Challenging the Market: October 2010

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Australians thinking and writing about Markets and Society

Damien Cahill is an Australian academic who has written extensively about the influence of neoliberalism and the use of market solutions to an increasing number of social issues. Some of his writings can read here and here.

Damien is also the co-convenor of the Markets and Society Research Network at the University of Sydney, which brings together social scientists concerned about markets and society to discuss the social foundations of markets; the regulation of markets; the social effects of markets; and the shifting boundaries between the state, private sector, and civil society.

Like this blog, the Market and Society Research Network aims to challenge orthodox conceptions of markets at a time of increasing ‘marketisation’. This includes critical examination of the role and nature of markets, the legitimate scope of markets as well as investigations of markets as sites of contestation.

The Network recently ran a 2 day conference to critically analyze the increasing reliance on market-based solutions in Australia in areas such as climate change, provision of human services, childcare services, health, education, superannuation and housing. The program and the papers can be read here.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

The crisis in the Murray Darling and the failure of market mechanisms

Bruce Haigh on the madness of using market mechanisms to manage water in the Murray Darling Basin and the need for a radically different approach to the management of Australia's water resources:

"The management of water should not be left to markets where the pursuit of profit has water abused, devalued and often powerless with respect to sustainability. Water needs a voice and a value beyond the market. At the moment it comes a very poor second in calculations relating its use - agriculture and industry have the upper hand and water is required to comply".

"The National and Liberal Parties presided over the slow decline of rural Australia. They had the opportunity to reverse this during almost 12 years of government. They declined to do so and as a result many jobs were lost and economic opportunities that may have come through the provision of better services and infrastructure were not created, but were lost. This neglect saw the rise of rural Independents who now hold the balance of power".

Sunday, October 3, 2010

The ideological straitjacket of economics

"We need to develop a new way of conceiving the economic process. In calling for an end to economics, I am not suggesting that we should dismiss everything that economists have learned about the economy. Some economic insights are useful. Our goal should be to build up an understanding of the economy in a context that transcends the narrow context of economic theory that characterizes modern economic theory. In doing so, we may lay the groundwork for an economy that transcends our outmoded capitalist way of life."
Michael Perelman Railroading Economics

Stephen Marglin calls it the "dismal science". Michael Perelman writes about the ideological straitjacket of modern economics. James Galbraith describes contemporary economics in terms of a god that failed, a governing creed whose fallacies have been exposed by events of recent years. In his book Economia Australian Geoff Davies writes that we have all become so accustomed to the current economic regime that we fail to see how absurd it is. He is right.

I am currently reading the books pictured and all present a radical and sustained critique of contemporary economics. They challenge the idea that market and market forces are a solution to our social, environmental and economic problems.

These books don't just expose discredited contemporary economic orthodoxies, they also document the destructive effects of those orthodoxies in the real world (rather than the theories of economists and business leaders). These authors more importantly set an alternative and radical economic agenda for the future.

The books pictured include:

Stephen Margeli (2008) The Dismal Science

Michael Perelman (2006) Railroading Economics

James Galbraith (2008) The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and why Liberals Should to

Geoff Davies (2004) Economia: New Economic systems to empower people and support the living world

James Gustav Speth (2008) The Bridge at the End of the World

Barry Lynn (2009) Cornered:The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Dynamics of Destruction

Challenging the Market is an initiative of the WA Social Justice Network to publicize the writings of Western Australian citizens and activists who support economic, environmental, racial and social justice.

We work in many different areas - health care, academia, politics, human rights, economics, education, social policy, human and community services, labour unions, the law, Aboriginal affairs and small business. We share a range of political and ideological philosophies and views.

We come together out of a shared concern about the extension of market, corporate and business values into so many spheres of daily life with the resulting debasement of democracy, public policy, civic life and political debate. We believe that the extension of market, corporate and business values into so many spheres of daily life is detrimental to the wellbeing and social fabric of WA.

We aim to challenge the dominant market and corporate worldview. Relying on the market to solve social and environmental problems it has created is both shortsighted and dangerous.

Quotes and Reflections

"The power of the dominant order is not just economic but intellectual-lying in the realm of beliefs"
Pierre Bourdieu

"Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose".
Tony Judt

"No lasting change has been successful without large numbers of people acting consciously and collectively around human values of solidarity and social justice, not market values. Markets are great ways to do some things, but not to fashion communities of caring and compassion"
Michael Edwards

"The markets have ruled for a third of a century but it has all ended in tears... Any great failure should force us to rethink. The present economic crises is a great failure of the market system"
Robert Skidelsky

"To concede the authority of the market is to affirm the legitimacy of the hierarchies that markets produce..... The market system is not open to fundamental reform; power relations cannot be changed"
James K Galbraith The Predator State

"If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.": Howard Zinn, Historian and Author

"The dazzle of free markets has blinded us to other ways of seeing the world"
Raj Patel

"Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma. The G8's dogma is that the making of profit has to be mankind's guiding principle before which everything else from the traditional past or aspiring future must be sacrificed as illusion"
John Berger

" The capacity of the state for effective political action has been severely limited. As a result, quite a few of the modern-orthodox state functions have escaped or been shifted sideways to the markets, increasingly emancipated from political supervision (let alone direction) or have fallen or been dropped to the area of individually conducted "life politics"- by definition the sacrosanct realm of privacy"
Zygmunt Bauman

"The age of neo-liberalism is still with us despite everything.... no major figure of the neo-liberal cause, anywhere in the world, has recanted or acknowledged the disastrous consequences of their failed revolution.
The citadels of power, status and wealth across the globe still hum to the dynamics, logics and cliches of neo-liberalism despite the devastation they have wrought both recently, and across the whole of the last thirty years".
Gerry Hassan

Challenging the Market