"While generative AI and AI agents are the buzzwords that splash across the headlines, the same dynamics are true of precursors to contemporary AI systems like automated decision-making technologies used in banking, hiring, and criminal justice
(...)
More than a decade of evidence demonstrates how it goes: The introduction of these systems concentrates power among the deployers of the tech, leaving those on the receiving end more insecure, vulnerable, and unable to contest the determinations made by the “smart machine” at the expense of the broader public. These tools are often invisible to those judged by them, and inscrutable even when they are visible.

Why society would ever accept this bargain is the critical question at hand. Amid the excitement over AI’s (speculative) potential, the sobering reality of its present and recent past is obscured. When we consult the record on how AI is already intermediating critical social infrastructures, we see that it is materially reshaping our institutions in ways that ratchet up inequality, render institutions opaque to those they are meant to serve, and concentrate power in the hands of the already powerful. (...) It makes clear that for all the whiz-bang demos and bold Davos proclamations, on the ground AI is consistently deployed in ways that make everyday people’s lives, material conditions, and access to opportunities worse and the systems that incorporate them stronger.

This report’s title, Artificial Power, captures the critical, and at times contradictory, moment we find ourselves in. On one hand, the tech oligarchy has successfully deployed “AI”—as a strategic marketing term and as a set of automation technologies—to cement and grow its power. At the same time, this power is vastly inflated, contingent, and poised for disruption."

https://ainowinstitute.org/publications/research/executive-summary-artificial-power

#AI #GenerativeAI #BigTech #SiliconValley #PoliticalEconomy

"The Trump administration misses a major dimension of power. Power is the ability to get others to do what you want. This goal can be accomplished by coercion, payment, or attraction. The first two are hard power; the third is soft power. In the short term, hard power usually trumps soft power, but over the long term, soft power often prevails. Joseph Stalin is thought to have once mockingly asked, “How many divisions does the Pope have?” But the Soviet Union is long gone, and the papacy lives on.

The president seems inordinately committed to coercion and the exercise of American hard power, but he does not seem to understand soft power or its role in foreign policy. Coercing democratic allies such as Canada or Denmark more broadly weakens trust in U.S. alliances; threatening Panama reawakens fears of imperialism throughout Latin America; crippling the U.S. Agency for International Development undercuts the United States’ reputation for benevolence. Silencing the Voice of America mutes the country’s message.

Skeptics say, So what? International politics is hardball, not softball. And Trump’s coercive and transactional approach is already producing concessions with the promise of more to come. As Machiavelli once wrote about power, it is better for a prince to be feared than loved. But it is better yet to be both feared and loved. Power has three dimensions, and by ignoring attraction, Trump is neglecting a key source of American strength. In the long run, it is a losing strategy.

America’s decline may not be a mere dip but a plunge.
And soft power matters even in the short run. If a country is attractive, it won’t need to rely as much on incentives and penalties to shape the behavior of others. If allies see it as benign and trustworthy, they are more persuadable and likely to follow that country’s lead..."

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/end-long-american-century-trump-keohane-nye

#USA #Trump #SoftPower #Imperialism #PoliticalEconomy #Diplomacy #InternationalRelations #Geopolitics

Against Money by JW Mason & Arjun Jayadev

"by writing about money, we seek to clarify our vision of the social world that exists around, outside and in opposition to it...the two great monetary aggregates debt and capital evolve according to their own autonomous logics, actively reshaping — rather than merely reflecting — the organization of material life"

#economics #money #politicalEconomy

https://jwmason.org/slackwire/against-money/

Starting a new blog series on #capitalism but might be biting off more than I can chew which is why my next blog posts are taking so long. I’m optimistic they’re going to be good, though. In the mean time check out the seven posts I’ve published since I started writing this year.

https://misaligned.markets

#blogging #politicaleconomy #economics #philosophy

https://content.blubrry.com/thedig/The_Dig-EP_489-Guy.mp3

#men #hombres #uomi #hommes

#JacobinMagazine

#TheDig: #Menswear and the World System

#DerekGuy #clothing #capitalism #history #politicaleconomy #textileindustry

"This isn’t innovation; it’s a hostile takeover of the money supply. Lacking anything resembling serious regulation, stablecoins are neither stable nor merely an alternative dollar payment option. They are a Trojan horse for the privatization of money.

The European Central Bank sees the danger. If securities migrate to the blockchain, with bonds, stocks, and derivatives becoming tokenized, then settlement must follow. The ECB’s solution is a tokenized euro, ensuring public money remains the bedrock of finance. So far, the ECB has faced resistance to this plan from German and French private banks. Now, the ECB has another, bigger headache: the United States is racing in the opposite direction. By banning CBDCs and green-lighting stablecoins, Trump’s team are not just rejecting public digital money; they are outsourcing dollar supremacy to the darkest forces within Big Tech.

The irony is grotesque. The same libertarians who rail against government are now begging the state to anoint their stablecoins as de facto official currency. Worse, they demand access to the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, allowing private issuers to back their tokens with central bank reserves. Imagine a world where Tether, Circle, or some non-scam “X Token” backed by Elon Musk enjoys the implicit backing of the US Treasury while operating outside banking regulations. This isn’t just regulatory arbitrage; it’s monetary feudalism."

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-wants-private-stablecoins-to-replace-dollar-by-yanis-varoufakis-2025-05

#USA #Trump #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Stablecoins #Dollar #MonetaryPolicy #PoliticalEconomy #Money

"China’s advances in manufacturing have caused a series of problems, however — both for its economy and for the rest of the world. Critics say one of the main weaknesses is the propensity to produce market distortions — sometimes on a monumental scale.

Local governments, whose leaders are measured by their ability to deliver economic growth, latch on to new central government policies to attract subsidised industries to their areas.
The result is duplication and state-backed overcapacity supercharged by competition that drives prices down — good for consumers but not for corporate profitability or local government finances.

“We have seen these boom-and-bust cycles,” says the EU Chamber in China’s Eskelund, pointing to the solar and battery industries. “The government actually gives policy guidance and . . . everyone seems to be rushing in the same direction.”
The EV sector was a case in point, he says, where only about three out of 112 manufacturers are making a profit. “We see waste at an absolutely colossal scale,” Eskelund says."

https://www.ft.com/content/724431ad-26db-4f6d-acab-ccb3cad11daa

#China #Manufacturing #MadeInChina2025 #Protectionism #PoliticalEconomy

"Garo’s Marx, une critique de la philosophie, especially since it is situated on the terrain of Marx’s relation to philosophy, is also an implicit discussion of Althusser’s theses (22). Garo’s interpretation indeed goes against Althusser’s more strictly philosophical reading of Marx, his epistemological break, and his minimalization of Marx’s political implications (for more on this, see Garo 2011). Garo shows, rather, that the critique of political economy is at the same time a critique of traditional philosophy and a redefinition of political economy (160), refusing to turn Marx into a philosopher. Marx’s constant critique of philosophy is presented by Garo as the mean and condition of Marxian analysis (289). She also demonstrates the strong continuity within Marx’s oeuvre, despite his constant reevaluations and the evolution of his thought. Her ability to convey the contradictions and ruptures that fill Marx’s works while convincingly demonstrating their strong continuity is indissociable from her commitment to representation as an interpretative through-line.

Marx, une critique de la philosophie is a successful exposition of Marx’s thought, as the work manages to skillfully combine the presentation of the majority of his major works and important biographical elements with a strong interpretative thesis. Garo aptly covers an impressive amount of primary literature, and the contextual notes she adds breathes new life into an oeuvre too often caricatured or sclerosed. Marx’s thought is, with Garo, filled with political urgencies, acute to socio-historical developments and constantly reevaluated – encouraging us, in turn, to confront our own historical conjuncture."

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/22129_marx-une-critique-de-la-philosophie-by-isabelle-garo-reviewed-by-isabelle-le-bourdais/

#Marx #Marxism #Philosophy #CriticalTheory #Althusser #PoliticalEconomy

'Plundering the Skilled #Workforce: Depriving Developing Nations of Their Most Valuable Assets' - a #Research article in 'World Review of #PoliticalEconomy' by Pluto Journals on #ScienceOpen: https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.13169/worlrevipoliecon.15.3.0004

World Review of #PoliticalEconomy (WRPE) is a peer-reviewed quarterly journal, published by Pluto Journals as the official publication of the World Association for Political #Economy, to produce #Research into #Marxist political economy: https://www.scienceopen.com/collection/wrpejournal

"President Xi Jinping’s government is considering a new version of its master plan to boost production of high-end technological goods, according to people familiar with the matter, signaling its intention to keep a firm grip on manufacturing as President Donald Trump looks to bring more factories back to the US.

Officials are drawing up plans for a future iteration of Xi’s flagship “Made in China 2025” campaign, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing deliberations that aren’t public. The plan over the next decade would prioritize technology including chip-making equipment, one of the people said, adding that it may not carry a similar name to avoid drawing criticism from Western countries.

Policymakers who are separately preparing Beijing’s next Five-Year Plan starting in 2026 are looking to maintain the share of manufacturing in gross domestic product at a stable level over the medium to long-term, one of the people said, underlining how the rebalancing of China’s economy sought by the US may prove elusive.

As part of deliberations, officials have discussed whether the next Five-Year Plan should include a numerical target for consumption in terms of its share in China’s GDP, according to the person. They are currently leaning against that, as authorities are concerned they lack effective tools to spur spending by households and are reluctant to commit to a specific number, the person said."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-26/xi-plans-new-made-in-china-effort-even-as-trump-aims-to-boost-us-manufacturing

#China #MadeInChina2025 #Manufacturing #USA #Trump #Tariffs #PoliticalEconomy #Protectionism #TradeWar

Wanted: A Marxian Data Centre https://thinkhammerly.wordpress.com/2025/05/26/wanted-a-marxian-data-centre/ #Economics, #EmpiricalAnalysis, #MarxianEconomics, #PoliticalEconomy

"The lose-lose economic policy is exactly what the US government is pursuing. The national security requirement, as seen by the US political elite, is that the costs imposed on China (in terms of slower growth rate, delayed technological development etc.) be greater than the equivalent costs to the United States. A recent Foreign Affairs article by Stephen G. Brooks and Ben A. Vagle cites a number of scenarios conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington that find in almost all cases that the lose-lose policy is more damaging to China than to the United States. Similar conclusion was reached by a Beijing thinktank cited by the Wall Street Journal (“Beijing Braces for a Rematch of Trump vs. China”, WSJ, May 2, 2024, p. 8): the GDP loss to China would be three times as big as to the US.

Whether the policy will indeed produce such an outcome can be doubted. The legitimate discussion among economists and political scientists should thus focus on whether the lose-lose policy would improve US relative position or make it worse."

https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/nothing-to-say

#USA #Trump #Tariffs #China #TradeWar #Protectionism #Economics #PoliticalEconomy

"The AP Stylebook is considered “the foremost arbiter of grammar and word choice” for serious news and opinion writers, and it has sold more than 2.5 million copies since it was first published in 1953. It’s a basic resource in college journalism and editing courses, too, where students can be docked points on their assignments for failing to follow its guidelines. Simply put, it’s the industry standard—and that fact gives the people who write and edit the Stylebook a lot of power to shape both news coverage and the political narratives around it.

The Associated Press, of course, denies that it’s a political institution. Like many professional organizations, it claims that its decisions are “factual and nonpartisan” and that its Stylebook “doesn’t align with any particular agenda.” But we should always be wary of people and groups who loudly proclaim themselves neutral—because they rarely are. Instead, they usually have unspoken biases and ideologies that shape their work, whether the people involved realize it or not. The Associated Press is no different. When we dig into the latest edition of the Stylebook, we can find all kinds of material that expresses a political viewpoint—or suppresses one. From the environment, to immigration, to policing, to Palestine, the AP Stylebook serves to reinforce the status quo and prevent writers from telling the truth about today’s most important issues."

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-the-ap-stylebook-warps-reality-to-serve-power

#AP #AssociatedPress #APStyleBook #Journalism #Media #News #PoliticalEconomy #Propaganda #Ideology

By itself, a tax like this one wouldn't do a thing to shift the current balance of power between capital and labour. Increasing inheritance taxes and enforcing stricter antitrust, anti-monopoly policies would be way more efficient in fighting the real causes of wealth inequality:

"Zucman’s project is that every billionaire should pay total annual taxes equalling at least 2 per cent of their wealth. That, he explained, is the level where they would pay the same tax rate as everyone else. If someone already pays 2 per cent through income and other taxes in their own country, “you are good, there’s nothing more to pay”. If they pay less, then any country where they do business could levy additional taxes to reach 2 per cent. For instance, Brazil or France could tax Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, as his company operates there.

“It’s a bold proposal, yet modest at the same time,” said Zucman. He explained that his “starting point” was learning from the “failure” of most previous European wealth taxes. Whereas they hit millionaires, his would exempt even those with wealth of €4.8mn (the threshold for entering the global 0.1 per cent).

This is hardly the Bolshevik revolution. Indeed, 2 per cent wouldn’t even reduce inequality, as billionaires’ wealth has been growing by 7 per cent a year. Piketty, who supports his former protégé’s plan, grumbles that it’s only “a useful first step”.

The EU has long backed Zucman’s research. But his big breakthrough came last year, when Brazil, host of the G20 summit, invited him to present his plan to the assembled finance ministers. Brazil twisted the arms of even Argentina’s libertarian president Javier Milei to agree to a shared declaration: “With full respect to tax sovereignty, we will seek to engage cooperatively to ensure that ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed.”"

https://www.ft.com/content/859ef96a-daa8-4fcc-96ab-a3a9465a441a

#Inequality #Billionaires #WealthTax #FiscalPolicy #Taxes #PoliticalEconomy

'Voices for African liberation: conversations with the Review of African Political Economy' - a book review in the Review of African #PoliticalEconomy on #ScienceOpen: https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.62191/ROAPE-2024-0039

Since 1974 the Review of African #PoliticalEconomy has provided radical analysis of trends, issues and social processes in #Africa, adopting a broadly materialist interpretation of change: https://www.scienceopen.com/collection/ROAPE

Yep. I also suspected it was a bit on the Poppish Intellectual History, especially when compared to Philip Mirowski and Wolfgang Streeck...

"Slobodian’s​ story is fascinating, but the problem with his account is that he doesn’t much want to explore how the ideas he describes found their way into the mainstream, or what else had to happen to make that possible. He is content with tracking the ideas back to their sources and pursuing them across the obscure university departments, cranky newsletters and weird work outings where they first got going. He has a colourful cast of characters – like the bouffant-haired Peter Brimelow, who started out as a fairly standard Thatcherite in the UK and ended up in the US as a white supremacist, or Murray Rothbard, who went from paleolibertarianism to promoting David Duke and Holocaust denial – but after a while they are hard to tell apart. It’s difficult to get a sense of which ideas mattered most, which alliances gained real traction, which people knew what they were doing politically and which of them didn’t really care. The neoliberal origins of the populist right are treated as though they existed in a kind of ideological vacuum, the various ideas tumbling down on top of each other as we repeatedly discover that some bad people knew plenty of people who were even worse.
(...)
Slobodian has an interesting thesis about the way Hayek’s ideas got turned inside out, but it feels overdetermined and undertheorised. Hayek’s Bastards is a short book – 176 pages – yet it has 52 pages of notes and a 38-page bibliography. Something is out of whack here."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n09/david-runciman/hokey-cowboy

#Neoliberalism #IntellectualHistory #PoliticalEconomy #PoliticalTheory

Why public benefit corporations won’t fix the ethics of platform capitalism

I wrote a couple of months ago about my scepticism that Bluesky will retain its ethical stances in the face of investor pressure. There’s no path to federation they’ve committed to, at a point where they’d be relatively free to do so, making it seem unlikely they’ll gut the commercialisation model at a future point when investors could push back. The obvious retort to this is that Bluesky is a public benefit corporation but, as Catherine Bracy points out in the (excellent) World Eaters, from pg 189:

While PBCs are a positive development in corporate governance, moving away from the misguided concept of shareholder supremacy that has dominated capitalism for the last century, they still have significant shortcomings. The biggest is that they don’t require companies to behave a certain way. They just provide protection for those executives who choose to put mission over profit. The companies that want to enact stricter protocols that mandate certain behavior no matter who is in charge are mostly left to create their own governance structures.

In other words it provides internal cover for sustaining commitment to a mission but it’s still dependent on motivated actors, who are operating within a system of incentives which makes it difficult to sustain a mission beyond growth and profitability. It doesn’t ‘lock in’ the mission, only ensures that it remains formally on the agenda in a discursive sense. Consider OpenAI’s hybrid structure which is arguably closer to a ‘lock in’ than being a public benefit corporation. From pg 189 of the same book:

There are a few notable examples of these bespoke structures in tech, most famously the one employed by OpenAI, which puts the for-profit entity that develops and markets ChatGPT under the control of a nonprofit whose mission is to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” The company also places a cap on the amount of returns that investors in the for-profit entity can make, an interesting indicator that it understands just how much investor returns can influence product and business model decisions.

And Anthropic’s even more onerous hybrid structure, from pg 190:

One of OpenAI’s main competitors, Anthropic AI (which was founded by a breakaway faction of OpenAI employees who were even more concerned about AI safety risks), also has constructed a bespoke governance model with the intention of protecting the company’s mission from the vagaries of investor demands. Anthropic’s model is a hybrid. They are incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation in Delaware, but they have also created what they call a Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT) that, by 2027, will have the authority to select a majority of the company’s board members. The trustees who oversee the LTBT are selected based on their commitment to and expertise around the safe deployment of artificial intelligence and will have no financial stake in the company. The terms of the trust arrangement also require the company to report to the trustees “actions that could significantly alter the corporation or its business.”

We’ve already seen Altman begin to dismantle OpenAI’s governance structure, supported by a workforce who, Bracy suggests, rallied around him after the sacking due to concerns about the value of their stock options. I think Altman’s motives have as much to do with power, particularly vis-a-vis the board, as profit in driving this dismantling of governance structures he played a significant role in designing. But fund raising will generically play a role in driving resistance to these governance structures, as Bracy notes on pg 192:

The ability to raise money while adopting an alternative structure also reflects an enormous amount of privilege on the part of these companies’ founders. The vast majority of entrepreneurs are not able to drive the kind of bargain Altman and the Anthropic team did with their investors, even in times when VCs have more money to invest than they know what to do with. Even Altman found it difficult, telling me, “It was very hard to raise under this structure. Most investors looked at it and said ‘absolutely not, I’m not capping my profits.’ ” Creating a system in which any founder can do what Altman and his cofounders did will require much deeper structural change.

While I hope Anthropic’s governance structure remains intact, not least of all because I think a reactionary Claude would be the most dangerous of the frontier models, the idea that public benefit corporations and complex governance mechanisms (consider Meta’s oversight board as well) will be sufficient to produce ethical outcomes is self-evidently implausible. The problem, as Bracy argues, in a really incisive book arises from, the incentive structure of the innovation ecosystem itself. From pg 169:

That process, of continuously raising more venture capital in order to demonstrate value to future-round funders rather than focusing on building a solid business with strong fundamentals, is what creates bubbles. It is, more than any inherent risk associated with investing in startups, why Silicon Valley is such a boom-bust sector. Given what’s at stake for venture capitalists, it is extremely difficult for founders to find off-ramps that might allow them to retain control of their companies and operate in accordance with what’s best for customers, employees, and the long-term sustainability of the business instead of what will create the highest valuation in the venture capital marketplace.

What she’s talking about her could be frame in terms of the interplay of the micro-social (founders, VC partners and key staff seeking fame and fortune) and the meso-social (the organisational dynamics of growing a firm under these conditions) within a very specific structure of incentives provided by the innovation ecosystem and the political, legal and economic climate of late neoliberalism. The turn towards public benefit corporations and ethical governance is a welcome shift but it does nothing to change the overarching context, nor does it produce fundamentally different types of firms.

#anthropic #BlueSKy #CatherineBracy #investment #investors #platformCapitalism #politicalEconomy #publicBenefitCorporation #samAltman

still waiting for a Saw Gerrera series. #StarWars #Andor #Marxism #PoliticalEconomy #ScienceFiction #SpaceOpera

What are you rebelling against, Andor?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=y7zj0QqVruc&si=7G78fSgL8COHTezj