An obituary of John Weeks appeared in the Guardian on 24th August 2020

The link is here

Laszlo Andor , Hungarian Economist , was EU Commissioner Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion 20

Laszlo is the Secretary General of FEPS , the Foundation for European Progressive Studies

“This Summer, progressive economists lost a great thinker, author, teacher, activist and friend. I have known Prof. John Weeks for nearly three decades, starting with a visit at SOAS, and then an invitation to Budapest. During the post-1989 transition, those who refused to buy into the newly hegemonic neoliberal dogma, found his book Capital and Exploitation highly illuminating as well as accessible. more ..“

Stephany Griffith-Jones, Council member

John Weeks was a rigorous and progressive  academic economist, committed to  good economic policy and political action; at the same time he was a  very kind, supportive and loyal colleague and friend. He is being  so very badly missed; his memory, and that of his personal and intellectual contributions, however,  keeps him alive amongst his colleagues and friends

I got to know John well in recent years, when PEF was being formed. He kindly invited me to join the PEF Council, which I have enjoyed tremendously, so am really grateful to him for that. John was so  crucial to the work of PEF, and to the links with ,as well as  our support for the Labour party, and in particular for then Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and his team. It was really admirable to see John’s dedication, which continued till the end, even as his health was failing him.In this, he was not just admirable, but in many ways heroic. He was a wonderful colleague, always generous with his support of other people’s work.

Ann Pettifor, Council member

Ann has written a full obituary for Tribune Magazine

“Late last month, pioneering socialist economist John Weeks passed away. Ann Pettifor remembers her colleague and friend – and his contributions to left-wing politics.”: https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/08/remembering-john-weeks

Carolina Alves, Council member

John Weeks was scholar who inspired me to know more about Marx, Keynes and inequalities. I knew his work on Marx before I met him in person in 2011. Having accepted to give an interview about his views on labour theory of value, he opened his house without knowing me that well. It was an amazing encounter, and an amazing interview. From this day onwards, John never stopped supporting me and listening to what I had to say.

During my PhD at SOAS (2013-2017), he would patiently listen to my ideas, doubts and question, but he was different than other seniors scholars. He seemed to actually listen to me. He showed interests in my ideas. He was curious about my views. He always made me feel like if I knew something he didn’t. This gave me confidence, it made me feel I was doing something right and it made me grow intellectually. I think perhaps that’s what made John so good at his work and so special, he would listen to others – and he will listen to the others with an open mind and open heart. This didn’t mean he didn’t have strong views or a very clear dear of his principles, theories (we all know that he did!) but he was never afraid to test them.

My experience as a PhD student and after as a young scholar showed that John was an exception in academia because he would carry you with him. While many others would only speak about giving space to young minds or women or people from other minorities, John would actually do something about it. He would invite me for events, for discussions, and would push me to write and be vocal. All this he would do treating me as an equal.

He made me feel valuable and sometimes in academia this is all you need to enable you to carry on. There are many other things that made John very special. He was committed to build a better world and he gave his time for that. He was a humanist with his sharp sense of humour. He was transparent and honest. The heterodox community didn’t only lose a brilliant mind, we lost a human being who made our community more bearable and caring. 

Sue Konzelmann, Council member

When you’ve known him for only three of his 79 years, it ought to be harder to write about John than it actually is. His engagement with not only economics, but also the people who define, implement – and, not infrequently, suffer – from it, is not a characteristic you develop overnight. Much the same could be said of his deceptively “low key” approach to both other people and getting things done; he was someone you simply wanted to work with and help out. Unsurprisingly, that’s how we first met John in 2017 – helping him to bring another book to fruition.

This softly spoken gentleman was, though, without doubt also someone driven to continually try to improve things, a task he set about with an energy that never really wound down. Much will be written about his professional career, which will in all likelihood continue to be influential well into the future. But that’s only part of the reason for the many words of appreciation being written and spoken about John. He was also a thoroughly decent man with real sympathy for his fellow man, as well as a keen wit, making light of his declining health with the observation that “getting old is not for sissies …” 

John also took great delight in his cats, and saw no reason not to adopt another in the last year of his life. In an email exchange after his previous cat died, he wrote: “I asked my 5 year old grandson what he thought that meant. ‘He won’t come back’, my grandson said – which is not bad for a 5 year old, but not true. The cat and my sister come back to me every day in my memories”.

A lot of people are going to remember John like that, too.

Richard Murphy

I first met John when I was appointed as a Professor of Practice. John showed that he understood what others I was working with did not, which was that when appointed to such a post you might really know your subject, but that did not mean that you were familiar with the ways of academia. Because he had that insight he appreciated what others did not, which was that translating ideas into journal paper format is a skill most academics learn when doing a PhD, which stage I had missed. He helped me greatly with that process of adjustment. 

We didn’t always agree. We were on occasion robust with each other. And I like and admired John for precisely that reason. Our commitment to progressive economics permitted differences in pursuit of a greater cause. As a result I did, like I suspect many others who learned from John over his many years in academia, come to greatly appreciate his wisdom, guidance and friendship.

A life well lived is, I think, one that has positive impact on the lives of others. I only knew John in the last years of his life, but he added enormously to my knowledge and understanding during that period, and I am immensely grateful for having had the chance to know him. I suspect there will be a great many who feel the  same way. 

Guy Standing, Council member

When one loses a long-time friend, fellow traveller and kindred spirit, one realises one has lost of bit of oneself. There will be no replacement. This is the case with John Weeks. I will always recall the moment many years ago when he said to me quietly, ‘Please call me Johnny’. He was nearly always a rather serious man. However, what he meant was that he only wanted family and close friends to call him Johnny, rather than the formal John. I felt honoured.

Here is not the place to try to duplicate the excellent obituary written for The Guardian. I merely want to testify to our friendship and recall the two years we worked together in preparing a report for President Nelson Mandela’s Labour Market Commission in 1994-6. I was Director of Research for the Commission, which was a tricky assignment, mainly because of my opposition to the economic strategy being finalised by the Minister of Finance, Trevor Manuel, under the guidance of the IMF. I asked Johnny to work with me on our report and the book that came from all our research, which had contributions from about 50 economists in the country. We also asked John Sender to join our three-man team.

What I will always be grateful for is that Johnny was the one who resolutely supported me and who made major contributions to the book, particularly on macro-economic policy and above all in our economic analysis criticising the emerging IMF approach, known as GEAR.

Johnny and I concluded that if GEAR was pursued, there would be years of sluggish growth, persistence of very high unemployment and worsening inequalities, both within the white population and within the black population. At the time, South Africa had the highest unemployment in the world and probably the most unequal income distribution. Despite our efforts, the ANC government followed GEAR. Today, the country has the highest unemployment rate in the world and the worst income inequality, with a gini coefficient of 0.63. There is not much pleasure in being proved right in such circumstances, but several years ago the Minister of Labour told me that he still regarded our book as his ‘bible’. 

Johnny and I often recalled our work together, and just weeks before he died, when he was asking me to explain exactly why I was highly critical of the job furlough scheme in the UK, he reminded me that I had written a similar critique of wage subsidies in our book. I had forgotten; he had not.

Johnny was the sort of colleague and friend we all need. He could be critical at times, and often was. But you always knew that the friendship and kindred spirit would remain.

The post John Weeks – Obituaries and Tributes appeared first on The Progressive Economy Forum.

Since the 1970s, capitalism has undergone significant changes regarding production and distribution of value. Despite different and often contested approaches looking into these changes, a more prominent role for capital gains, fee incomes and, more broadly, rent-seeking behaviour is hardly denied. This shift has been described through various dimensions including heightened speculation in the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors, financialisation of non-financial spheres, and the emergence of new rentier classes. At the heart of this process we saw predatory value extraction and increase in inequality, which in turn has been enabled by the reinforcement of market fundamentalism and mechanisms that have led to the hollowing of states and institutions.

Although many regulations were implemented and redesigned since the 2007-8 crisis, aggressive risk-taking and moral hazard, which marked the foundations of the crisis, did not simply evaporate but have been extended and socialised in many different ways. Late capitalism rests on the ease to transcend institutions because the checks and balances which regulated profit accumulation during the post-WWII era are no longer in place. The hollowing of state has been accompanied by both allegedly neutral ‘technocratic bureaucracies’ and an absence of development indicators such as class mobility and welfarism.

Within this context, the expertise of epidemiologists to contain the virus may be more successful if accompanied by systemic reforms to address the imbalances resulting from the current structure of rentier extraction that, explicitly or implicitly, hinder policies aimed at common good.

Let’s consider, for example, the surge in demand for some products due to reasons including hoarding on an individual and corporate level. The supply side of this story may be facing input price rise, like pharmaceutical companies raising prices on essential drugs citing a halt in the import of raw materials from India and China. However, the current context may also give rise to exploitative practices. Either way, the most financially vulnerable will feel this cost in a time of illness, and their perception may exacerbate surges in demand (including hoarding) – especially in a system which is not prepared to challenge unexpected increases in production costs.

The Competition and Markets Authority issued a statement to ensure that companies should not engage in exploitative practices at the expense of customers. Yet this statement is effectively no better than a non-legally binding code of conduct, with no punitive consequences for unscrupulous market participants. This state of affairs is representative of a wider trend across UK regulatory and supervisory authorities, which short of litigation, have tended to merely deal with failures in consumer protections with toothless platitudes.

Rescue economic packages: how efficient?

The gravity of the current crisis has led governments to implement ambitious stimulus packages to revive the economy. Economists and policymakers have intensely scrutinised these packages. A very peculiar point cutting across some of these criticisms, however, lies within the need to focus on households and workers. In the case of the UK, the rescue package does not empower or directly support households but companies. Its measure for the most part expressly targets businesses with VAT and other tax holidays or deferrals, interest rates cuts, and various other kinds of operational assistance. Even when the approach deals with the workforce – for example, the scheme offering up to 80% of an employee’s wage – it has been geared towards the objective of business continuity, with no focus or conditionalities aiming at precluding a class of zero-hours contract employees to follow, keeping employed as many workers as possible, and enabling them to make productive contributions.

Part of the intention behind this scheme, recently extended to the self-employed, is both to prevent a lapse in consumption and stave off the attendant insolvencies, company voluntary arrangements, and business failures that might originate thereof. In this respect, this scheme is comparable to an extent with the approaches following the 2008 crisis, where a number of financial innovations and measures were introduced with the specific aim to improve the supply of credit to the real economy. But, as history showed us, the availability of such credit did not translate to the expected ‘trickle down’ to either consumers or businesses, as the recipient institutions remained averse to lending (even to each other), protecting themselves. With a faith on businesses rather than financial institutions, in the current case, the wage scheme is to be sought from the government by the employer rather than by the employee, with no explicit mechanism to either avoid firms acting solely for their own benefit (for example, Virgin Atlantic upon seeking a £7.5bn bailout from the government are simultaneously demanding that their employees should forego remuneration for eight weeks) or ensure binding regulation to guarantee employment (see, for example, Wetherspoons).

It can’t be emphasised enough that the current pandemic is neither simply a crisis of supply or demand, but a disruption of labour supply followed by unusual shock slowing down demand for some services and goods even when most of the people are still holding their jobs or being monetarily compensated for not being at work. For this reason, although households within economic analysis are usually understood from the lenses of consumption, it seems that now stimulus or reform packages have to be tailored to not only spur demand (at the right moment) and keep businesses alive, but ensure that a complete breakdown of the system due to the need to ‘de-mobilise’ the economy is avoidable.

In this sense, much more needs to be done assuming a more central role in the economic analysis for households. We ought to include measures that look into issues ranging from childcare and elderly care, direct and quick monetary transfers to levels of debt and precarity of employment. This focus is particularly important considering that the weakening of the state in the UK has been accompanied by the austerity policies and misallocation of resources resulting from the privatisation of healthcare.

While alternative measures such as universal income and ‘helicopter money‘ have been criticised on the basis of the amount of money transfer and duration of uncertainty linked to the crisis, the efficacy of both proposals lies in protecting households. This protection, whatever its format, is what we need now, and it should be followed by radical changes in a way we see, understand, and perceive inequality, vulnerability, and class – in the same way that the implementation of the welfare state in the 1940s followed both a radical change in how poverty was perceived after WWII and the acknowledgment of the need for a comprehensive welfare system as a duty of the state. If we will use the war analogy to understand and solve the COVID-19 crisis, this is definitely the main (and perhaps the only) reason to do so.

So, what next?

As others have advocated, a reform/stimulus package has to be a comprehensive intervention which ensures protection for ordinary people. In the absence of a vaccine, the ‘economic contagion’ needed to keep the economy afloat can only work if people are both immobilized and financially secure. The current model of capitalism and its response to crisis is not only inadequate, it continues to fail in protecting the most vulnerable and assuring safety for households. A systematic transformation, which leaves institutions better prepared to deal with crises, can only start with addressing the basic question of unequal distribution and reorienting economic policy from a common good perspective. The UK has a historic opportunity to rethink its economic model: regulation must be strengthened and transformed in favour of the public.

This piece was orignally published on LSE blogs, here. Photo Credit: Flickr/Michael Broad.

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