [that] recede as quickly as they erupt, without producing any sustained change” since the financial crash, he observed a sense of “anarchist fatalism” throughout the Left. Activists’ refusal to adopt tactics that could actually vie for power in the state and transform mass media narratives was, he argued, an unwitting reflection of depressive resignation. “Neo-anarchism,” he wrote, “isn’t so much of a challenge to capitalist realism as it is one of its effects.” And he saw that resignation in how leftists communicated with each other, describing, in one of his most famous essays, “Exiting the Vampire’s Castle,” how leftists have abandoned solidarity, shared experience, and common purpose in favor of essentialism, individual turf-guarding, and brand-building, often weaponizing identity to bludgeon each other rather than build an effective movement. Tragically, the approach paralyzes these movements, making them unable to take up the urgent task of fighting oppression — or much of anything else. I don’t blame Mark for surveying this state of affairs and sinking further and further into his depression. Things have been bleak. But I wish Mark could have held on. I wish he could have held on for selfish reasons: few writers in this world brought the kind of joy and even astonishment to me that he did, through the breadth of his writing, his clarity, his fearlessness. But I also wish Mark could have held on because the nightmare of capitalist realism that he spent much of his life wrestling with is finally beginning to break. We can see it wherever we look. Capitalist realism is beginning to break in the United Kingdom, where Jeremy Corbyn is head of the Labour Party. Mark saw this before his death: in her remembrance of Mark for the Los Angeles Review of Books, British writer Ellie Mae O’Hagan writes that the last time she saw Mark, she argued with him about Corbyn. She was pessimistic; he “was animated and full of hope; this was it, he thought, the left’s time was coming.” Fittingly, at the Labour Party’s fringe festival The World Transformed last year, inspired by the book Mark was working on when he died called Acid Communism (the draft of which is included in K-Punk), organizers from the left-wing Labour activist group Momentum held an event that brought together Corbyn’s left political project with the joyful countercultural styles that Mark loved so much. They called it “Acid Corbynism.” We can see capitalist realism beginning to break here in the United States, in the wild successes of Bernie Sanders and the explosion of the Democratic Socialists of America, in the warp-speed transformations of public consciousness around Medicare for All and free college for all and taxing the hell out of the rich. Perhaps we can see it nowhere better than Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter account, which she wields joyfully and savagely against any dumbass sap who dares oppose her bold left-wing political agenda by trotting out old capitalist-realist talking points. I also have a feeling Mark would’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of the recent conservative freak-out over a video of AOC dancing in college. He liked using the word “libidinal” across contexts in his writing; he probably would’ve found plenty of libidinal energy in her ecstatic style of dancing and tweeting — as well as, perhaps, a different kind of such energy in Fox News’ constant and obsessive coverage of her. And he would have been heartened at the poetic justice of last week’s news: nearly four decades after their union, PATCO, was smashed by Ronald Reagan, symbolizing a new day of corporate union-busting and helping herald the destruction of social solidarities that Mark believed were so crucial for us to rebuild, air traffic controllers ground flights to a halt in one of the world’s major airports. Together with the threat of strikes by flight attendants, they forced Donald Trump to end the government shutdown. The very workers whose crushing defeat in 1981 seemed to herald the end of history proved to be today’s well-burrowed old mole, popping their heads up from underground just in time to save the world. It’s impossible to look over the past four decades and see anything but the bleak landscapes of capitalist realism that Mark described. But it’s also impossible to look out over the world of 2019 and see capitalist realism marching onward, uncontested, smug and secure in its hegemony. A better world isn’t certain. But one thing is clear: we are witnessing the beginning of the end of capitalist realism. Mark helped us see that collective depression we have all lived in. I only wish he could have held on long enough to see that depression finally lift from the world. Perhaps it would have helped lift his own.
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Post by Admin on Jan 29, 2022 11:04:28 GMT
Rising Social and Existential Uncertainty Linked to Mental Distress A review of the research literature finds a positive association between uncertainty and mental distress such as depression and anxiety. By Micah Ingle, MA -January 28, 2022 www.madinamerica.com/2022/01/rising-social-existential-uncertainty-linked-mental-distress/J Ment Health . 2022 Jan 11;1-12. doi: 10.1080/09638237.2021.2022620. Online ahead of print. The association between uncertainty and mental health: a scoping review of the quantitative literature Alessandro Massazza 1 2, Hanna Kienzler 2, Suzan Al-Mitwalli 3, Nancy Tamimi 2, Rita Giacaman 3 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35014927/Abstract Background: The current moment is characterised by deep-rooted uncertainties, such as climate change and COVID-19. Uncertainty has been reported to be associated with negative mental health outcomes, such as stress and anxiety. However, no comprehensive review on the association between uncertainty and mental health exists. Aim: The aim of the current scoping review was to systematically explore and describe the literature on the link between uncertainty and mental health. Methods: A scoping review was undertaken following guidelines by Arksey and O'Malley (2005). Results: One hundred and one papers addressing the association between uncertainty and mental health were identified. Most were cross-sectional studies (67%) conducted in the fields of medicine or nursing (59%), in high-income countries, among adult populations (74%), and in medical settings. Substantial heterogeneity was identified in the measurements of uncertainty and mental health. Most studies (79%) reported a positive association between uncertainty and mental health problems. Conclusions: Research is needed in more diverse contexts and populations. More robust designs are required to provide insight into the directionality and strength of the association between uncertainty and mental health. Few studies reported how individuals coped with uncertainty. Future studies should address the identified gaps and investigate interventions to address uncertainty and its determinants. Keywords: Uncertainty; mental health; scoping review.
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Post by Admin on Feb 21, 2022 20:18:36 GMT
Which is better - to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one??? ~ Aldous Leonard Huxley 1894-1963.
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Post by Admin on Feb 28, 2022 23:32:14 GMT
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Post by Admin on Apr 2, 2022 14:38:57 GMT
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Post by Admin on Apr 4, 2022 14:47:53 GMT
YANIS VAROUFAKIS: WE ARE LIVING IN A POST-CAPITALIST, TECHNO-FEUDALIST DYSTOPIA World-renowned Greek economist, author, and politician Yanis Varoufakis argues that global capitalism as we know it is dying—and something much worse is taking its place. BY JASON MYLES AND PASCAL ROBERT FEBRUARY 22, 2022 therealnews.com/yanis-varoufakis-we-are-living-in-a-post-capitalist-techno-feudalist-dystopiaFrom the push to turn more of the workforce into precarious “gig workers” to the ways profit-seeking digital platforms condition how we act and think while extracting free data from us, we can see and feel everyday the creeping evidence that we are living in a new reality. As world-renowned Greek economist, author, and politician Yanis Varoufakis argues, “This is how capitalism ends: not with a revolutionary bang, but with an evolutionary whimper. Just as it displaced feudalism gradually, surreptitiously, until one day the bulk of human relations were market-based and feudalism was swept away, so capitalism today is being toppled by a new economic mode: techno-feudalism.” In their latest interview for TRNN, co-hosts of THIS IS REVOLUTION Jason Myles and Pascal Robert speak with Varoufakis about how this “techno-feudalist” system emerged, what sets it apart from the global capitalist system that preceded it, and what it will mean for humanity if we don’t stop it. Yanis Varoufakis formerly served as the finance minister of Greece and is currently the secretary general of MeRA25, a left-wing political party in Greece that he founded in 2018. He is a professor of economics at the University of Athens and the author of numerous books, including The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy and Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present.
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Post by Admin on Apr 8, 2022 15:28:57 GMT
Modern Madness: A Wild Schizoanalysis of Mental Distress in the Spaces of Modernity
by Ed Lord (Author)
What are we to make of an age that delivers pandemic levels of mental illness and a physical environment at the point of catastrophic collapse? What is it that connects and infuses both modernity and psychiatry to make them seem like the only possible ways to organise our lives and aid our distress? Could there be other options available? Other ways to explain and ameliorate our distress? What if mental distress is considered as much a matter of geography as it is of personal pathology? These are some of the questions opened up for analysis in this radically ground breaking investigation of mental distress in the spaces of the modern world. The philosophical legacies of Felix Guattari and John Zerzan are employed to take the reader on a profoundly challenging walk through Critical Theory, anarchy and decolonisation to create a route to sanity via a wild-schizoanalysis. Drawing upon a professional background in acute psychiatry and a personal immersion in radical environmentalism the author introduces us to the opening salvo of a wild and undomesticated way to think about the personal and global issues we face.
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Post by Admin on May 22, 2022 17:35:09 GMT
EVERYBODY IS INSANE INSIDE. We don't call anybody insane unless he moves too much to the extreme; but the difference between insane people and the so-called sane is only of degree -- AND ANYTHING CAN TRIGGER IT! YOU ARE JUST BOILING... somewhere near ninety-nine degrees; just one degree more -- your business fails, you go bankrupt, your wife dies -- and that one degree is added to your ninety-nine degrees, and you start evaporating; you are insane. THE PSYCHIATRISTS, THE PSYCHOTHERAPISTS, ALL FUNCTION ONLY TO KEEP YOU WITHIN LIMITS. They keep you normally abnormal -- that is their function. THEY ARE THE AGENTS OF SOCIETY, just as in the old days, priests were the agents of the society. PSYCHOTHERAPISTS ARE THE NEW PRIESTS, a new priesthood which functions to keep this society running, which keeps this society believing that everything is okay. Nothing is okay. EVERYBODY IS ON THE VERGE OF A BREAKDOWN -- and anything, any accident, can push you into the world of the insane. You are getting ready, you are always getting ready... The more SENSITIVE you are, the more alive you are, THE GREATER THE POSSIBILITY that you may go insane. —Osho— Walking in Zen, Sitting in Zen Ch #1: The breath of the soul am in Buddha Hall
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Post by Admin on Aug 12, 2022 22:20:23 GMT
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Post by Admin on Sept 12, 2022 1:25:05 GMT
Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so called pleasure. ~Erich Fromm (Book: In the Name of Life amzn.to/3KQaZbn)
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Post by Admin on Oct 21, 2022 13:51:33 GMT
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Post by Admin on Dec 10, 2022 23:19:08 GMT
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