New Left Review criticizes Lords of Finance

War, Crash, Slump by Tom Mertes

Keynes and the Macmillan committee by Simon Wren-Lewis

1926 United Kingdom general strike

Scotland

DeLong tweets

.@cstross (1/2) a vote for “yes” is a vote to abandon the progressives of England to a state where UKIP & Tories command 60% of the vote!” 

.@cstross (2/2) progressive internationalism requires a “no” vote! (Also that Canada agree to its annexation by Merka)…

Ugh Niall Ferguson pushed me towards Yes, but now DeLong has pushed me back towards No.

Stross on Scotland

Charlie Stross on the Scottish referendum.

In the long term I favour a Europe—indeed, a world—of much smaller states. I don't just favour breaking up the UK; I favour breaking up the United States, India, and China. Break up the Westphalian system. We live today in a world dominated by two types of group entity; the nation-states with defined borders and treaty obligations that emerged after the end of the 30 Years War, and the transnational corporate entities which thrive atop the free trade framework provided by the treaty organizations binding those Westphalian states together.

...

One final note: what about left-internationalism? Isn't nationalism the enemy of the working class? (And to the extent that all of us who aren't in the 0.1% are "working class"—if you have to work to earn a living, you're working class, even if you're a brain surgeon or an accountant—the enemy of all of us?) Well yes: but the kind of nationalism that brought us the Great European War (for the Second World War may best be viewed with the perspective of long-term history as simply a flare-up of the war that began in 1914, after the combatants time out to breed a new generation of cannon-fodder) is pretty much dead. As dead as the Westphalian states that had territorial integrity they could defend, because getting from one to the other still took days or weeks by railway or steam ship, and invading another from the one took days or weeks of marching infantry divisions. Nor is the working "class" still obviously an entity you can point at, with which people share a strong sense of solidarity: where is the solidarity between lawyer and street-sweeper, nursing home care worker and robot designer? Yes, capitalism and the crisis of capitalism is still with us: but the continuing and ongoing recomplication of the world around us makes the traditional movement of masses one of questionable relevance. We need better structures, it's true. But I don't see them emerging from the kind of monolithic, territorially hegemonic state that thinks its place in the world is best secured by building bigger aircraft carriers. Firepower doesn't build external stability, as the past decade in Iraq demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt. We need consensus, and we need a finer granularity of constitutional decision making. Hence smaller nation-states.

Scotland

Krugman and Wren-Lewis worry about the Euro disaster replicating itself in London.

The radical Left:

"So what, then, are socialist arguments for independence that would meet these requirements? The most obvious is the possibility of breaking up the British imperialist state."

A referendum called while the occupation of Afghanistan was still ongoing, with the Iraqi and Libyan interventions a recent memory, is inseparable from the arguments against these wars and the British state’s subordinate alliance with the American empire. Scottish secession would at the very least make it more difficult for Britain to play this role, if only by reducing its practical importance for the US.

Why Scotland Should Vote Yes by Neil Davidson

I guessed correctly. No Tony Blair poodle. American imperialism isn't great but Chinese or Russian imperialism won't be better and will probably be worse.

Dan Davies on the Swiss

The World Is Squared: Episode 1 – “Switzerland, Country of Joyce” by Daniel Davies