Accelerationism

 

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In political and social theory, accelerationism is the idea that either the prevailing system of capitalism, or certain technosocial processes that have historically characterised it, should be expanded, repurposed or accelerated in order to generate radical social change. Some contemporary accelerationist philosophy takes as its starting point the Deleuzo-Guattarian theory of deterritorialisation, aiming to identify, deepen, and radicalise the forces of deterritorialisation with a view to overcoming the countervailing tendencies that suppress the possibility of far-reaching social transformation.^{[1][clarification needed]} Accelerationism may also refer more broadly, and usually pejoratively, to support for the deepening of capitalism in the belief that this will hasten its self-destructive tendencies and ultimately eventuate its collapse.^[2][3]
Professedly accelerationist theory has been divided into mutually contradictory left-wing and right-wing variants, with "left-accelerationism" attempting to press "the process of technological evolution" beyond the constrictive horizon of capitalism, for example by repurposing modern technology to socially beneficial and emancipatory ends, and "right-accelerationism" supporting the indefinite intensification of capitalism itself, possibly in order to bring about a technological singularity.^[4][5][6]

Contents

 [hide] 

• 1 Background
• 2 Contemporary accelerationism
• 3 References
• 4 Further reading
  • 4.1 Books
  • 4.2 Articles

Background[edit]

A number of philosophers have expressed apparently accelerationist attitudes, including Karl Marx in his 1848 speech "On the Question of Free Trade":

But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.^[7]

In a similar vein, Friedrich Nietzsche argued that "the leveling process of European man is the great process which should not be checked: one should even accelerate it...",^[8] a statement often simplified, following Deleuze and Guattari, to a command to "accelerate the process".^[9]

Contemporary accelerationism[edit]

Prominent theorists include right-accelerationist Nick Land. The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru), an unofficial research unit at the University of Warwick from 1995–2003,^[10] of which Land was a member, is considered a key progenitor in both left- and right-accelerationist thought.^[11] Prominent contemporary left-accelerationists include Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, authors of the "Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics",^[12] and the Laboria Cuboniks collective, who authored the manifesto "Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation".^[13]
Along accelerationist lines, Paul Mason tried to speculate about futures after capitalism. He declares that "[a]s with the end of feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s replacement by postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started." He considers that the rise of collaborative production will eventually help capitalism to kill itself.

References[edit]

1. Jump up ^ Wolfendale, Peter (2014). "So, Accelerationism, what’s all that about?". Dialectical Insurgency. Retrieved 5 February 2015. 
2. Jump up ^ Shaviro, Steven (2010). Post Cinematic Affect. Ropley: O Books. p. 136. 
3. Jump up ^ Adams, Jason (2013). Occupy Time: Technoculture, Immediacy, and Resistance After Occupy Wall Street. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 96. 
4. Jump up ^ Jiménez de Cisneros, Roc (5 November 2014). "The Accelerationist Vertigo (II): Interview with Robin Mackay". Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. Retrieved 5 February 2015. 
5. Jump up ^ Williams, Alex; Srnicek, Nick (14 May 2013). "#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics". Critical Legal Thinking. Retrieved 5 February 2015. 
6. Jump up ^ Land, Nick (13 February 2014). "#Accelerate". Urban Future (2.1). Retrieved 5 February 2015. 
7. Jump up ^ Marx, Karl, On the question of free trade, Speech to the Democratic Association of Brussels, 9 January 1848.
8. Jump up ^ Quoted in Strong, Tracy (1988). Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 211.  Original in The Will to Power §898.
9. Jump up ^ Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix (2004). Anti-Oedipus. London: Continuum. p. 260. 
10. Jump up ^ "CCRU". V2_Institute for the Unstable Media. Retrieved 2015-10-09. 
11. Jump up ^ Schwarz, Jonas Andersson (2013). Online File Sharing: Innovations in Media Consumption. New York: Routledge. pp. 20–21. 
12. Jump up ^ "#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics". Critical Legal Thinking. Retrieved 2015-10-09. 
13. Jump up ^ "After Accelerationism: The Xenofeminist manifesto". &&& Journal. Retrieved 2015-10-09. 

Further reading[edit]

Books[edit]

• Land, Nick (2011). Brassier, Ray; Mackay, Robin, eds. Fanged Noumena. Urbanomic. ISBN 9780955308789. 
• Mackay, Robin, ed. (2014). #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader. Urbanomic. ISBN 9780957529557. 
• Noys, Benjamin (2013). Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism. Zero Books. ISBN 9781782793007. 

Articles[edit]

• Brassier, Ray (13 February 2014). "Wandering Abstraction". Mute. 
• Brennan, Eugene (12 August 2013). ""Debate is Idiot Distraction": Accelerationism and the Politics of the Internet". 3:AM Magazine. 
• Land, Nick. "Meltdown" at the Wayback Machine (archived April 8, 2012).
• Mackay, Robin (2014). "So, Accelerationism, what’s all that about?". Dialectical Insurgency. 
• Moreno, Gean (2012). "Notes on the Inorganic, Part I: Accelerations". e-flux. 
• Negri, Antonio (2014). Translated by Matteo Pasquinelli. "Reflections on the "Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics"". e-flux. 
• Pasquinelli, Matteo (9 June 2014). "The Labour of Abstraction: Theses on Marxism and Accelerationism". 
• Power, Nina (2015). "Decapitalism, Left Scarcity, and the State". Fillip. 
• Wark, McKenzie (2013). "#Celerity: A Critique of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics" (PDF). 
• Williams, Alex; Srnicek, Nick (14 May 2013). "#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics". Critical Legal Thinking. 

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Accelerationism&oldid=694796395"

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• Social change
• Social theories
• Marxism

About Clifford Hugh Douglas

The genius who discovered Social Credit


Blogger Ref  http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics

Clifford Hugh Douglas 1879-1952

At the origin of Social Credit, there is one name, the name of a man of genius, a Scot: Clifford Hugh Douglas, born in 1879, son of Hugh Douglas and Louisa Horfdern. Graduated from Cambridge University, with an honour degree in mathematics, Douglas chose to be an engineer by profession.

He was a brilliant engineer, who was entrusted with important projects. He was, in India, Chief Engineer and Manager for the British Westinghouse Company; in South America, Deputy Chief Electrical Engineer for the Buenos Aires and Pacific Railway; back in England, he was employed on the construction of the London Post Office Tube Railway; then, during World War I, he was Assistant Superintendent at the Royal Aircraft Factory in Farnborough, England. After the war, he ran a small yacht-building yard, in which he was helped by Mrs. Douglas, who was herself an engineer.

Douglas was also an expert in cost price accounting. It is for this expertise that the British Government asked him to go to Farnborough in 1916 to sort out “a certain amount of muddle” in the Aircraft Factory's accounts.

Douglas never bore the title of economist; he would have considered this as an insult anyway because of the monument of errors, based on false premises, in economic teaching in universities. Yet, Douglas was actually the greatest economist of all times, with his diagnosis of the major flaw in today's economics, and with the proposals he formulated to solve it.

Throughout his career as an engineer, Douglas had to tackle problems of physical nature and solve them. But he gradually noticed that, if the solving of physical problems was always possible, many entreprises were stopped because of purely financial problems. That led him to study the financial question with the spirit of an engineer.

He briefly related himself, in an address to members of the Canadian Club in Ottawa, in 1923, how he came to take interest in the question of finance and credit. The report of this address was published in the April 15, 1923 issue of the Ottawa Citizen.

Douglas said that his first experience with financial hindrances stopping physical possibilities, dated back about fifteen years earlier, around 1908. At that time, he was in India, in charge of the Westinghouse interests. He had to conduct a survey, at the insistence of the Government of India, of a large district with considerable water power. He found a large amount of exploitable water power, went back to Calcutta and Simla to report it, and asked what was going to be done about it. The answer was: “Well, we have got no money.”

Douglas found that decision deplorable. For this was at a time when the manufacturers in Great Britain were finding it hard to obtain orders, and the prices for machinery were very low. As for India, it badly needed electric power. But “they had got no money”, and Douglas could only accept it, while pigeonholing in his mind this case of a beautiful physical possibility that was paralyzed by a financial impossibility.

Round about that time, he said, he dined frequently with J. C. E. Branson, the Controller General in India. This Branson used to bore him considerably by discussing something he called “credit”. Treasury officials in India and Britain persisted in melting down and recoining rupees (India's coins), having regard to what they called the “quantity theory of money”. Yet, insisted Branson, silver and gold had nothing to do with the situation; it nearly entirely depended upon credit. Douglas subsequently remarked that had he be given a short lecture on Mesopotamia, it would have been, at that time, just as unintelligible. But, nevertheless, Branson's repeated words had also been pigeonholed in Douglas's mind.

Just before World War I, Douglas was employed by the British Government to build a railway for the Post Office from Paddington to White Chapel. There was no physical difficulty at all with the entreprise. He was ordered to get on with the job. Suddenly, he got the order to suspend work and pay off the men. Always for the same reason: no money.

Some time after that, during the war, he was sent to the Farnborough Royal Aircraft Works, to sort out a muddle which the books of that institution had gotten into. It was not long before that he had remarked that, each week, the cost prices of the goods produced were greater than the income distributed in the form of wages and salaries. Prices were not in accordance with purchasing power.

All that drew his attention, and a study of the cases of many companies showed him that it was so in every factory. How could, in those conditions, the money distributed to consumers buy the products? Douglas also remarked that once the war came, there was no more a question of a lack of money. So there was nothing sacred with money. Money could appear all of a sudden, and all that was physically possible could be made financially possible, as it was the case during the war.

Douglas also faced other experiences. He decided to locate and bring up-to-date the defects of the financial system; then, as an engineer, to seek, discover, and formulate principles to put finance in keeping with realities at all times. This is what has been called since Social Credit.

Douglas first published his conclusion in an article in the English Review for December of 1918 under the heading “The Delusion of Super-Production”, and then a series of articles of A. R. Orage's weekly review, the New Age. Those articles were reprinted in 1920 as Economic Democracy, Douglas's first book. The same year appeared Douglas's Credit-Power and Democracy, then Social Credit in 1923, Control and Distribution of Production and The Monopoly of Credit, both in 1931, and Warning Democracy and The Alberta Experiment, both in 1937.

Apart from these books, Douglas also travelled the world to give lectures on Social Credit — to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Norway. In 1923, he gave evidence before the Canadian Banking Inquiry, and in 1930 before the MacMillan Committee on Finance and Industry, in England.

Douglas died in his home in Fearnan, Scotland, on September 29, 1952 — the feast of Saint Michael the Archangel. He was 73.

Louis Even            

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Social Credit: A Simple (If Somewhat Lengthy) Explanation

Source The Clifford Huge Douglas Institute    http://www.socred.org/index.php/


Posted on: January 09, 2015 by M. Oliver Heydorn   

Category: Social Credit Views /

 

Blogger Ref  http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics

  

The founder of the Social Credit movement, Major Clifford Hugh Douglas (1879-1952), correctly discerned the cause of our perennial economic difficulties and also developed a series of proposals to effectively deal with the  underlying problem.

 
     Social Credit encompasses the philosophical, economic, political, and historical ideas of the brilliant Anglo-Scottish engineer, Major C.H. Douglas.
     As far as the economics of Social Credit is concerned, the choice with which we are faced is a simple one: we can either continue to suffer unnecessarily and increasingly under a financial system (i.e., a banking and cost accountancy system) which serves an oligarchic elite at the expense of the common good, or we can reform the financial system along Social Credit lines in order to ensure that it will operate in full service to the common citizen.
     The key issue is not the fact that the banks create the bulk of the money supply out of nothing, nor the fact that the interest which they charge on loans can often be onerous, excessive, and/or exploitative. The key issue is one of policy. Does the financial system serve our policy, yours and mine, in the best possible manner: getting the goods with the least amount of effort, or does it serve the policy of those who occupy the pinnacle of the economic pyramid: getting the most effort from us (as measured in economic and, above all, financial terms) in exchange for the least amount of goods?
     The standard financial conventions generate an artificial scarcity of both producer and consumer credit and then allow that scarcity to be leveraged by the private banks due to their monopoly on credit-creation.[1] As a result, economic wealth, power, and privilege are illegitimately funneled into the hands of financiers and those upon whom their favour rests.
     The costs of running the financial system as a private self-serving monopoly are extremely heavy. Instead of enjoying an abundance of needed goods and services alongside increasing leisure from an economic system that is socially equitable, environmentally sustainable, and internationally concordant, we are hounded by the paradoxes of poverty in the midst of plenty and of servility in place of freedom, by the recurring cycle of boom and bust, by continual inflation (both cost-push and demand pull), by economic inefficiency, waste, and sabotage, by forced economic growth, by an ever-increasing mountain of societal debt that is, in the aggregate, unrepayable, by heavy and often increasing taxation, by social conflict, by forced migration, by cultural dislocation, by environmental degradation, and by international economic conflicts leading to war, etc., etc.
     The present financial system does not permit the members of society to fulfill the true purpose of economic association (the delivery of goods and services, as, when, and where required and with a minimum of trouble to everyone) to the extent that this fulfillment is physically possible because it is a fundamentally dishonest system.
     Every society relies on its inventory of ‘physical’ economic resources (land, labour, the increment of association, and, in an industrialized country, know-how and real capital in the form of machines and equipment) in order to provide its members with the goods and services that they need to survive and flourish. This stock of raw economic power is what Social Credit theory refers to as the real credit. It is a society’s useful productive capacity.
     By contrast, financial credit, or money, is only a method of representing this real credit so that production can be catalyzed and then distributed to consumers. The creation, issue, and recall of financial credit is administered by a society’s financial system.
     The primordial problem with the reigning financial system is that it does not issue and recall financial credit of the right nature, at the right rate, and under the right conditions so as to accurately represent society’s real credit. Instead, it artificially limits the real credit and misdirects many of our economic activities.
     An honest financial system, i.e., one in which the nature of financial credit, the rates at which it is issued and recalled, and the terms under which it is issued and recalled, accurately represented the physical facts of real credit, would allow the citizens of a nation to freely produce whatever they desired (so long as the production in question was physically possible) and to consume all of the resultant goods and services without the imposition of any further and illegitimate conditions (such as the contraction of debts that are, in the aggregate, unrepayable, and/or additional work). Money would be regarded as a mere accounting unit and not as a scarce commodity that is to be rented out by the private banks (N.B., the banks currently claim the ownership of the financial credit that they create).
     An honest system would operate quite naturally in the interests of the common citizens because it would recognize that a society’s financial credit belongs not to the private banks but to those who actually own, in varying degrees, the real credit that the financial credit is supposed to represent. Hence it follows that consumers, who may rightfully be regarded as shareholders in their country’s economies, are the people who should determine a society’s overarching financial and hence economic policy.
     Whenever there is, on the one hand, sufficient ‘physical’ economic resources to actualize a specific production programme, and, on the other hand, a real demand on the part of consumers for the goods and services which that programme would make available, sufficient financial credit to catalyze that production should be created and issued as a matter of course. Similarly, whenever there is, on the one hand, a certain volume of consumer goods and services coming on to the market, there should also be, on the other hand, sufficient consumer purchasing power in the form of consumer income (not associated in any way with additional or extraneous costs) to purchase that volume in full and to liquidate all of the corresponding costs of production.
     In order to accomplish the equation of society’s financial credit with its real credit, Social Credit proposes the establishment of a National Credit Office. The NCO would be a politically independent organ of the state and a purely administrative device. Its activities would be entirely determined by statistical data and that data would be the result of the free decisions of private firms, governments, and individual consumers in conjunction with the physical facts of the economy's natural resources. The NCO would guarantee sufficient producer credit in line with a society’s useful productive capacity and sufficient consumer credit, in the form of a ‘debt-free’ National Dividend and National Discount, to equate the flow of consumer purchasing power with the flow of consumer prices. The dividend would also ensure that the increasing number of people whose labour is no longer necessary in the formal economy (on account of the intensifying trend of technological unemployment) would nevertheless have access to goods and services. One can read about the stark differences between a National Dividend and conventional basic income proposals here: http://www.socred.org/index.php/blogs/view/the-big-difference-between-a-basic-income-and-the-national-dividend.
     Social Credit does not advocate the nationalization of the private banking system, but rather the breaking of its monopoly and the restoration of the ownership of financial credit to the individuals who make up the community. It is completely opposed to any proposal that would see us jump from the frying pan of a self-serving private system into the fire of a complete state monopoly over money and its issuance. The latter would be a fine basis for the introduction of a totalitarian society. In direct opposition to this vision of the social order, Social Credit stands for the decentralization of economic and political power in the direction of the individual. What Social Crediters want is a financial system which, while dutifully serving a public policy of maximizing individual benefit, is nevertheless privately administered to a very large extent.
     Finally, in spite of the presence of the word ‘social’ in Social Credit, it must also be recognized that Douglas’ economic proposals are not socialist but rather anti-socialist. They are completely consonant with and supportive of a free enterprise economy (incorporating free markets, private property, individual initiative, and the profit motive) so long as it is financially structured towards the fulfillment of the true purpose of economic association Cf.http://www.socred.org/index.php/blogs/view/why-social-credit-is-not-socialism.



[1] N.B., the artificial scarcity of consumer credit or the chronic deficiency of consumer income that Douglas identified is not due, in the first place, to the charging of interest on loans but rather to the way in which real capital (machines and equipment) are financed and the way in which their costs are then accounted and charged into the prices of consumer goods. Cf. http://www.socred.org/index.php/blogs/view/social-credit-and-usury.

A Review of Social Credit Economics

Posted on: November 22, 2015 by Clifford Hugh Douglas  Institute
http://www.socred.org/index.php/


  

Category: Social Credit News /Blogger Ref http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics

  

 

The following review of Oliver Heydorn's Social Credit Economics by Brent Ranalli will be published in the next edition of Basic Income Studies. It is already available on-line here: http://www.degruyter.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/printahead/j/bis.    

Social Credit Economics, by M. Oliver Heydorn, Ph.D. CreateSpace, 2014. ISBN: 978-1493529766 (paperback). 548 pages.
Reviewed by Brent Ranalli, The Cadmus Group, 100 Fifth Ave, Suite 100, Waltham, MA 02451,USA, E-mail: brent.ranalli@gmail.com

     Most proponents of a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) are aware that the Social Credit movement, which was founded by Major Clifford Hugh Douglas and flourished especially in British Commonwealth countries in the 1920s and 1930s, promoted a scheme of monetary reform that involved universal dividends. Relatively few are probably acquainted with the details of Douglas’s reform ideas. Oliver Heydorn’s book Social Credit Economics provides the useful service of gathering together the various elements of Douglas’s ideas about monetary and economic reform from his many writings and presenting them systematically. Social Credit Economics is a large book (over 500 pages). Its bulk is due in part to extensive quotations from Douglas’s own words in the text and in footnotes, which Heydorn includes to demonstrate that the interpretation he presents is authoritative (against alternative interpretations of Social Credit that have been put forward over the years by both opponents and ill-informed allies). But the interest of the book is far from merely antiquarian: Heydorn forcefully argues that the problems Douglas identified and the solutions he offers are just as relevant today as they were a century ago, if not more so. Douglas’s central insight was that the total price value of goods and services a firm produces in a given period (say, a year) is normally higher than the total income (wages, salaries, dividends, etc.) the firm places in the hands of consumers during that same period. There are structural reasons for this, and the disparity between prices and consumer income increases as industries increasingly substitute capital for labor. In aggregate, a society organized like ours will face a permanent problem of deficient consumer purchasing power, which will chronically threaten the solvency of firms, and consequently that of households and nations as well. We cope with the problem in various ways, but none really provides a solution: aggressive trade policies merely shift the deficiency from one country to another; borrowing (by consumers, producers, and governments) merely postpones the day of reckoning and increases its magnitude. When coping fails, we have periodic financial and economic crises that right the imbalance by destroying productive capacity via bankruptcies and foreclosures.

      In Douglas’s analysis, the root of the problem is found in the financial sector, which supplies money (credit) to all other economic actors, including government. Heydorn repeats the common rule of thumb that approximately 95% of money in circulation is bank credit as opposed to treasury-issued bills and coins. Since financial institutions charge interest, a loan always adds more debt than credit to national accounts, aggravating the deficiency in purchasing power. Furthermore, financial institutions control the policy of money creation (deciding who to lend to and on what terms) in ways that serve their own private interests rather than the public interest. Finally, and most fundamentally, the financial institutions claim private ownership of the credit they issue, credit that Douglas argues properly belongs to the community as a whole. Banks lend on behalf of themselves, not on behalf of the community. In Douglas’s vision, a reformed financial sector would serve the rest of the economy in the manner of a utility: like providers of water and electricity, providers of credit would be regulated in the interest of the consumers and the general business community they serve. Banks would still be private and (modestly) profit-making institutions, but the credit they issue, as brokers, would originate in a National Credit Office (NCO). With the grip of the financial sector on the rest of the economy broken, a nation’s NCO could make policy to remedy the deficiency of consumer credit vis-à-vis prices. Douglas proposed two complementary measures: a national discount and a national dividend. The dividend would put money directly into the pockets of all consumers, an equal amount to each individual, similar to a partial or full BIG. The discount (which I will not attempt to explain here in full) would further extend consumers’ purchasing power, and also neutralize any inflationary pressure that might attend the payout of a national dividend. Heydorn devotes several pages to spelling out the similarities and differences between Social Credit reforms and BIG. Like BIG, Social Credit envisions a society where individuals are increasingly free to accept or forgo paid employment, free to step off the treadmill of wasteful production and conspicuous consumption and devote their time to those activities they find most fulfilling, whether within or outside the formal economy. Unlike BIG, the size of a Social Credit dividend is established based on what national accounts indicate the economy can support, irrespective of standard-of-living indices. Depending on economic conditions, the Social Credit dividend in a given nation may exceed a full BIG or fall short. Another difference is that unlike many BIG proposals, the Social Credit scheme is explicitly not redistributive. Social Credit economics is the “policy of a philosophy” (in Douglas’s words), and Douglas’s philosophy is one of robust individual rights, opposed on principle to coercive taxation, including redistributive taxation.

     Social Credit offers a complete package of economic (and indeed social/political) reform, and thus can be seen as an alternative to BIG. But can it also be seen as capable of contributing something to the BIG movement? At first glance, there appears to be no practical reason why a nation that engages in redistributive taxation could not also reform its financial sector along the lines proposed by Douglas. Heydorn notes that Douglas opposed land taxation in the style of Henry George, but it would appear that this opposition stemmed from Douglas’s political philosophy and is not essential to his financial-sector reform program. There appears to be nothing in Social Credit practice or philosophy that would be incompatible with the idea of redistributing wealth from the commons (natural resources, etc.) in the manner proposed long ago by Thomas Paine and promoted in recent years by entrepreneur Peter Barnes, author of Who Owns the Sky and Capitalism 3.0. In his most recent book, With Liberty and Dividends for All, Barnes explicitly advocated treating the financial system as another sort of commons capable of generating dividends, but did not specify in detail how it would work. Douglas supplies a concrete program. It is a widely shared view today, not only among BIG advocates, that our financial system is dysfunctional and in need of reform. Heydorn’s book performs the valuable service of offering one coherent blueprint of what a reformed financial system in the twenty-first century could look like. But the book does more than that, it poses a challenge: If Douglas’s analysis of the structural problem in our economy is valid (namely, that where private financial institutions hold a monopoly on credit there will be a permanent deficiency in consumer purchasing power), even a robust BIG program will not prevent periodic economic crises from recurring, crises that could threaten the continued financial viability of BIG itself. Simply put, those who take BIG seriously ought to take Douglas’s analysis seriously, and either rebut it or embrace it. And if they embrace it, they will need to either adopt Douglas’s reform program for the financial sector or develop alternative reforms that adequately address the problem Douglas has identified. I will not presume to judge the outcome. I will say that Heydorn makes the case for Social Credit in a way that is very compelling on its face. The book is well organized, and Heydorn writes with the precision of a philosopher (he is in fact an academic philosopher by training). One wishes, perhaps, that the book might have included additional graphic elements: for instance, diagrams to illustrate the flows of credit among banks, firms, and households described in the discussion of Douglas’s famous “A+B” theorem. Taken on balance, Social Credit Economics is challenging, rewarding, and valuable. Heydorn’s painstaking scholarship makes it possible for contemporary scholars to critically engage with Douglas’s economic ideas. The outcome of that engagement holds great interest for the future of BIG.

International Monetary System

The following is in connection with an academic publication in which there is a paper by Dante Urbina which discusses something about Post-Keynesian Economics, and Transfinancial Economics.

Blogger Ref  http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics

International Monetary System is the central part of analyzing international trade, international finance, international payments mechanism and international exchange rate mechanism by which the external sector of an economy depends on. On the one hand, international monetary system has its historical aspect too and on the other hand ,it has political economy concept other than the monetary theory. International capital market and the process of trade integration are now the major area of studies in which international monetary system plays the pivotal role where Regional and multilateral international institutions and trading blocs emerge a new paradigm shift of theories in international trade and finance. Keeping with this view, I have attempted to edit this volume where 20 articles have included in which 8 papers are directly related with this theme and other paper explained the global financial crisis, regional integration and international trade respectively.
I think, all these excellent research papers will be useful to students, research scholars and academicians who are especially involved in the areas of international monetary system.
Dante A. Urbina-Professor, author and lecturer of Complutense University of Madrid and Prof. Carlos Aquino Rodriguez of San Marcos National University, Lima, Peru have written excellent foreword for the book. Both of them appreciated the book which might serve the scholars immensely in studying the international trade, finance and monetary system.
Four parts of the edited book contain,[i] “Economic theories on International Monetary System” in which seven articles are included,eg,
[1]  Asim Kumar Karmakar and Sebak Kumar Jana
     -The International Monetary System and the Global Financial Integration
[2] Dante A. Urbina

• Orthodox Monetary Theory:A Critique from Post Keynesianism and Transfinancial Economics

[3] David M. Fields
     -Dollar Hegemony
[4] David M. Fields and MatiasVernengo

• Dollarisation

[5] Carlos Aquino Rodriguez
 -The TPP and the New International Trade Order
[6] Arturo Chian
  -Quantitative Easing and Financial Instability :From Shadow Banking System to the dealer of the Last Resort
[7] Mahendra Pal
 -The IMF Conditionality :Theory and Application in India
[8 –SomnathKarmakar
--The International Financial Architecture:Past,Present and Future
In Part-2,Global Financial Crisis and its impact has 5 important articles which are
  [i]David Fields and MatiasVernengo
–Hegemonic Currencies during the crisis:The Dollar versus the Euro in a Cartalist perspective.
[ii] AjoyPandey
   -Financial Crisis and Impact on Indian Economy
[iii] Dante A. Urbina
  -Did Austrian Economists predict the financial crisis
[iv]SukantaSarkar and SumanKalyanChaudhury

• Global Financial Crisis:Causes,trends,consequences and Remedial policies

[v] Suvrangshu Pan
  -Impact of global economic crisis on Indian Economy
In part-3 entitles “Regionalism and Monetary System” in which 3 articles are included,namely
[i] SusmitaMitra and Amrita Saha
 - Re-examining the SDR’s role in the new context of today’s globalized world
[ii] Sourav Kumar Das and KishorNaskar

• Framework of Monetary Policy in the region under SAARC

[iii] TapanPurkait
- Does BRICS’ New Development Bank Matter?
In part-4  entitles as “International  Trade”,there are 4 articles,namely.
[i] ChinmayaBehera
  – Future market and Inflation :An Econometric Investigation into Metal and Energy Futures
[ii] Debjani Mitra and SudiptaSarkar

• Foreign Trade Scenario of India and Bangladesh:AnEmperical Study

[iii] DipikaBasu and Arun Kumar Nandy
 -India’s export efficiency and economic growth during pre-WTO and post-WTO periods:An approach to DEA
[iv] SyedShahidMazhar,  AnisurRehman and  FarhinaSardar Khan
   -A Detailed Study of changing foreign trade pattern of India before Pre-reform liberalization era:Factors and cases.
The Editor (Dr.Debesh Bhowmik) himself wrote a brief description of the 20 articles and he also wrote an excellent Introduction of the book in which he explained the International Monetary System from pre-silver standard to present monetary system including  system of SDR and possibility of evolving Bretton Woods-II and III respectively. Even he explained the ongoing debates about the reform of the International Monetary System.
In this edited volume ,five foreign economists contributed 7 articles which demand high academic and professional values.
The edited book might help the students,scholars,teachers,policy makers and professionals who are related with International Trade,Finance,International Monetary System and liquidity crises.



Ref Source Link  http://debeshbhowmik.blogspot.co.uk/2016_01_01_archive.html