Cold Wars, New Wars

I was listening to Katrina van den Hueval on one of Pascal’s recent episodes over at Neutrality Studies .

Katrina mentioned how today the world’s security against nuclear weapon deployment seems more precarious than during the Cold War. Although I have not dug deep into any statistics to validate the proposition, I tend to agree. But I had to post a comment:

@15:30 while it is probably true our times are more unstable than the Cold War era, this is good${}^\ddagger$. When things are stable there is little change. What actually changed during the Cold War? Nations went from a mix of bastard Keynesianism to full on monetarist neoliberalism. In other words, political economy went backwards for the last four decades or more. The 70’s inflations were not due to Keynesian policy (pure nor bastard forms) neither due all that much to the conflict between capital and labour (a very minor effect), but were due mostly to energy price shocks driven by a powerful monopoly cartel. The MMT crowd can explain, get them on the show, and when you get them on roast their nuts on why they are not more militant against neoliberalism and bourgeois complacency and nihilism. The rentiers have to be euthanized, they’re not the wealth creators, workers are.
     ${}^\ddagger$A stable society is a good condition once you have a peaceful fair society. Not when you have a disgusting class based unjust society. Where you come from, the initial conditions, matters.

I know friends over at RP/RPiA and other MMT activist circles would agree with me. The “MMT crowd” I refer to above is the milquetoast normie MMT’er, the ones who think understanding the monetary system will fix things right.

That means not Bill Mitchell. See Bill’s recent comments here: “Class, Capitalism and MMT”

One thing should be said however, in defence of neutral MMT. Anyone who goes from not knowing MMT to knowing MMT is about 90% likely to be radicalized, to transform from a normie to a powerful progressive, not a milquetoast progressive (fake progressive). Knowledge is power. It’s just not the only form of power. A moral compass is needed too, otherwise power gets channelled in the wrong directions.