http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/04/201142612714539672.html

Into extract:
The crisis of global capitalism is unprecedented, given its magnitude, its global reach, the extent of ecological degradation and social deterioration, and the scale of the means of violence. We truly face a crisis of humanity. The stakes have never been higher; our very survival is at risk. We have entered into a period of great upheavals and uncertainties, of momentous changes, fraught with dangers – if also opportunities.

I want to discuss here the crisis of global capitalism and the notion of distinct political responses to the crisis, with a focus on the far-right response and the danger of what I refer to as 21st century fascism, particularly in the United States.

Facing the crisis calls for an analysis of the capitalist system, which has undergone restructuring and transformation in recent decades. The current moment involves a qualitatively new transnational or global phase of world capitalism that can be traced back to the 1970s, and is characterised by the rise of truly transnational capital and a transnational capitalist class, or TCC. Transnational capital has been able to break free of nation-state constraints to accumulation beyond the previous epoch, and with it, to shift the correlation of class and social forces worldwide sharply in its favour – and to undercut the strength of popular and working class movements around the world, in the wake of the global rebellions of the 1960s and the 1970s.

Heads of cabbage and mouths full of water by Mark Neocleous.  Radical Philosophy Nov/Dec 2003

http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2187&editorial_id=14329

“The law which shaped the modern corporation as a new form of legal person has been reluctant to admit that the same persons can commit illegal acts and recognizable harms. The law, in other words, has been structured in a way that is far more accommodating to corporate subjects than to human ones. In this way the ruling class has more or less defined capital as beyond incrimination: the ‘harms’ committed by corporations are treated as the result of a failure to follow regulations and procedures and thus are not ‘crimes’ in the way that laypersons might think. Apropos of right-wing attacks on ‘welfare scroungers’ and ‘the idle poor’, one might say that it is the corporation that has acquired plenty of rights but few responsibilities. Capital has used the corporate form to its advantage by avoiding some of the most obvious disadvantages of being a legal subject, namely responsibility for one’s acts”.

STAGING POWER: MARX, HOBBES AND THE PERSONIFICATION OF CAPITAL by Mark Neocleous.
Law and Critique 14: 147–165, 2003. © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

“The law which granted the modern corporation fully-fledged status as a juridical person has been reluctant to admit that the same persons can commit illegal acts and recognisable harms; the corporation is a person when it comes to the advantages of law, but a ‘nonperson’ when it comes to crimes seemingly committed by it. The individualizing nature of bourgeois law constructs the corporation as a person but then resists punishing it on the grounds that it is not a person at all but a collective which has no mind per se. The state personalizes capital, but doesn’t punish it as a person. It punishes it (when it does) as capital – as something different to (human) persons. A propos of attacks on ‘welfare scroungers’ and ‘the idle poor’, one might say that it is the corporation that has acquired plenty of rights but few responsibilities. In Marxist terms we might say that the unity of the corporate persona created by the state has helped consolidate the  domination of capital over everyday life. Capital has used the corporate form to its advantage by avoiding some of the most obvious disadvantages of being a legal person, namely responsibility for one’s acts. The outcome has been the tendency to treat ‘crimes’ committed by corporations as mere failure to follow regulations and procedures and thus not ‘crime’ at all: the ruling class has defined capital as beyond incrimination. But then this should not surprise us: as with bourgeois law in general, the corporation is, after all, constituted as a person for purposes of capital accumulation and not for the purposes of justice.

There is a tendency among writers on ‘corporate crime’ to argue that “while . . . the charge of corporate manslaughter remains a highly difficult one to pursue successfully, there are no insuperable problems intrinsic to law to the effective criminalisation of such offences; . . . what is commonly lacking is political will”. Maybe so; but the implication of my argument is that any such ‘political will’ would have to be rooted not in the current structures through which mainstream politics is organized – political parties and reformist groups – but in a movement that would be willing to challenge the whole edifice on which political and social power is structured – the state and the individualizing tendencies of bourgeois law as well as capital itself. Moreover, any such challenge would have to take on board the fact that capital uses the persona in bourgeois law as the veil of its power”.

Both articles via Joss Winn http://stuck.josswinn.org/

Troubles ahead for world economy the 7.30 Report. Transcript of interview with Joseph Stiglitz.

Extract:
Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel laureate, a former chief economist of the World Bank and he chaired Bill Clinton’s presidential council of economic advisors.  His latest book, ‘Freefall’, is a worrying critique of the root causes of the Global Financial Crisis, and despite President Obama’s recent banking reforms, he says it could happen again. He’s also predicting another US economic slowdown. The veteran economist is on a lecture tour in Australia and I spoke with him in Brisbane today.

Joseph Stiglitz, if we can start with an up-to-date appraisal of the US economy: what is the state of the economy right now?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ, GLOBAL ECONOMIST: In a single word, weak, ah, and probably going to get weaker.

Austerity: Why and for Whom? by Rick Wolff. On-line article at Commondreams.org. Links austerity programmes across Europe to conditions set by banks lending to governments due to fears of defaults on government debts. For instance the high rates of interest imposed on Greece in return for bail out loans by European banks. If governments default on loans then their credit rating may prevent them borrowing more, the banks will collapse and the Governments will not be able to borrow form banks to bail them out! Is this right? The banks have lent money to governments to bail themselves, the banks, out. Presumabley these are not the same banks – it is the banks not crippled by bad investment (the ‘national’ banks’?) that are lending to governments who then use the money to bail out the failing banks. The public funding cuts are to ensure governments can service these debts to the bank, maintain their credit ratings so that, if necessary, the governments can bail out the banks in the future. If the national banks lent the money to governments to bail out the failing banks, why couldn’t the banks have lent directly to other banks? I assume they want governments, their tax streams and assets, to guarantee the loans. It is generally recognised that European national banks will make significant profits out of lending to Greece as the interest rate is significantly higher than the banks can borrow money themselves.

All this leaves open the question – why do the austerity measures punish the poor and, despite everything, wealth still grows and concentrates? That’s because for the wealthy, every problem is an opportunity. And for the political right, ironically, via neoliberal policies, it is an opportunity to enact barely masked ideologically informed policies. Given the high profits banks will make out of loans to Greece, for instance, this looks like a direct transfer of money from the poor to the financial institutions that got us into the mess in the first place.

“The Idea of Communism” at Marxism 2010 (1/2) from Kosho Yoshiyama on Vimeo.

A debate between Alex Callinicos, John Holloway and Slavoj Zizek on the Idea of Communism.

http://johannhari.com//2010/07/02/how-goldman-sachs-gambling-on-starving-the-worlds-poor-and-won

Posted by Johann Hari

By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You’re wrong. There’s more. It turns out the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here’s the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world – Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more – have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world, just so they could make a fatter profit.

In the World Tonight broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on the evening of June 30th (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00stk6m minutes 13 to 18) a couple of small business owners were interviewed to test the claim of the ConDem govt that the reduction of the jobs in the public sector would be more than compensated by the creation of new jobs in the private sector. As far as the intentions of the programme were concerned, the test was inconclusive. However, the programme was revealing in another, unremarked upon, way. The first business was a small fashion designer. SeeMe London. Their customers had not bought anything for most of 2009. To the credit of the owners they had kept their staff on while weathering the storm and restructuring their business. Business was now expanding again but they had ditched their previous customers and markets and how re-branded themselves at the high end of the market selling high value services. The future is now looking quite rosy. The second small business was a company that specialised in tuning high performance cars, Paramount Performance. Again, over 2009 business declined dramatically. One attempted solution was to diversify and offer economy tuning rather than performance tuning thinking that their customers, in straightened circumstances, would be more willing to spend money on saving fuel. To their disappointment this did not appeal and the attracted very few customers. However, this year business is growing again and it is the high end sector that is placing the orders and spending the money.

This is only anecdotal evidence of course but may prove to be symptomatic of how this recession will play out – the already poor and the middle classes getting poorer and the rich getting richer, as is evidenced by previous recessions.