Must-Read: Ann Pettifor: Brexit and Its Consequences

Must-Read: I have concluded that I have a strong disagreement with Ann Pettifor here. The BREXIT vote is not the result of a class- and social structure-based Polanyi process. Yes, people believe that the communities in which they live, the money they make, and the industries in which they work are important parts of their lives, that they deserve to have their expectations about those things satisfied, and that a society that fails to satisfy those expectations is not a good society. Yes, Polanyi was correct in his grand argument that turning land, labor, and finance into commodities subject to the wreakings of a market society would inevitably disappoint a great many of those expectations and so potentially causing massive backlash against a liberal or neoliberal order.

But what we are seeing now is not that backlash.

Consider Germany: the secret Keynesianism of an undervalued currency means the neoliberal economic order is just dandy for Germany: no “economic anxiety” here! Yet Angela Merkel is in as much trouble from her indigenous domestic Trumpists as is any centrist political leader in the North Atlantic.

The “economically anxious” did not drive the BREXIT vote. The nativists did:

Ann Pettifor: Brexit and Its Consequences: “The ‘Brexit’ vote is but the latest manifestation of popular dissatisfaction with the utopian ideal of autonomous markets beyond the reach of regulatory democracy…

…Brexit represented the collective, if (to my mind) often misguided, efforts of those ‘left behind’ in Britain to protect themselves from the predatory nature of market fundamentalism. In a Polanyian sense, it is a form of social self-protection from self-regulating markets in money, trade and labour…. The economic profession’s deflationary, liberal finance bias, and the failure to include money, debt, and banks in economic analyses and modelling made it nigh impossible for the profession to correctly predict, prevent, or mitigate the ongoing crisis….

Today’s policy-makers struggle to stabilize an unbalanced global financial system, and doggedly oppose expansionary policies needed to ensure employment and recovery. The necessary restructuring and rebalancing of the global economy have been postponed. With the historic Brexit vote, the British people rejected this flawed brand of economics—and in particular the dominant liberal finance narrative. And they did so because the hardship they are experiencing—repressed wages, diminished public services, rising housing costs and shortages, and insecure employment—is indirectly a consequence of the theories and policies of the mainstream economics profession…. Britain’s ‘Brexit’ vote is but the latest manifestation of popular dissatisfaction with the economists’ globalized, marketized society…