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Dreams and nightmares It ended well, the article in the Morning Star of 8 December: “The dream of a moneyless, socialist society can become a reality.” Unfortunately, the rest of the article, by Gerry Gold, contradicted this. Gold, a supporter of the Old Labourite Labour Representation Committee, was offering a way out of the current crisis. No, he was not advocating the common ownership and democratic control of the world’s resources as the basis for going over to production directly for use instead of for profit and to distribution on the principle of “from each their ability, to each their need” instead of in response to paying demand. What he was advocating was some radical reforms to capitalism such as closing down the Stock Exchange and outlawing hedge funds and derivatives and “replacing the entire for-profit financial system with a not-for-profit network of socially owned financial institutions providing essential services. Many examples of these already exist – mutually owned building societies, credit unions, the Co-operative bank”, If there are still going to be financial institutions this is hardly making “the dream of a moneyless, socialist society” a reality. It can’t even be called a dream, just a sanitised reflection of today’s humdrum everyday existence, with the only noticeable difference being no banks on our high streets only building societies. Gold went on: “With the elimination of private-equity shareholding and the abolition of speculation on the money markets the techniques developed by global capitalism can be used to clear payments between enterprises within and between countries. Accounting systems can be used and further developed to be open to public scrutiny.” Then followed the passage about a moneyless society. Lenin used the same argument in Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?, composed a month or so before the Bolsheviks seized power: “Capitalism has created an accounting apparatus in the shape of the banks, syndicates, postal service, consumers' societies, and office employees' unions. Without big banks socialism would be impossible. The big banks are the ‘state apparatus’ which we need to bring about socialism, and which we take ready-made from capitalism; our task here is merely to lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even bigger, even more democratic, even more comprehensive. Quantity will be transformed into quality. A single State Bank, the biggest of the big, with branches in every rural district, in every factory, will constitute as much as nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus. This will be country wide book-keeping, country-wide accounting of the production and distribution of goods, this will be, so to speak, something in the nature of the skeleton of socialist society.” His thinking was that if there was one big State ‘Bank’ it would be possible to account for the use of resources, and their transfer between productive units, without monetary exchanges. This was the view also of those other European Social Democrats of the time who realised that socialism would be a moneyless society and who thought about how production and distribution might be organised without money. There may have been something in it, but it was never going to work in economically backward Russia. And it didn’t. After a period of so-called “War Communism” till 1921 when money was hardly used, it was Lenin himself who called for a return to money – and not just any old paper money, but a gold-based rouble. The Bolsheviks did retain state power, but the outcome was the nightmare of state capitalism. |
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The migrants are managed by a Mafia-run employment system, the caporalato, that operates like a 21st century chain gang. Saviano says that those who object to low wages or poor working conditions are simply eliminated — and not just by a pink slip. “It’s a military system. The farm and factory owners employ the Mafia caporali to bring the workers. The immigrants wait on the roads, the caporali pick them up and take them to the work. If they complain, they get killed.” http://tinyurl.com/ye37o32 Despite more than a dozen international conventions banning slavery in the past 150 years, there are more slaves today than at any point in human history: http://tinyurl.com/ykfzer7 Civil freedoms around the world lost ground for the fourth straight year in 2009 with Iraq improving, Afghanistan falling back and China acting as if it were under siege by its own citizens, Freedom House said on Tuesday. Bahrain, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Yemen moved into “not free” category, raising the total to 47 from 42 in 2008. The number of electoral democracies fell from 119 to 116, the lowest since 1995: http://tinyurl.com/y9gcudl Workers at a Sussex-based electronics firm were today left “devastated” after being told in a video message that manufacturing at their factories is to end and 220 jobs moved to Korea and the Czech Republic: http://tinyurl.com/ye9fhca Zuma famously likes to spend as much time as possible among his cattle in his native homestead at Nkandla, in northern KwaZulu-Natal province, where he is building a huge palace. In South Africa, R3m (£250,000) buys a pretty decent house, but Zuma’s new house there is costing R65m (£5.4m). ..It is a strange sight. Zuma, brought to power with the support of the ANC left, the trade unions and communist party, is ever more imitative of the Zulu monarchy – even down to the leopard-skin attire. It may have nothing to do with socialism, but then nor do, or did, the quasiroyal dynasties of many communist states such as the Kims of North Korea, Romania’s Ceausescus and the Zhivkovs of Bulgaria. And it should not be thought that these contradictions are embarrassing to Zuma. On the contrary, he is having the time of his life: http://tinyurl.com/yemc8h4 One of the most callous reactions to the Haiti disaster thus far has come from televangelist Pat Robertson, who told viewers of his Christian Broadcasting Network on Wednesday morning that he knew the real reason for the quake: The country’s long-standing pact with Satan: http://tinyurl.com/yfm745x It has emerged that Kim Kardashian, the American reality television star, commands at least $10,000 per post. Many of Kardashian’s tweets are mundane - “I must have pinched a nerve in my neck... I need a massage” - but when she mentions advertisers such as Nestle or the fast-food chain Carl’s Jr, she receives four-figure sums: http://tinyurl.com/ygjcsbv Top Contents |
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