Linkage

With appropriate support and mentorship, most Ph.D. students possess motivation independent of grades. Though it may vary with the highs and lows of the research process, this motivation is (mostly) related to students’ intrinsic interest in their field and topic of study. (Though the recognition afforded by the degree itself also serves as extrinsic motivation for most). Even without the grade, graduate students work hard. They re-do, revise, and revise some more. They seek out feedback from others as they work to improve their abilities and understanding. They pursue intriguing ideas and approaches, and while it may be a frustrating waste of time when some of those don’t pan out, there is no explicit penalty. They are empowered to take risks. They are taught that failure is normal, even if it is painful. They learn that an experiment with an unexpected result is often what leads to new questions, insights, or even breakthroughs. When they graduate and enter the job market, especially academia, potential employers will evaluate them based on their body of work and narrative assessments of their abilities (recommendation letters).

Those statements above seem almost silly when applied to a dissertation, but statements like these are typical justifications of the necessity of grading undergraduates. Why are our views on grades for undergraduates often in direct opposition to how we might perceive grading dissertations?

Joe Biden’s inner circle of strategists for the Middle East — Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk — have little understanding of the Muslim world and a deep animus towards Islamic resistance movements. They see Europe, the United States and Israel as involved in a clash of civilizations between the enlightened West and a barbaric Middle East. They believe that violence can bend Palestinians and other Arabs to their will. They champion the overwhelming firepower of the U.S. and Israeli military as the key to regional stability — an illusion that fuels the flames of regional war and perpetuates the genocide in Gaza.

In short, these four men are grossly incompetent. They join the club of other clueless leaders, such as those who waltzed into the suicidal slaughter of World War One, waded into the quagmire of Vietnam or who orchestrated the series of recent military debacles in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. They are endowed with the presumptive power vested in the Executive Branch to bypass Congress, to provide weapons to Israel and carry out military strikes in Yemen and Iraq. This inner circle of true believers dismiss the more nuanced and informed counsels in the State Department and the intelligence communities, who view the refusal of the Biden administration to pressure Israel to halt the ongoing genocide as ill-advised and dangerous.

The Washington Post has an article out titled “As Houthis vow to fight on, U.S. prepares for sustained campaign,” with “sustained campaign” being empire-speak for a new American war.

“The Biden administration is crafting plans for a sustained military campaign targeting the Houthis in Yemen after 10 days of strikes failed to halt the group’s attacks on maritime commerce, stoking concern among some officials that an open-ended operation could derail the war-ravaged country’s fragile peace and pull Washington into another unpredictable Middle Eastern conflict,” the Post reports.

The Post acknowledges that “sustained military campaign” means “war” in the ninth paragraph of the article, saying the anonymous US officials cited in the report “don’t expect that the operation will stretch on for years like previous U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria.” Which is about as reassuring as a pyromaniac saying he doesn’t expect he’ll be burning down any more houses like all those other houses he’s burned down.

The power of capital is such that it’s not only individuals whose lives are shaped by it. It has a coercive influence over governments as well. Fujitsu, despite its complicity in the Post Office Scandal, has continued to run the Post Office’s computer systems without any penalties. It is claimed that it would be too expensive to sack them. They continue to be given government IT contracts as there is little in procurement law to stop them being awarded them on the basis of bad behaviour in the running of previous contracts.

The people in charge of such companies often have close personal relations with those in government, having gone to the same schools or universities and belonging to the same social circles. They can relate to each other, but not to the lives of working-class people. They look after their own and show no evidence of really caring for ordinary people like those whose lives have been destroyed by the Post Office.

Is there any evidence that things have been learned as a result of the Post Office scandal?  I do not believe so. The dangers created when powerful multinational companies are allowed important roles within the public sector have not been addressed. The Post Office Scandal shows that they can operate in ways that damage working class lives with little meaningful accountability to the public.

“At the moment, analyses of pandemic threats focus on diseases that might emerge in southern regions and then spread north,” said geneticist Jean-Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University. “By contrast, little attention has been given to an outbreak that might emerge in the far north and then travel south – and that is an oversight, I believe. There are viruses up there that have the potential to infect humans and start a new disease outbreak.”

This point was backed by virologist Marion Koopmans of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. “We don’t know what viruses are lying out there in the permafrost but I think there is a real risk that there might be one capable of triggering a disease outbreak – say of an ancient form of polio. We have to assume that something like this could happen.”

In 2014, Claverie led a team of scientists who isolated live viruses in Siberia and showed they could still infect single-cell organisms – even though they had been buried in permafrost for thousands of years. Further research, published last year, revealed the existence of several different viral strains from seven different sites in Siberia and showed these could infect cultured cells. One virus sample was 48,500 years old.

At the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference, Michael Knowles took the main stage and called for the “eradication of transgenderism from public life” to a standing ovation. Not long after, Project 2025 (led by the Heritage Foundation) published the “Mandate for Leadership,” a 900-plus-page blueprint for the next Republican administration. The first legislative item in the executive summary declares that “transgender ideology” is a form of pornography, and that all pornography should be outlawed. It then goes on to call all trans people “child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women.” It further demands that anyone who is a “purveyor of transgender ideology” be put on sex offender lists and imprisoned.

This an explicit call to make being transgender illegal, and to put anyone who fails to flee or detransition in prison, or maybe camps if there are too many for the existing system to handle. This is already the solution Donald Trump is proposing for other “undesirables.” It’s not coming from fringe organizations: This is the mainstream of the GOP. When Trump promises to be a dictator on day one, it’s so that he can implement draconian policies and laws like these. Average Americans might think, “Surely we would never go this far? This sounds positively Naziesque, and it is, and we’re better than that, right?”

Wrong.

We already have the first state proposing bills to do exactly this (and more) less than a week into the new legislative year. By January 17, more than 200 anti-transgender bills have already been filed. West Virginia’s Senate Bill 197 defines the existence of transgender people as “obscene” and bans them from being within 2,500 feet of any school. Senate Bill 194 would not only ban all transition-related care for anyone over the age of 21, but would also require that all providers (including therapists of all types) attempt to “cure” them. It would define being transgender as a “sexual deviation,” like pedophilia, exhibitionism, masochism, sadomasochism, or fetishism. Senate Bill 195 in West Virginia would declare that any material related to being transgender is obscene, which would have far-reaching implications for the internet and the First Amendment.

In December, five years later than promised, the Tories finally delivered draft, non-statutory guidance for schools on “gender questioning children”. It provoked criticism and concerns from all sides, and is open for consultation until March. But whatever its final form, one aspect of the guidance has gone largely unnoticed.

The document doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know about this government’s hostile stance on trans identities, inclusion and rights; but, unfortunately, what it does do is further solidify in official documentation and language the politicised phrase “gender identity ideology”. The government is attempting to bring into the mainstream this contested term, a creation of rightwing sex and gender conservatism that dates back to the 1990s, and which forms a key part of renewed attacks against the LGBTQ+ community.

As used in this context, the phrase “gender identity ideology” is actually nothing to do with gender, as in masculinity and femininity, and how this shapes our identities. Instead, it is used to imply that trans, transgender and gender non-conforming identities are a new fad, and that the longstanding social justice movement for trans rights is really a recent conspiracy of nefarious elites.

The use of terms such as “gender identity ideology”, “gender identity” and “social transition” serve to obscure the ideology of gender that members of this government, like all sex and gender conservatives, merrily adhere to themselves, and enforce on us all. Gender ideology is real, but it wasn’t invented by trans men or trans women, and it doesn’t just apply to trans or transgender people. The real gender ideology is the binary sex and gender system that requires all of us to be either male-masculine-heterosexual or female-feminine-heterosexual; and which attaches harsh penalties to those who deviate from this script. Almost all of us will have been socialised on to pink or blue paths from birth, if not by our immediate family, then by the books, TV, toys, clothes and adverts that surrounded us in wider society. This socially prescribed gender informs our gender identity.

No money is universally acceptable. What distinguishes special-purpose monies (SPMs) from national currencies is not the fact of geographical or institutional constraints on their acceptability as such, but the intentional imposition of such constraints as a design priority. This article integrates SPMs into the theoretical framework of the credit theory of money and proposes a novel typology of complementary currencies. In this view, any money is part of a global hierarchy of credit monies. The position of each money in that hierarchy depends on its liquidity, including the degree of commensurability and convertibility, and on the degree of sovereignty that backs it, including aspects of sovereignty that are based on monopoly power and social norms that have no necessary link to states. The position of national currencies in the global hierarchy can be assessed along the dimensions of liquidity and sovereignty. Along the same lines, four types of SPMs can be distinguished. Non-commensurable SPMs backed by some form of sovereignty and connected to public provisioning systems appear to be a more promising instrument than private convertible currencies for supporting effective sustainability transitions.

Degrowth lacks a theory of how the state can finance ambitious social-ecological policies and public provisioning systems while maintaining macroeconomic stability during a reduction of economic activity. Addressing this question, we present a synthesis of degrowth scholarship and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) rooted in their shared understanding of money as a public good and their common opposition to artificial scarcity. We present two arguments. First, we draw on MMT to argue that states with sufficient monetary sovereignty face no obstacle to funding the policies necessary for a just and sustainable degrowth transition. Increased public spending neither requires nor implies GDP growth. Second, we draw on degrowth research to bring MMT in line with ecological reality. MMT posits that fiscal spending is limited only by inflation, and thus the productive capacity of the economy. We argue that efforts to deal with this constraint must also pay attention to social and ecological limits. Based on this synthesis we propose a set of monetary and fiscal policies suitable for a stable degrowth transition, including a stronger regulation of private finance, tax reforms, price controls, public provisioning systems and an emancipatory job guarantee. This approach can support broad democratic mobilization for a degrowth transition.

The central argument of this book is that the foundations for sustainable prosperity lie in an approach to economic management based on modern monetary theory and a job guarantee. This approach builds on the work of Keynes, Kalecki, Minsky, Davidson, Godley and other Post- Keynesian economists—as well as research by behavioral economists including Simon, Kahneman and Loewenstein—to explore the role that a permanent, equitable job guarantee could play in building an inclusive, participatory and just society. Orthodox (neoclassical) economics, in its various forms, has failed to deliver sustainable prosperity. An important reason for this failure is its lack of realistic foundations. It misrepresents both human nature and economic institutions, and its use as a frame for the development and assessment of economic policy proposals has had disastrous consequences for social inclusion and the quality of life of millions of people. This book discusses an alternative, more realistic and more useful set of economic foundations, which could deliver the opportunity of a decent quality of life with dignity to all.