Last week, I presented a webinar to the Australian Industrial Transformation Institute at Flinders Uni. The slides are here – I’ll update when the video becomes available

Summary: From four-day weeks to unconditional basic income to free education, it’s possible to imagine a future where society’s focus has moved from consumption to quality of life.

My latest Substack newsletter, a report on what I’ve been up to in June and early July. My biggest news is that I’ve decided to take a break from commenting on day-to-day politics. Even starting with low expectations, I’ve been deeply disappointed by the Albanese government. That feeling seems to be widely shared, especially as regards Covid and Climate. Perhaps the public response will turn things around, but I don’t have anything much to add beyond what I’ve said already.

Instead, I’m trying to think about longer term issues, making the case that we need a utopian vision as an alternative to the current dystopia.

That’s the title of my new column in Independent Australia. I plan to write fortnightly from now on.

Now that quantitative easing is no longer needed, the problem is how to manage the huge increase in money balances that is driving demand. This is not a new problem; it arises every time a lot of spending is needed to handle an emergency, and we know what works and what does not. In the aftermath of World War I, governments in the UK and Australia sought to unwind the inflation created by wartime spending and return to the gold standard. The result was a long period of economic weakness, culminating in the Great Depression. By contrast, after World War II, wages and prices were allowed to rise, as wartime rationing ended and reconstruction gradually removed constraints on production.

As long as the real value of wages is maintained, a once-off increase in the price level is a small price to pay for avoiding economic disaster during the pandemic. The reconstruction of supply chains, along with the underlying increases in productivity generated by technological progress, will allow a gradual return to lower rates of inflation. We can also hope for some additional gains arising from the experience of the pandemic with remote work, telecommunications and home delivery of goods and services.

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Following up my initial response to Lane Kenworthy, I decided to approach the question from a different direction and ask “Would we be better off without corporations?”. That is, I’d like to consider a society in which all large enterprises were publicly owned. There would still be room for owner-operated private businesses, worker-controlled co-operatives, partnerships and perhaps some other forms of business I haven’t thought about. I won’t get into disputes about whether this would constitute socialism, except to say that it would be radically different from any version of capitalism we’ve seen so far.

I’m also going to reverse the burden of proof implicit in Kenworthy’s approach. I start from the assumption that the expansion of corporate power under the neoliberal (or market liberal) policy package of privatisation, financialisation and deunionisation that has prevailed since the 1970s has been bad for most of us.

Given that neoliberalism is a term that’s often used loosely, I’ll try to be more specific about the adverse effects that can be tied specifically to the resurgence of corporate power.

The most obvious is the growth in inequality that has coincided with the rise of neoliberalism and corporate power. Virtually every aspect of neoliberal policy reform from increasing capital mobility to union-busting to flattening of tax scales has contributed to increased inequality. Moreover, they all reinforce each other.
?So, if we can do without for-profit corporations without incurring significant economic costs, we should.

I started looking at this on a sector-by-sector basis but then realised I would need to write a whole book in reply. So, over the fold, some disorganized thoughts

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My latest Substack newsletter

I’ve just received a copy of Lane Kenworthy’s latest back Would Democratic Socialism be Better (Shorter LK: “capitalism, and particularly social democratic capitalism, is better
than many democratic socialists seem to think”).

The book is a follow-up to his Social Democratic Capitalism, which made the case that the USA would be better off moving to a Nordic model of social democracy.

I’m hoping to make a longer response soon, but I thought I’d begin by summing up the argument as I see it, and the reasons I’m unconvinced.

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