Starry Aspirant

More reading on neo-classical economics. It was invented in the 1870s but is still at the heart of mainstream economics. It’s probably more fundamental to the resurgence so-called free-market capitalism from the 1970s than “neo-liberalism”, the corresponding global political project. Especially, I’m anxious not to do a hatchet-job on neo-classicism that skates over the power behind its enduring appeal, despite some of its well-known obvious drawbacks. On this, I was thinking yesterday about the idea of perfect competition, and what an amazing tool for wealth-creation—as the basis for universal human freedom—and a severe check on capitalist excess, it would be, if it were not a mostly unattainable ideal-type. It’s a transcendental dream of freedom and democracy of a sort. (Perfect competition describes a situation in which many small firms without price-setting power compete to sell interchangeable products, achieving just enough profits to sustain the industry to meet consumer ...

The argument of my thesis so far: 1.     Oligarchs and oligarchy are differentiated from other kinds of elite and elite rule by extreme wealth. 2.     Wealth conditions the methods and logic of oligarch political strategies and actions. Large wealth differentials can stoke social and political tensions, creating specific kinds of protection problems for oligarchs, but permits the purchase of protection, whether coercive or political/ media influence. 3.     The original and subsequent wealth-enhancing economic schemes of the Ukrainian oligarchs are characterised by indirect extraction via the state. Some schemes are more transient than others, as modes of extraction of this kind evolve. 4.     Once in motion, the economic-political relationship goes both ways: wealth leads to political influence, but political position and influence can allow the accumulation of wealth. 5.     Despite the existence of wealthy oligarchs at...