Currently I’m reading Nina Burton’s ‘Livets tunna väggar’ which translate to something like Walls of Life. It’s a book by a Swedish writer who inherits her mother’s summer house. When she wants to renovate it, she finds all sort of life around and in the house. She uses said life to teach you something about the intellect of various insects and animals, which goes deeper than humans normally think.
It’s a very interesting book that makes me think about non-human life even more. Creatures that are thousands of times smaller than we are have such complex societal structures. Humans have overcommodified animal life for centuries now, seeing them as property and commodities instead of complex and intelligent life forms.
What are you reading?
Thanks to the latest Macro N Cheese podcast episode, I’ve ordered a copy of Carlos García Hernández’s Fiat Socialism: Achieving the Goals of Socialism through Modern Monetary Theory. It seems to be hard to find physical copies of it in the US right now (perhaps because it’s new), so I have to wait two weeks for it to arrive from Australia. Amazon & Kobo have ebook versions.
Edit: I suspect what I may eventually come to find that this is essentially what socialism with Chinese characteristics is, but first I’ll need to learn more about what actually goes on in China.
I hadn’t heard of Hernández before, but I was intrigued by the title so I gave it a listen. He said he doesn’t subscribe to dialectical materialism and his entire framework of defining socialism without even considering the ownership of the means of production strikes me as deeply idealistic, so I’m not so sure how seriously I want to take his work.
He comes from a philosophy background, and I’m not really interested in his weird Kant vs Hegel diversion, but for his attempt to synthesize fiat money & socialism, which is what I suspect China has already achieved. China is allowing some limited private ownership of the means of production, and they have sovereign fiat money.
As far as I know (which isn’t all that much) fiat money/Keynesianism/MMT hadn’t yet been developed when Marx was writing on capital. I have a suspicion that these innovations may have “resolved” some of capitalism’s internal contradictions, such that it might never collapse on its own. For instance, did Marx consider that the State might just print money to bail out the too-big-to-fail monopolies indefinitely, or that the State might prop the monopolies up by becoming their buyer of last resort? American capitalism seems to have entered uncharted territory.
It certainly made capitalism more stable for a while, but once the US runs out of imperial power and those trillions of dollars in debt aren’t backed by any real goods they’ll get in deep trouble.
Yes. The trillions of US dollar-denominated debt can always be paid, so the collapse won’t come from that directly. But imperial power is fading and attempts to retain/regain it seem to be accelerating that. The Biden admin. factions that are attempting re-industrialization are at odds with the FIRE factions, and when the Republicans get back in power, they’re unlikely to do any better. What do we make now but dollar-denominated loans and expensive, underperforming weapons?
I also just ordered Carlos Martínez’s new book, The East is Still Red – Chinese socialism in the 21st century. He contributes to Midwestern Marx.