about zamheifa
zamheifa (bavarian: to cooperate, mutual aid) is a collection of notes and results on economic theory and analysis from a libertarian socialist point of view.
Currently there are results from two major lines of work:
- analysis of data / stylised facts and development of a basic model for growth, business cycles and structural change (transition from the fordist to the neoliberal growth regime in the 1970ies/80ies). [→ growth, cycles and crises]
- analysis of long-term evolution (since the 1960ies) of the distribution of income, with the focus on the four Western-European countries France, Germany, Italy and Spain [→ distribution of income, wealth and power]
zamheifa is a personal web page, the presented results and analyses are fruit of my personal research done in my free time, as an auto-didact in the economics profession, presented to the interested public in the hope that You may find some interesting ideas or data collections helpful either for related research and studies or for political work.
The intention is to be as scientifically rigorous as possible with the limited available time and resources (without support of an academic institution or funding behind).
socio-political background and basic objective
In the evolution of the global capitalist system since the transition to neoliberalism at the beginning and the collapse of the “real socialism” in the Sovjetunion at the end of the decade of the 1980ies the social conflicts of an essentially economic character are intensifying even in the central regions of the capitalist economy.
The shortage suffered by the majority of the population is more and more in contrast with a productive potential without precedents. The accumulation of means of production and know-how would allow for a production of goods and services in abundance, in order to cover social needs, and at the same time reducing the amount of working time and improving the working conditions. The contrast between what IS and what COULD BE never has been as large as in our times.
The intrinsic mechanisms by which capitalism generates this ever increasing gap can be classified into three basic categories:
- the inefficient utilisation of productive resources (capital destruction in the crisis, infra-utilisation of productive capacity in spite of covering social needs …)
- the increasing inequality of distribution of income, wealth and power
- the utilisation of resources for socially useless or harmful purposes (production of luxury goods and status symbols, advertisement, bureaucratic and repressive apparatus, military industry, projects of “pyramides”).
The basic objective of my research and analysis is making some modest contributions to generate conciousness about these facts giving support to the claim that neoliberal capitalism is extremely injust, inefficient for covering social needs and destructive for the environment and social relationships.
