Otto Neurath...Vladimir Putin...and the economy of real things

Just two days ago the Hindustan Times published an article with the headline, "US Senate clears long-delayed $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan". A long-awaited proposal to continue the massacre of unlimited numbers of Ukrainians, Palestinians and to lay the ground-work for a similar future for Taiwan seems to have seen the light of day.

However, headlines seem to be written primarily for those who read nothing more than the headline (or a tweet), for in just the second paragraph, the following is written:

"The legislation will now be submitted to the House of Representatives, which is controlled by Republicans, where there is little possibility that it would pass into law. US Speaker Mike Johnson has condemned the bill."

The Russians have said time and again that providing financial aid to Ukraine may prolong the conflict but would do nothing to change the outcome. Yet, this obsession with providing billions of dollars of aid continues. 

Such is the obsession with the magical power of money brought about by the unrelenting spread of neoliberal ideology and finance capitalism around the world, that it's hard for most people to get their heads around the fact, that money, by itself, is quite nothing.

It is the things that we can buy or rent or use with the money that is everything. There is not much use in having a lot of money during a famine when there is no rice to buy with it (just watch Satyajit Ray's classic film 'Asani Sanket' on the Bengal famine during World War 2 that claimed the lives of 5 million people).

This propaganda of money is particularly strong in India, where three decades of worshiping and trumpeting of finance capitalism has granted a god-like status to the super-rich. It matters little how the money is accumulated or what is being done with it. The mere possession of it is enough to attribute the virtues of greatness, intelligence, wisdom, talent, vision etc etc to the rich. If you are great then you will definitely be rich and if you are rich then you must be great !

However, there is not much use in releasing billions of dollars to fight a war if you neither have sufficient quantities of weapons and equipment to buy with it, nor have the industrial capacity to produce it. Already back in 2022 news articles appeared about the "donation" of 20000 rounds of 155 mm artillery ammunition to Ukraine by the US and Canada only to be followed by other news articles that would discuss the difficulties in producing and procuring sufficient quantities of shells in a short time.

And all that while, the Russian armed forces were firing about 60000 155mm shells on Ukrainian positions every single day. 

Money can buy shells if there are shells. Money cannot magically become shells. 

Apparently it was not part of the calculations of globalists that after having off-shored much of the industry to other countries to both maximise profits and break the backs of trade-unions; having set up military bases around the world to ensure that this global network stays in control; and putting in place all the financial institutions to deploy the sanction-weapons to put any mis-behaving economies in line, that they would have to see this day when they struggle to produce shells in their own countries while Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia line up to join the BRICS.

And we saw a similar situation recently with the Houthis. The peculiarly named 'Operation Prosperity Guardian' was faced with an embarrassingly prosperity-threatening prospect of having to shoot down couple of thousand dollars worth of Houthi drones with couple of million dollars worth of air defense missiles.

Already in February-March 2022, when the western powers hurled every possible economic sanction at Russia and then proceeded to freeze about 600 billion dollars of their sovereign funds, they were certain that as a result of these measures the Russian economy will tank and collapse in days.

Well, guess what ? We are in 2024 now and if this is what the Russian economy can do when it is tanked then I don't know what their economy is like when it booms. It's the sanctions that tanked, not Russia. Nobody even remembers Mr. Daleep "Sanction" Singh now.

There is no mystery to the resilience of the Russian economy. It is an economy of real things - or, as economists like Michael Hudson and experts like Andrei Martyanov have described ad nauseam - it is a REAL ECONOMY.

 

 

And this is nothing new, although it is almost always ignored by mainstream economists. Already in the 1920s the Austrian political-economist and the creator of the ISOTYPE method of pictorial statistics, Otto Neurath had discussed at length about "in-kind" accounting in economics based on his studies of war time economics. He realised that periods of crisis - such as war - clearly revealed the reality of a nation's economy and that is based on the simple fact that you can neither eat money, nor wear money, nor shoot money from money if you do not have the real goods that can satisfy all these needs in sufficient quantities.

Of course, it continues to be a mystery to scores of people in the west and also here in India. 

 

How come "rich" economies like the US and EU cannot bring a "poor" (gas-station-masquerading-as-a-country) economy like Russia to its knees with its earth-shattering sanctions ??

 

Well, as they say in many Hollywood films and series -- "Just follow the money"...and keep following it until the trail runs cold on reaching the dead site where the factories used to be.