Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A left of liberal argument Should we be scared o the coronavirus debt mountain?

What the Economist doesn't tell you

"Liberalism has always contained different shades, and its dominant version has varied across countries and periods. In the capitalist world, going back to the eighties, the line of division separating a liberal politics from a politics of the left is their respective attitudes to the existing order of things: does it require structural change or situational adjustment? Between states, the ‘liberal international order’ has for thirty years been the touchstone of geopolitical reason: free markets, free trade, free movement of capital and other human rights, policed by the most powerful nation on earth with help from its allies, in accordance with its rules and its sanctions, its rewards and its retributions. Within states, ‘neoliberalism’: privatization of goods and services, deregulation of industries and of finance, fiscal retrenchment, de-unionization, weakening of labour, strengthening of capital—compensated by recognition of gender and multicultural claims. The first has

Hitler by Brendan Simms and Hitler by Peter Longerich And even Adam Tooze, an economic historian cherished by the liberal left, and some revolutionary leftists, has made a blunder. "Contrary to common belief, Tooze argues, in Hitler’s mind the supreme enemy against which his mobilization of the Third Reich for continental war took aim lay not in the steppes to the east, but across the ocean to the far west. Not the bacillus of Bolshevism but the might of the United States, headquarters of world Jewry, was the existential threat to Germany that obsessed him, and governed his ambitions of aggression. The destruction of Communism and conquest of Russia was just a means, not an end, Operation Barbarossa no more than a way-station—the acquisition of a territorial  and resource platform capable of rivalling the vast open spaces of the American colossus, in the battle for world domination. Historically, then, ‘America should provide the pivot for our understanding of the Third Reich

Liberals do not have any answers to crisis

An admission that this one of the inherent aspects of capitalism In Tooze’s view,  “These crises are hard to predict or define in advance,”  and, short of more regulation, there is nothing we can do. In a way, as long as capitalism continues as the dominant mode of production globally, that is pretty much right.  That reminds me of what Greenspan said in his final summation of the crisis: “ I doubt that stability is achievable in capitalist economies, given the always turbulent competitive markets continuously being drawn toward but never quite achieving  equilibrium” . He went on,  “unless there is a societal choice to abandon dynamic markets and leverage for some form of central planning, I fear that preventing bubbles will in the end turn out to be infeasible. Assuaging the aftermath is all we can hope for.” Crashed: more the how than the why