On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 7:43 AM, Louis Proyect <[email protected]> wrote:
> I am proud to be called a Trot, even if I am more of a Bukharinite. But > Yves Smith? This is just a stupid smear, like Sean Hannity calling Obama > a "socialist". > I couldn't care less what Marxist faction, Proyect associates himself with, but he happens to be exactly right about Yves Smith. I used to read her work a lot back in the housing bubble years when she (along with the late Tanta of the CalculatedRisk blog) had some of the best economic and financial commentary equipped with excellent and detailed inside knowledge, keen intelligence and terrific writing skills. She has since the crisis years become quite radicalized and her blog has grown into an aggregation site - sort of a radical version of the Huffington Post. Although she has excellent contributors (including Michael Perelman, William Black and I believe Yanis Varoufakis before this year), the volume of material has become too large for me to keep up like I used to. Now I just scan the RSS feed from her site for the occasional essay that seems especially interesting. Anyway I was and still remain a fan of Yves Smith's work. She definitely belongs to the radical left, offers shrill commentary on neoliberalism and Wall St, and frequently uses Marxist categories in her analysis. BUT - she is no Marxist - much less a "Trot" whatever that means. For a reasonably typical example of the role that Marxist ideology plays in her analysis see this (yes, I know this is a guest contributor rather than Yves herself, but I recall her writing similar things in the past): http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/10/marx-versus-capitalism-versus-you.html --------------------------snip This is basically what is wrong in the developed world. There needs to be a balance between wages and investment returns for the system to function well. Henry Ford paid his workers well not because he was a generous man, but because then they could buy Fords. Globalisation has, of course, undone this compact, and although it has led to some productivity improvements, it is also having the effect of gutting the middle classes in the developed world. In Europe it is seen in the shape of unemployment, in America, the same as well as in the shape of rising poverty <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/saturdayextra/stories/2011/3344486.htm> and the evaporation of the middle class. Now, one does not have to be a Marxist to arrive at these conclusions. But Marxism (as opposed to what Marx wrote) resulted in the demonisation of markets, a perfectly normal human activity that goes back 3,000 years, give or take a century. In response, capitalism (whatever that is exactly) felt the need to overstate the value of markets, producing the kind of market worship we now see. Each position is absurd. Marxism has largely collapsed from its own contradictions. Capitalism is on the way to doing the same because when market worship is applied to financial systems, it produces the kind of endless regresses we are now seeing.
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