DESIGNING A MIRACLE TO SAVE SOUTH AFRICA

By Howard Richards

New times call for new ideas.   In a desperate situation, like that of South Africa today, some people may be willing to consider the new ideas that are on offer, going on the lookout for measures that might work.  Others may have their minds already made up; they might be already sure that they know what miracle, if it would only happen, would save South Africa.  read more

A General Solution to Economic Problems

I refer to the unsolved ones, not to those that are pretty satisfactorily solved already.   I focus on our two acronyms SF1 and SF2, where SF can be read as Staggering Fact or as Structural Fact. In the terminology of John Maynard Keynes SF1 generates a chronic shortfall of the inducement to invest.  Once a society comes to depend on investment-for-the-sake-of-production-for-the-sake-of-sale-for- the- sake-of-profit to meet its needs, investment becomes its drug.   It can never get enough of it.   SF2 generates a chronic insufficiency of effective demand. read more

Pierre Bourdieu and the Crisis of Modernity

 By Howard Richards


Pierre Bourdieu is a problem.  He continues to be a problem even though since January 23, 2002, he is no longer alive.  He is a problem because he has great prestige and he gives some bad advice.  ATTAC, an organization he co-founded, continues to be a forum where his views carry great weight.  The publisher of the Chilean edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, a periodical to which he frequently contributed, has reprinted a collection of his writings on political and social issues that includes:  “The Essence of Neoliberalism,”  “For Committed Science,”  “Give Social Meaning to the European Union,” “The Architect of the Euro Confesses,”  “A New Planetary Vulgate,” and “Masculine Domination.”  I will be commenting mainly on these.

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Say’s Law

By Howard Richards


Before proposing some ways to respond to the challenge of making dignity for all compatible with the social functions of profit-making and capital accumulation, we will examine Say´s Law… read more