English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

This article intends to re-examine what is necessary and desirable for reconstructing social democracy and socialism for the 21st century against neoliberalism. It starts by reviewing the final chapter of David Harvey's The Enigma of Capital (2010), where he presents his ideas of what is to be done about a series of important issues of our age. Among other things, we have to rethink anew notions of communism, socialism, anti-capitalism, anarchism, social democracy, and Keynesianism against neoliberalism. Beyond the typical 20th-century models of social democracy and socialism, which expected to change the roles of nation state upon the ground of trade union movements, new features and components of their 21st-century models are to be examined. Among them, let us reconsider here more concretely, based upon our recent experiences, what to expect on Keynesian devices, green recovery policies, the ideas of basic income and local currencies.Key words: social democracy; socialism; green recovery; basic income; local currenciesWhat is to be Done?The final chapter of David Harvey's The Enigma of Capital (2011) is titled "What is to be Done? And Who is Going to Do It?" It presents us a series of important issues to be discussed in our age under the disastrous world economic situation ranging from the subprime to the sovereign crisis. Among others, we have to rethink anew notions of communism, socialism, anti-capitalism, anarchism, social democracy, and Keynesianism against neoliberalism. We are thus induced to reconsider large-scale alternatives to the neoliberal tendency to shift the burden of continuous global crises onto the shoulders of working people.Harvey points out powerfully that the weakness of orthodox neoclassical economics as a foundation of neoliberalism is its inability to decipher the enigma of capital, concerning why and how capital inevitably forms a capitalist market economy which is intrinsically crisis-ridden as we are experiencing in the recent world economic crisis. I basically agree with him that the basic theory of capitalist economic crisis in Marx's Capital (1867: 85, 94) is suitably applicable to the contemporary world crisis.However, there remains a difference between us on how to utilize Marx's crisis theory. Harvey (2011) takes a multi-causal approach to maintain various types of crisis theory in Capital, such as over-accumulation theories underlining a fall in profit rate due to either labor shortage or rising composition of capital, and excess commodity theories underlining the difficulty of realization of values of commodities due to either anarchical disproportion among industries or under- consumption among workers, which are to be applied to different historical cases of crisis.By following up K. Uno (1953), a Japanese original Marxian political economist, I intended to complete a basic theory of classical cyclical crises of labor-shortage type together with Marx's theory of credit system, in accord with Marx's intention to clarify commodification of human labor-power as the fundamental root of contradiction of capitalist economy (Itoh 1980, 1988). The global inflationary crisis at the beginning of the 1970s occurred after over-accumulation of capital in relation to laboring population in the advanced economies as well as to flexibility in supply of primary products in the world market, and was analyzed exactly by applying such an over-accumulation theory of crisis of labor-shortage type, as Harvey agrees.As a reaction to this crisis, the exceptionally advantageous position of workers and their trade unions easily to demand a wide increase of real wages due to labor-shortage was reversed continuously in advanced economies, both domestically and internationally, in the process of reformation of an industrial reserve army through "rationalization" of wage costs by means of information technologies (IT), weakening trade unions under neoliberal privatization of public enterprises or deregulation in labor laws, and utilization of cheaper workers abroad by multinational corporations. …

Political Economy for 21st-Century Models of Social Democracy and Socialism: Following up the Issues Raised by David Harvey