Re: <nettime> Debt As A Public Good, Berlin #BeautifulTrouble Book Launch w/ @AndrewBoyd & @Info_Activism // Attn @BTroublemakers

[Dmytri Kleiner <dk@telekommunisten.net>]

Hey Kieth,

Whether I would advocate a return to a national economy or not, there 
is no path back, that ship has sailed.

In anycase, The sectoral ballances approach is used by many modern 
economists, i.e. Wynne Godley, L. Randal Wray, etc. The accounting 
identities are facts that are true by definiation, and thus certainly 
apply. Peter Cooper explains it as follows:

    "When a sector, in aggregate, spends more than its income, it is 
said to be in deficit.
     If it spends less than its income, it is in surplus. We can write 
the identity as:

     (G â T) + (I â S) + (X â M) = 0

     This makes clear that the deficit of the government sector plus 
the deficit of the
     domestic private sector plus the deficit of the external sector 
(foreigners, including
     both foreign private sectors and governments) must sum to zero, 
balancing each other out.

     This is an identity, true by definition. It tells us that whatever 
the net positions of
     two sectors, the other sector must offset them exactly. {1}



Dispute emerging economic relations which may be "off the books." The 
social reality of debt, whether that of US students or Eurozone nations, 
and is very much "on the books" and thus understood by way of the 
macroeconomic identities described.

If you're studying emerging economic practice these formulations may 
seem obsolete, however they still shape the big politics of the day. The 
fact remains that student debt and bond debt alike must be paid in 
government currency, the availability of which is governed by the 
accounting facts described. Thus, in terms of political organization, 
these identities help understand and analyze the policies of existing 
governments.

Now, one day we may transcend the national economy even more than today 
so as to make it completely irrelevant to everyday life. Perhaps at some 
higher level of society we will have so much available wealth and 
spontaneous co-operation that we wont need to count anything at all. 
However we are a long way away from there, and in the meantime we still 
need to confront society as we encounter it.

And even looking forward, certain questions like how do we collectively 
achieve economic and social outcomes, and no matter how we define the 
collective form, no matter how we view the constitution of the public 
after the national form has receded in importance, our new public still 
need means, at least for some time, by which to withdraw  productive 
capacity from the service of private consumption towards the service of 
public good. In other words, the need for these new publics to have 
fiscal and monetary policy is likely to remain for some time, and thus  
the understanding of macroeconomic identities remains far away from 
being a "relic."

Best,




{1} http://heteconomist.com/?p=2360


On 11.09.2012 18:17, Keith Hart wrote:

> Hi Dmytri.
>
> I agree with: "Organizing around debt means uniting against insane
> policies that promote the interests of rich corporations and rich
> countries against common households and poorer countries. Much of the
> debt born my households and the debt born by peripheral nations is a
> result of bad government and bad economic policy." But I don't understand
> why you stick with this Keynesian analysis which, if it ever applied
> anywhere, partly illuminated the national economies of Europe during *les
> trente glorieuses* of social democracy. The approach doesn't offer much
> insight into the current global system of money where most of it goes off
> the books. Do you advocate a return to national economy? There must be
> some rhetorical purpose for exhuming this relic.

--
Dmytri Kleiner
Venture Communist


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org