David Gleicher

Rethinking money and the state: a semiotic turn

A novel conception of money and the State is offered, in the context of post-golden-age financial and political systems (roughly from 1980 to the present), and with regard to the sovereign-currency States, focusing particularly on the USA. The basic elements of the paper are: (1) a novel semiotic understanding of money as language rather than as a unit of measure, money understood to communicate goods-ownership to the public, and debt ownership to the corporation; (2) a discussion of financial unsustainability under the present system in which the banking oligopolies possess a newfound freedom to create money capital both more independently and on a significantly larger scale than under the previous Glass–Steagall regime; (3) a critique of the neo-liberal simulation (in the sense of Baudrillard) of government debt and dissimulation of the sovereign-currency State, able to create money at will; (4) a delineation of two fundamental policy objectives: to genuinely meet the States obligation to assure the life and pursuit of happiness that all citizens are entitled to, and secondly, to decompress ever-expanding and ever-dangerous capital; (5) specific, highly original policy actions are put forward, aimed at meeting these policy objectives, notably lifting budgetary constraints on federal government spending and transforming the central bank into a repository of guaranteed household deposits.

Four Thousand Lives Lost: The inquiries of Lord Mersey into the sinking of the ‘Titanic’, the ‘Empress of Ireland’, the ‘Falaba’ and the ‘Lusitania’

the backbone. Of German origin, the réveilleur (p. 114) was claimed to lessen troublesome symptoms by simulating multiple insect bites. A totally different approach involved the Bessemer saloon (pp. 55–6) which swung, somewhat independently, within the hull of a cross-channel steamer: it was hoped that this arrangement would provide passengers with comfortable, non-nauseating accommodation. Le Moing also provides a photograph of an American device (p. 119) which, during the Second World War, sought to accustom soldiers to the movement of landing craft in rough seas. In essence, this contraption was a sort of stretcher moving on what might well be termed ‘eccentric wheels’. As a general comment, it is this reviewer’s opinion that Petite histoire provides a compact and very readable source of information regarding mal de mer. Perhaps, in due course, an English translation might be considered? h. J. k. Jenkins PeterBorough http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00253359.2014.932599

Social action, dialogism and the imaginary community: toward a dialogical critique of political economy

We view political economy through a lens of dialogical thought associated with the writings of the Bakhtin circle (1918–1929). The individual is understood to be a “social subject” who engages by necessity in self/other dialogue, in the medium of language, and whose actions are inscribed by an existential social unit. The latter cannot “communicate itself” as a unified object, for the very reason that meaning is always in it. This basic dialogical approach is then extended to the “social-as-community”, pointing toward a dialogical critique of political economy. The subject is understood to be oriented by its experience of an other individual as that which the subject is not, and as that which the subject is. Conceptually, then, the imaginary community is a transfiguration of the task each subject faces orienting self and other. It is a set of individuals, each individual inside the community being experienced by each other one as self, and individuals outside the set, as other.

Toward a general model of price, choice of technique and distribution in a centrally-planned, socialist economy

Introduction The premise of this paper is that centrally-planned, socialist economies exist. Our aim is to locate and explain the characteristic features of such economies in terms of real social forces. The argument is presented in four sections, to which the following theses correspond: (i) General structural relations under socialism imply functional asymmetries among economic agents as members of households, on the one hand, and members of central planning institutions on the other; (ii) These asymmetries explain a peculiarly socialist articulation of plan and market, which can be captured by a general equilibrium model; (iii) The set of production methods employed in a socialist economy the ‘choice of technique’ is endogenous to the plan, and thereby is necessarily ‘political’. However, the notion of a purely technical choice of technique with respect to capitalist economies is, itself, a fiction; (iv) Distribution is determined through a causal-cum-intentional mechanism at the interface of plan and market. The explanatory and analytical nature of our model is a departure from abstractly normative approaches to the topics explored below (for which the notion of ‘technical efficiency’ may be a metonym). Between an uncritically descriptive ‘is’ of pure institutionalism, and a sociologically inapposite ‘ought’ of middle-brow neoclassical writings, there is the need for a theoretical understanding of socialist economies; an understauding of the sort that has, indeed, been generated vis-a-vis capitalism. Classical political economy, we believe, has discerned identity criteria what we will refer to as ‘parametric relations’ of capitalist economies, that illumine a varied range of modern societies, ranging from liberal England to Nazi Germany to social-democratic Sweden. The parametric relations of post-capitalist, socialist societies have yet to be brought to light in a similar fashion. The first section, below, is an exploratory attempt to delineate those relations. It is useful, at the outset, very briefly to touch upon the conceptual status of the formal model outlined in the second section. The model rests on epistemological premises common to both the classical and neoclassical schools of economic thought insofar as it involves the determination of a ‘general equilibrium’ solution. We state, without defending it here, that ‘disequilibrium’ criticisms are just that-criticisms, rather than an alternative theory with explanatory power. We stress, however, that the model differs from either classical or neo-