Adam Tooze: Transformation and Financial Crises

This lecture was presented in the framework of the RECET Opening Week on 22.04.2021 at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) / University of Vienna, online via Zoom.

[@nickhomyak6128]

Cumulative effects mount via flawed species; "we the people" are flawed because we know not who we are; because of the cult of individualism against the collective; a break from our ancestors, and their norm of cooperations into all the past tried removal of injustices

[@Africanbeauty846]

Investment trading has helped me and my family from debts

[@mattgumbley1317]

I’ve done the same with workin the streets. You know My ass is gunna get tapped tonight bro

[@MrDXRamirez]

The "Original Sin" of the political economy of the old world is applied to the new world through immigration...and in waves, diverted from the British colonies to the shores of America fresh and young labor-power that got jammed up in the East creating Chicago, NYC, because of the inconvenience of Indians in the West occupying the land. 1 out of 6 natives were taken away into foster care and boarding schools. The bonds the west native Americans had to the land west of the Mississippi were broken by the removal program with the remains stored in the Smithsonian. State's own borrowed money and the creation of public credit along with the inherent difference in the accumulation rate of profit between borrowers and lenders that needs support in the private sector, continues to be two factors stressing out the system from achieving levels of employment and income, America can live by. So, in essence, its a Neoliberal Paradigm into which the only social class that owns a commodity that can be used as collateral or be monetized for borrowing, and be a fund for the support of private and public debt, is the working class, who are owners of a special commodity, and common to all individuals and institutions in our fine American bourgeois republic, owners are free-people who meet on the basis of equal rights in the eyes of the law until that commodity gets used by its buyer. American political economy strives toward a standardization of the labor-process for it to be borrowed against, that every second is not only a job for the worker but also a transfer rate of the investment capital to the product with assistance from automation that paradoxically acts to throw people back on the labor-market. Automation makes this extraction process so standardized the job is mind-numbing and which, the machinery that doubles productivity gets all the credit as a form of external patriotism. Patriotism because its voluntary, when two owners of special and distinctive commodities are permitted by the state, to sell and buy, and exchange equivalents, using money (equivalent sum) for labor-power (equivalent sum of 8hrs standard working time) that is patriotism the American Way. The original sin has roots on that fine day when the labor of a slave no longer made a slave a commodity for its owners. A proclamation freed black individuals and families along with whites in a government decree as the "possessors of a special commodity". Labor-power became the private property of the individual and everyone changed from master-slaves into equal owners. Society became a collection of buyers and sellers going from one set of relations to another set of relations in a violent war coming out of that war a thing oriented society. Equal only outside of the door that reads: Employees Only. Unequal behind the door where things are made, used, exchanged, as value-units. There the individual works in what has become a value creating process in order to finance cities, roads and bridges, a process that spirals in altitude till the spiral flattens and starts all over again but each recovery doubles as a depression and ends up in a higher accumulation of capital for sellers and lower purchasing power for more people losing a claim to the product and control over their own productivity. This has evolved to become the center piece of an empire in decline.