Les Bourne

Former foreign correspondent, management consultant & director at a leading international news organization, business consultancy & pharmaceutical corporation

[Les Bourne @bourne_les]

There are several problems with this analysis. First, the American system is a myth.

The only real system where the government plays a direct role today in managing the economy is the Chinese System.

Second, just having the government direct the economy is meaningless unless the objective of that management is known. Remember the Nazis took direct control of Germany's economy in the 1930s: The German System.

Third, re-industrialization is a nice buzzword but practically meaningless on so many levels. (A) , globalization was enacted, not as a conspiracy, but as a complexity's response to falling earnings in mature markets. As such, de-globalization (aka re-industrialization) can only be possible if labor factor costs are at least equal to systemic labor factor costs under globalization. (B), the increase in the attraction of trade employment in the US does not typically mean jobs in manufacturing but employment in maintenance services and construction — sector where most jobs are today filled by cheap immigrant labor.

As such, the only avenue open to the US economy to cheapen costs of producing goods and services is to fast and furiously increase investments in capital vs labor, on the one hand, and enter new markets such as those currently controlled by China needed to realize net earnings, on the other.

[Les Bourne @bourne_les]

@GagarinGorilla @CDMorlock It doesn't matter. The fact is in Germany the Communists could not and did not know how to lead the working class. The fascists did! Will the communists in America be able to lead the working class to victory?

[Les Bourne @bourne_les]

@IIIrdWorldOrder @RegimeIdeologue Excuse me weren't the Bolsheviks overthrown in 1991?

[Les Bourne @bourne_les]

@RWApodcast But it does show just how desperate and opportunistic the Russian political elite is today, by siding with any body in the West, even no-bodies, so long as they are not anti-Russian.

[Les Bourne @bourne_les]

True in part but fascists can also lead revolutions that arise from social contradictions if communists do not have the right stuff as was the case in Germany and Italy prior to WW2. So, communist revolutions are indeed made just as fascist revolutions are made, given the same underlying circumstances.

[Les Bourne @bourne_les]

Well you forget about technological innovation which can create new wealth, drive up productivity and drive down prices of products and services and thus expand sales and keep net income levels from falling. After all, that is how capitalism has adapted and expanded since its inception. What is more, China appears ready to sell the West market share in exchange for improved access to global resources. No guarantee all these pieces will fall into place of course. But strong prior precedents do exist.

[Les Bourne @bourne_les]

@khrachvik Marxist economist, Richard Wolff, has his own theory about China's economic system. He states that China has developed a novel type of economy that is neither socialist or capitalist but one that contains elements of both legacy systems.

[Les Bourne @bourne_les]

@CDMorlock Anarchists at the end of the day are just plain vanilla liberals.

[Les Bourne @bourne_les]

We have to give credit where credit is due. Marx was the first, at least to my knowledge, to apply systemic complexity theory — decades before the theory was formally developed — to an empirical science. He started many to start thinking in a new way —holistically/dialectically — which brought about new discoveries in sociology and economics.

[Les Bourne @bourne_les]

Marx had two weaknesses, both exposed in his theory of the dynamics of capitalism as a system.

The first he underestimated the role of technological development in reducing commodity costs, sales expansion potential and net earnings growth on a systemwide basis.

The second he almost completely missed the role of imperialism in expanding markets, again systemwide, and thus offsetting the tendency for the rate of systemic average profit to fall.

Those are the main reasons capitalism never collapsed as Marx thought it would.

[Les Bourne @bourne_les]

Well you forget about technological innovation which can create new wealth, drive up productivity and drive down prices of products and services and thus expand sales and keep net income levels from falling. After all, that is how capitalism has adapted and expanded since its inception. What is more, China appears ready to sell the West market share in exchange for improved access to global resources. No guarantee all these pieces will fall into place of course. But strong prior precedents do exist.

[Les Bourne @bourne_les]

@PrometheanActn @BarbaraMBoyd The world economic system lies on a foundation of evil conspirators. There are no scientific laws guiding its evolution.

[Les Bourne @bourne_les]

@CDMorlock Well there may come the need to put the US economy through an orderly process of bankruptcy.

[Les Bourne @bourne_les]

@CDMorlock And how does that logic operate?

[Les Bourne @bourne_les]

@CDMorlock Oh I thought you believed that that world systems theory with its core and peripheral sectors concepts had been debunked.

[Les Bourne @bourne_les]

@CDMorlock Oh so you finally admit : there is a real economy. Why did the rentier (ficticious) sector arise then? Or was it, as you say, just a conspiracy of some bad capitalists?

[Marta Havryshko @HavryshkoMarta]

What was Zelenskyy thinking when he signed the decree granting an elite military unit the honorary title of “Heroes of the UPA”?

“We did not mean to offend the Poles,” people in his office now say.

But this is about far more than offending Poles.

You offended me.

You offended me as the great-granddaughter of a Polish woman. You offended me as a Jewish. You offended me as a Ukrainian. You offended me as a Holocaust scholar.

And you offend everyone who cannot understand how a nation can elevate to the status of national heroes people who sought to build Ukraine on the blood of tens of thousands of their Neighbors.

A democratic Ukraine worthy of respect should not require the glorification of figures whose legacy remains inseparable from ethnic violence, persecution, and mass suffering.

Patriotism does not demand historical amnesia. National dignity does not require the sanctification of every chapter of nation-liberation movement and every "freedom fighter" who killed innocent women and children in the name of his nation.

The tragedy is not that this decision has angered Poland. The tragedy is that it sends a message that the pain of victims—and the concerns of those who remember them—can once again be brushed aside in the service of nationalist mythmaking.