पूंजी के व्यापारियों का अर्थशास्त्र और उदारीकरण की लूट :तथा नव उदारवाद की समाप्ती के कयास ------ विजय राजबली माथुर /आदित्य चक्रबोरती

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पूंजी के व्यापारियों का अर्थशास्त्र
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बैंक वस्तुतः पूंजी के व्यापारी हैं। बैंक पहले साधारण जनता से उसे छोटी-छोटी बचत को प्रोत्साहित करने हेतु बहुत थोड़े धन से सेविंग्स अकाउंट खोलते थे । जनता को सभी सुविधाएं मुफ्त देते थे जबकि व्यापारिक सेवाओं पर शुल्क तब भी लेते थे। चेकबुक मुफ्त मिलती थी दूसरी ब्रांच या दूसरे शहर की ब्रांच में अकाउंट का ट्रांसफर आसानी से होता था और निशुल्क ही। कर्मचारी जनता से मित्रवत व्यवहार करते थे।
जैसे-जैसे 'उदारीकरण ' बढ़ा और 'विकास' का शोर बुलंद हुआ। कर्मचारियों का व्यवहार जनता के साथ रूखा-दर- रूखा होता गया। ब्याज दरों में कटौती होती रही लेकिन सुविधाओं पर शुल्क वसूला जाने लगा। आगामी पहली जून से बैंक व्हाईट कालर्ड डाकू की भूमिका अख़्तियार करने जा रहे हैं। फासिस्ट पूंजीवादी सरकार अब जनता को अपनी बचत बैंकों में रखने के प्रति हतोत्साहित करने के ध्येय से अपने ही पैसों को जमा करने और निकालने पर शुल्क लाद  रही है। नतीजा यह होगा बैंक के बजाए लोग अपनी बचत ज़्यादा ब्याज देने वाले निजी संस्थानों में जमा करने लगेंगे। इस तरह निजी व्यापारियों को पूंजी का व्यापार बढ़ाने का अवसर मिलेगा और बैंक घाटे का उपक्रम बन कर रह जाएँगे तब सरकार इनको औने- पौने दामों पर कारपोरेट कंपनियों को बेच डालेगी। इस ओर न जनता ध्यान दे रही है न ही बैंक कर्मचारी नेता गण। सब के सब हिन्दू राष्ट्र के आगमन की धमक में निमग्न हैं । जनता की फिक्र उनको भी नहीं हो रही है जो जन-वादी होने का दंभ भरते हैं। 
https://www.facebook.com/vijai.mathur/posts/1075751852486790

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उदारीकरण की लूट 
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May 24 at 10:02pm · 
दो सप्ताह पूर्व टाटा डोकोमो ने sms के जरिये सूचित किया कि, वे 15 मई 2016 से CDMA सर्विस बंद कर रहे हैं जब उनसे कहा कि, GSM सर्विस में इसे ट्रांसफर कर दें तो तमाम अड़ंगे खड़े कर दिये। अखबार से पता लगा कि, रिलायंस ने अपने ग्राहकों को GSM की सिम CDMA के बदले खुद ही दे दी थीं। लेकिन फिर भी तमाम लोगों को हैंड सेट तो नए खरीदने ही पड़े। भले ही हमने दूसरे आपरेटर पर mnp करा लिया और अपना पुराना नंबर सुरक्षित बचा लिया लेकिन दस दिन झंझट तो रहा ही बेवजह नया हैंड सेट व सिम खरीदने में अतिरिक्त व्यय हुआ ही।

इस तरह ये कारपोरेट घराने जब तब जनता को उल्टे उस्तरे से मूढ़ते रहते हैं। बाजारवाद व्यापार जगत पर ही नहीं राजनीति पर भी हावी है। अब विधानसभाओं व संसद में प्रतिनिधि कारपोरेट घरानों के चहेते ही आसानी से चुन जाते हैं और जन पक्षधरता वाले लोग बड़ी कठिनाई से वहाँ पहुँच पा रहे हैं। फिर भला जनता के हितार्थ काम कैसे हो? श्रम कानूनों को उदारीकरण के आवरण में कारपोरेट हितैषी एवं श्रमिक विरोधी बनाया जा रहा है।
https://www.facebook.com/vijai.mathur/posts/1087992924596016

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लेकिन आदित्य चक्रबोरती साहब लिखते हैं कि, नव उदारवाद भीतर से ही समाप्त होने जा रहा है :
You’re witnessing the death of neoliberalism – from within
Aditya Chakrabortty

Tuesday 31 May 2016 06.59 BST

What does it look like when an ideology dies? As with most things, fiction can be the best guide. In Red Plenty, his magnificent novel-cum-history of the Soviet Union, Francis Spufford charts how the communist dream of building a better, fairer society fell apart.


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Even while they censored their citizens’ very thoughts, the communists dreamed big. Spufford’s hero is Leonid Kantorovich, the only Soviet ever to win a Nobel prize for economics. Rattling along on the Moscow metro, he fantasises about what plenty will bring to his impoverished fellow commuters: “The women’s clothes all turning to quilted silk, the military uniforms melting into tailored grey and silver: and faces, faces the length of the car, relaxing, losing the worry lines and the hungry looks and all the assorted toothmarks of necessity.”

But reality makes swift work of such sandcastles. The numbers are increasingly disobedient. The beautiful plans can only be realised through cheating, and the draughtsmen know it better than any dissidents. This is one of Spufford’s crucial insights: that long before any public protests, the insiders led the way in murmuring their disquiet. Whisper by whisper, memo by memo, the regime is steadily undermined from within. Its final toppling lies decades beyond the novel’s close, yet can already be spotted.

When Red Plenty was published in 2010, it was clear the ideology underpinning contemporary capitalism was failing, but not that it was dying. Yet a similar process as that described in the novel appears to be happening now, in our crisis-hit capitalism. And it is the very technocrats in charge of the system who are slowly, reluctantly admitting that it is bust.

You hear it when the Bank of England’s Mark Carney sounds the alarm about “a low-growth, low-inflation, low-interest-rate equilibrium”. Or when the Bank of International Settlements, the central bank’s central bank, warns that “the global economy seems unable to return to sustainable and balanced growth”. And you saw it most clearly last Thursday from the IMF.

It is the very technocrats in charge of the system who are slowly, reluctantly admitting that it is bust
What makes the fund’s intervention so remarkable is not what is being said – but who is saying it and just how bluntly. In the IMF’s flagship publication, three of its top economists have written an essay titled “Neoliberalism: Oversold?”.

The very headline delivers a jolt. For so long mainstream economists and policymakers have denied the very existence of such a thing as neoliberalism, dismissing it as an insult invented by gap-toothed malcontents who understand neither economics nor capitalism. Now here comes the IMF, describing how a “neoliberal agenda” has spread across the globe in the past 30 years. What they mean is that more and more states have remade their social and political institutions into pale copies of the market. Two British examples, suggests Will Davies – author of the Limits of Neoliberalism – would be the NHS and universities “where classrooms are being transformed into supermarkets”. In this way, the public sector is replaced by private companies, and democracy is supplanted by mere competition.

The results, the IMF researchers concede, have been terrible. Neoliberalism hasn’t delivered economic growth – it has only made a few people a lot better off. It causes epic crashes that leave behind human wreckage and cost billions to clean up, a finding with which most residents of food bank Britain would agree. And while George Osborne might justify austerity as “fixing the roof while the sun is shining”, the fund team defines it as “curbing the size of the state … another aspect of the neoliberal agenda”. And, they say, its costs “could be large – much larger than the benefit”.

 IMF managing director Christine Lagarde with George Osborne.
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 IMF managing director Christine Lagarde with George Osborne. ‘Since 2008, a big gap has opened up between what the IMF thinks and what it does.’ Photograph: Kimimasa Mayama/EPA
Two things need to be borne in mind here. First, this study comes from the IMF’s research division – not from those staffers who fly into bankrupt countries, haggle over loan terms with cash-strapped governments and administer the fiscal waterboarding. Since 2008, a big gap has opened up between what the IMF thinks and what it does. Second, while the researchers go much further than fund watchers might have believed, they leave in some all-important get-out clauses. The authors even defend privatisation as leading to “more efficient provision of services” and less government spending – to which the only response must be to offer them a train ride across to Hinkley Point C.

Even so, this is a remarkable breach of the neoliberal consensus by the IMF. Inequality and the uselessness of much modern finance: such topics have become regular chew toys for economists and politicians, who prefer to treat them as aberrations from the norm. At last a major institution is going after not only the symptoms but the cause – and it is naming that cause as political. No wonder the study’s lead author says that this research wouldn’t even have been published by the fund five years ago.

From the 1980s the policymaking elite has waved away the notion that they were acting ideologically – merely doing “what works”. But you can only get away with that claim if what you’re doing is actually working. Since the crash, central bankers, politicians and TV correspondents have tried to reassure the public that this wheeze or those billions would do the trick and put the economy right again. They have riffled through every page in the textbook and beyond – bank bailouts, spending cuts, wage freezes, pumping billions into financial markets – and still growth remains anaemic.

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And the longer the slump goes on, the more the public tumbles to the fact that not only has growth been feebler, but ordinary workers have enjoyed much less of its benefits. Last year the rich countries’ thinktank, the OECD, made a remarkable concession. It acknowledged that the share of UK economic growth enjoyed by workers is now at its lowest since the second world war. Even more remarkably, it said the same or worse applied to workers across the capitalist west.

Red Plenty ends with Nikita Khrushchev pacing outside his dacha, to where he has been forcibly retired. “Paradise,” he exclaims, “is a place where people want to end up, not a place they run from. What kind of socialism is that? What kind of shit is that, when you have to keep people in chains? What kind of social order? What kind of paradise?”


Economists don’t talk like novelists, more’s the pity, but what you’re witnessing amid all the graphs and technical language is the start of the long death of an ideology.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/31/witnessing-death-neoliberalism-imf-economists?CMP=fb_gu