Euro Engine – English » The Soviet Unit

Euro Engine – English

A (Tentative) Visualization of the Euro

Academy of Sciences, Capitalism, Economy, English Articles, Euro Engine - English, Infographics 2 Responses »

Aug 292012

…and here we go. In this picture, I meant to visualize how the Euro works, and particularly how it works as a class-struggle tool, as it serves the purpose of extracting as much surplus value from the workforce as possible. I don’t think this attempt is particularly succesful, though – but since I’ve completed it, here I go posting. The structure is there, but the visualization does not seem particularly compelling to me – it’s a bit complicated and does not clearly show how things work. I’m probably re-engineering that in the future. But hey, here goes.

How the Euro Works - visualized as a refinery

How the Euro Works – Click to Download

Go to Index Article

The External Debt Pump

Euro Engine - English 2 Responses »

Jul 292012

Versione Italiana

I don’t know if anyone still wonders where the foreign debt crisis came from – possibly, most are buying the mainstream media narrative that it comes from irresponsible public spending in the past, which is easy to sell in along with stereotyped Greek and Italian profligacy. Lazy Spanish, Irish and Portuguese fall well in line, don’t they? Except that that’s not true – better, I don’t take it any longer. I am personally sick of being patronized that the straits we’re navigating are a confirmation of century old racist commonplace. And the worst part is that we’re believing it ourselves – I know, because I see it every day, that tons of hard working Italians believe thateverywhere else (i.e.: when they don’t or where they can’t look), true lazy Italians are squandering our money to economic death.

It’s not that, it’s this:

The External Debt Pump

It’s the private sector piling up debt to fuel growth, and being rescued by public money. So the risk that the private sector could not repay debt was trasferred to the public sector, and then everyone began placing the blame on the latter rather than on the former. And no-one seemed to notice. Who’s to blame? Why, there’s an interesting blog everyone should follow, Goofynomics (in Italian, although it has some English articles) which revolves around the Goofy style consideration that a debt, from the other side, looks much like a credit. So who did grant all this risky credit? And where they as diligent as they should have been? Do they indeed hold any right to the debt they’re reclaiming? I don’t think the mere possibility of this analysis has had much fortune in the media, has it?

Go to main article

The Unemployment Boiler

Academy of Sciences, Euro Engine - English 2 Responses »

Jul 222012

Versione italiana

One of the two by-products of the crushing of the industrial base, which is going on in all peripheral Euro countries, is the creation and maintainance of the reserve army of the unemployed. This is useful because, beyond the direct competition of workers with capital, create a competition between workers. Unemployed workforce gives up rights and wages more easily to secure a job, and those who already are in the job are under threat of being laid off in favour of a cheaper, more ‘willing’ competitor. Thus the bargaining power of workers is undermined. Unions should recover that by creating an alliance between the employed and the unemployed, but that seems no longer an option for what remains of them. Here is the model.

The Unemployment Boiler

Go to main article

The Workforce Centrifuge Separator

Academy of Sciences, Euro Engine - English, Infographics 2 Responses »

Jul 212012

Versione italiana

The de-industrialization of the peripheral Euro economies, which are all of them with the exception of Germany and, to a smaller extent, France, has two desirable effects. The first is the creation of a dis-aggregate demand for industrial production that can be exported, or better, re-located. Read: FIAT closes down plants here and produces in Poland, Brazil, or even the US, where it is easier to manage wages, or they are considerably lower than at home, or both. The second effect is that the local workforce is laid off and enters the unemployment reserve (coming up next), which helps keeping pressure on wages themselves and increases internal competition among workers. To achieve this, the Euro Engine uses the Workforce Centrifuge Separator:

The Workforce Centrifuge Separator

It works the way of centrifuges: different materials have different specific mass (kilos per cubic meter, or whatever), so to separate them when they’re mingled together you centrifuge them – heavier materials will be pressed against the wall of the rotating drum, lighter ones will remain in the middle. Here you go. I changed a bit the render settings vs. previous ones in this project, these allow for less noisy pics. Nonetheless, I let the integrator go on for 1,600 cycles, just in case.

Go to main article

The Peripheral Industry Capacity Crusher

Academy of Sciences, Capitalism, Euro Engine - English 2 Responses »

Jul 202012

Versione italiana

This is the first of two components in the German commodity demand generator. For Germany to profit from its surplus, one of two conditions is that the countries it intends to export to decrease their output in competitive industries. The Industry Capacity Crusher takes care of that: in the name of reform, they give up their industrial base – which is either abandoned or relocated – to convert their workforce to servicing the marketing of imported products. Here goes the crusher:

Peripheral Industrial Capacity Crusher

Modeled after a real-life crusher, still bare of textures. Again, I’m not sure whether I’ll add more detail – probably not, it really depends on how large the final picture will be.

Go to main article

Older Entries