The Winters of Our Discontent and the Social Production Economy

Riccardo Bellofiore

Review of Political Economy, 2021, vol. 33, issue 3, 394-413

Abstract: The economic policy reaction to the Covid-19 crisis has been considered from different angles. Here I will remind only the positions by Draghi (looking at this historical conjuncture comparing it to ‘war times’), Tooze (seeing in it the definitive closure of the ‘political economy of inflation’ as well as ‘the first crisis of Anthropocene’), Kregel (proposing ‘central controls for social provisioning’ as the pertinent macroeconomic policy). The pandemic could inaugurate a game change in European economic policy; and even unlikely quarters suggested in the last year a retreat from neoliberalism as we knew it. However, the health crisis is not an exogenous shock: it is inherent in the capitalist social form of production and consumption. The pathological state of affairs that takes our breath away reveals the hidden reality of the society where we work and consume. Confronting the current and future virus outbreaks (as well as climate change) obliges us to go back to the founding themes of macroeconomics, which needs to consider not just the level of employment, but also what employment is for. In this logic, we are forced to radicalise the notion of the ‘socialisation of investment’ into that of a ‘social production economy’: the challenge in front of us is indeed about the ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘how much’ and ‘for whom’ to produce.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09538259.2021.1894818 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:revpoe:v:33:y:2021:i:3:p:394-413

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CRPE20

DOI: 10.1080/09538259.2021.1894818

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Political Economy is currently edited by Steve Pressman and Louis-Philippe Rochon

More articles in Review of Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().