A new world without rules, good or bad?

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Ahmed
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by Ahmed » 14/07/12, 22:33

@ Janic:
But this hierarchy is replaced by the authority of knowledge or supposed to be such. One-eyed for the blind?

The level of forum this authority has little weight and remains easy to challenge. Furthermore, knowledge is neither a congenital attribute nor an absolute and it is always possible to acquire it or, at least, to increase it ...

@ Obamot: Your translation is correct, but, because it is not complete, does not offer a satisfactory synthesis of the entire article.
Without wanting to translate or methodically summarize this text, here is what he suggests to me:

In the German context, (probably under Protestant influence?), develops a compromise between democracy / original capital, based on partnership.
Quality production with high added value is associated with a policy of full employment, stability, qualification and high wages, as part of an overall compensation package including only very limited differences, this through institutions that you mentioned.

However, this model has gradually disintegrated, according to the author, because it is complicated in this context to manage economic developments, but also because of the weight of reunification which imposed heavy sacrifices, finally and above all because the influence of globalization which followed internationalization profoundly changed the situation.
Competed by Japan in the field of quality and by the penetration of international finance which had little to do with the societal aspect of the German compromise, world standards could only impose themselves in the long term.
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Janic
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by Janic » 15/07/12, 07:50

@ Janic: Quote:
But this hierarchy is replaced by the authority of knowledge or supposed to be such. One-eyed for the blind?

The level of forum this authority has little weight and remains easy to challenge.
according to what criteria, precisely? Internet??? : Cry:
Furthermore, knowledge is neither a congenital attribute nor an absolute and it is always possible to acquire it or, at least, to increase it ...
but there, always, in what sense?
Being green-VGL, I constantly see the meaning in question which tolerates almost no questioning. :frown:
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Ahmed
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by Ahmed » 15/07/12, 15:49

Yes, Janic, the media (internet) does not fundamentally change general anthropological data!
On the forums there is necessarily a greater openness of mind regarding the orientation of the forum considered, however the majority current only reflects a minor inflection compared to the "current" opinion (if this qualifier has a meaning).
For many, it's about changing to keep everything as it was before; probably it would also be my tendency if I were not somewhat lucid on "the misery of the present" as it says A.Gorz and on the extent of future developments ...
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Obamot
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by Obamot » 15/07/12, 20:47

Ahmed: the last example given is on page 25 (in the conclusions)

Then there is only the bibilography. Nevertheless, I would surely take the words out of your mouth by saying that we must be wary of any excessive enthusiasm on the economic system of "Soziale Marktwirtschaft". In my corner, we also have ours (considering the German-speaking majority of the country):
https://www.econologie.info/share/partag ... aK6Vvl.pdf

Since you are referring to Protestantism, this system of governance has something of Anglo Saxon in the genes (this is what was noted above with Mc Gregor, and before him Taylorism, only Herzberg, Masslow and a third of which i 'forget the name just now have made shy advances amha).

In the 70s the same paradigm prevailed under Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph for a time. Their goal was not so much to rush into the said system as to prove that only a pure market economy could allow "social progress (vs a social market economy). They obviously abandoned it later rather quickly in the profit from the current system of predation - more sophisticated and perverse - that I call the new management (benchmarking and monitoring at all levels towards a culture of results and excessive optimization and above all continuous evaluations that undermine relations between colleagues and leads to a kind of mobbing behavior institutionalized, which leads to burnout (even to suicide once the lemon has been completely squeezed) and all this under the supposedly convivial regime of bottom-up, to circulate information from the base directly to the top of the hierarchy - which gives the illusion of "being important" - and although effective, is only an additional level of surveillance while giving workers, the feeling of a strong corporate identity through their personal commitment, except that: this is not the goal sought by management, but rather the increase in productivity and profitability at all costs.

To add to this intense stress, comes the precariousness of workplaces (turnover, tolerated immigration which puts a big pressure on wages down) and the low labor costs of certain countries end up making the work environment that is often unlivable in the medium term. Whatever, the workers end up changing jobs and leaving feathers there.

When it cracks, it hurts: statistically half of the population would use a shrink during their life ...

And for the result, we see where we are! To have reached the point where whole swathes of the real economy should reach returns approaching those of speculative investments is mind-boggling ... All the more so since this situation leads investors to lose interest in the real economy , except startups, as long as they are very promising ...! The Yankees made us walk on the head ... and which government is complaining loud and clear? None, we rather give them the bank account numbers of those who place their captives with us under the threat of blackmail and we go to bed to save our distribution networks installed there, because they are the ones who hold the knife by the handle..

In the meantime, the social gains obtained after long struggles are erased one after the other. This is how they impose THEIR “economic model” on us.
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Ahmed
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by Ahmed » 15/07/12, 22:16

I mentioned this article because it is interesting, not because I totally agree with the level of analysis whose field seems limited to me ...
Indeed, the "Soziale Marktwirtschaft" does not particularly fascinate me! It is, at best, a temporary modality of societal equilibrium; from what little I have been able to learn directly, the progressive dissolution of this functioning has important psychological repercussions on workers rejected from employment and who feel both "betrayed" and humiliated.

Regarding your remark on the Anglo-Saxon genes of this German model, I think you are referring to the Fordian pact; there are indeed similarities, which is undoubtedly not the result of chance but of a common historical phase.
However, I believe that the German system was based on older and more complex origins than this pact, on the one hand much more circumstantial and on the other hand much less societal than industrial and commercial.

What seems interesting to me is that, regardless of their (important) nuances, both aimed at a policy of full employment, improvement of wages, consumption through the constant improvement of productivity.
Clearly, less redistribution than better productive efficiency; what in Marxist terms we would call an increase in relative surplus value.

However, this orientation was ultimately condemned due to obvious limitations:
- depletion of resources (energy, raw materials);
- contamination by the accumulation of waste (pollution, climatic impact);

As well as by others who are much less so:
- decrease in profitability due to the increasing share of investment;
- decrease in profitability due to the constriction of the wage bill (which breaks the production / consumption cycle started by the Fordian pact);

The main current developments are deduced from this: refocusing of firms on the financial element, search for the fall in wage costs (Germany will massively use its neighbor the Czech Republic for labor, China for components, wage freezes, putting the unemployed to work at a discount).

This overall drop in profitability has been masked by various successive means:
- monetary policies that have let inflation slip (70s in France)
- following the American decision, credit restriction => unemployment / deflation => increase in public debt (80s and following in France)
- In the USA, attacks as a rule welfare state which leads to a greater compensatory recourse to private borrowing which will lead to the crisis of subprime
- In Europe, also the debt crisis, which is a transfer of public debt to private debt (and which could be translated into Marxist terms by an increase in absolute surplus value).

In the background of these behaviors, we must perceive the decreasing power of public opinion, the dismantling of counterpowers (Reagan, Thatcher), its incomprehension in front of these upheavals that the media explain ... in their own way ...
This explains why painless policies, the only acceptable ones then, are now moving towards much more aggressive policies.
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