The best thing about writing a specialist thesis

... is that you freaking can't wait to be done with it and read the stuff you actually want to read!

For me, this will involve (re) reading some of the classics of political economy: Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Jean-Baptiste Say, Josef Schumpeter, Thomas Malthus, Edmund Burke (Thoughts and Details on Scarcity), David Ricardo, Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx.

I'm getting pissed off with that free market ideology embraced by very nearly *all* political parties in the Western World. If you look at the US candidates, they all say the same, except that the democrats add a little caring touch to it, as if: "we will insist on fairer conditions", we'll do the same but nicer.

It drives me nuts because there is no way they will ever wipe out the exploitative tendencies of capitalism in that way. We'll exploit the two-third world more nicely, now there's a programme! And there is no way any of them can account for the lumpenproletariat, the people that an efficient capitalism does not need, and therefore leaves behind in squalor.

And I'm so frustrated that I don't have the answers. I'm sad that one of my favourite scholars died shortly after raising the crucial question: you guys have to do something about this hegemony of free-market thinking, this "area of implicit agreement" which is eating up our democratic debate.

An empirical analysis of the trajectory of the advanced economies over the longue duree suggests, in contrast, that ‘globalisation’ is not a new phase of capitalism, but a ‘rhetoric’ invoked by goverments in order to justify their voluntary surrender to the financial markets and their conversion to a fiduciary conception of the firm. Far from being -- as we are constantly told -- the inevitable result of the growth of foreign trade, deindustralization, growing inequality and the retrenchment of social policies are the result of domestic political decisions that reflect the tipping of the balance of class forces in favour of the owners of capital.

~Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant: Neoliberal Newspeak, Notes on the New Planetary Vulgate.