#Capitalism#Markets#PoliticalEconomy#ClimateChange#GlobalWarming: "Capitalism in this nakedly ‘antimarket’ form is beyond justification. At various points since the global financial crisis, leaders on the political left have attempted to point this out. Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders used their respective platforms to name and denounce a system that extracts without promising anything in return. Ed Miliband hung his 2011 Labour Party Conference speech on a Braudelian distinction between economic ‘predators’ and ‘producers’, which proved too much for Britain’s predator-aligned newspapers, and too nuanced to survive very long in the Westminster hubbub. He remains the last outpost of this kind of critical thinking in the shadow cabinet (following Starmer’s U-turn on his £28 billion a year decarbonisation spending commitment, a Conservative Party website led with the taunt ‘Where’s Ed?’), and the one front-bench politician who is receptive to analyses such as Christophers’s, which continue to be funnelled in his direction by the post-Corbynite think tank Common Wealth.
One curiosity of this critique is how much it owes to Keynes, and how little to Marx. It is precisely the lack of industrial exploitation of labour, and the absence of technological innovation, that are considered the central defects of contemporary capitalism. Instead, capitalism appears dominated by financial expertise, which floods and reconfigures everything from housebuilding to universities, public infrastructure investment to healthcare. The productive economy stagnates, while profits are wrung out of every available social and public utility by alliances of elite legal and financial services firms, sweating assets and expanding property rights. Liberal economists and pundits have latched on to the idea that Western capitalism is beset by ‘secular stagnation’, but Christophers goes further in setting out the way capitalism still manages to thrive..." https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n07/william-davies/antimarket
