alanjjohnstone
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If possible, offer yourself up as a possible candidate or election agent.
Maybe having a willing volunteer will help convince them to participate.
The link says he has already cut the price of Ruddles, an ale made by Greene King, by an average of 20p across its 900 pubs.
JD Wetherspoon’s boss, Tim Martin, has pledged to slash the price of lagers, spirits, wine and cider if the UK leaves the EU, after shaving 20p off a pint of ale to illustrate the Brexit benefits.
Martin has been one of the most vociferously pro-Brexit figures in the world of business, repeatedly insisting that leaving the European Union, even without a deal, will mean cheaper prices for customers.
It has not been mentioned, (perhaps it is a theory that can likened to be perpetual motion machines,) but ever since I first joined the Socialist Party, now going on almost 50 years ago, fusion nuclear power has always been talked of as the promised energy panacea. Some new developments have occurred but I wonder what the current state of play is about its use in the near future.
Every eco-engineer solution, every lifestyle change suggestion, in fact, every proposal raised by capitalism except the carbon taxes and carbon trading, will be applicable with socialism. Already some are being implemented such as reforestation. Most are too slowly introduced by the gradual timetable of the policy of protecting business and national self-interests. Socialism will speed up the process and give the urgency that XR and Thunberg’s climate strikers now urge.
But what we have failed to and I have mentioned this before is that it has to be done in tandem and in parallel with a growth of production, not its reduction as environmentalists equally demand. It is this part of the message I think should receive prominence and one that separates us from mainstream environmental movements. Curbing global warming but upgrading living conditions, particularly to our poor cousins in the developing and undeveloped parts of the world, that free access will necessitate. I think the current policies is one that the impoverished can rightly condemn as almost as climate apartheid where their quality of life is sacrificed so that the wealthier regions, North America and Europe, can continue without consequences.
I fear that if we neglect the gloom and doom message which is very much fundamental to our analysis of capitalist economic laws, by promoting possible alternatives to the present eco-policies, we might just well be offering capitalists arguments that they too can present as remedies.
The science exists to solve climate change, the political will isn’t and the economic prerequisite isn’t. Surely what is lacking is where we should focus our campaigns.
Radu, I am sure you will appreciate the great difference between the Romanian regime and our depiction of a socialist society.
A state-capitalist command economy that was brought to Romania by Russian T-34 tanks and then which became the fiefdom of the Ceausescu dictatorship and his secret police, the Securitate.
I think I didn’t highlight that Cost Benefit Analysis also need not be based on money values bit can be used in a points version to determine advantages and disadvantages of a project.
And also that logistic supply chains such as Just-In-Time already operated by capitalism can be applied even to socialism.
Perhaps you can expand on your insight that money is a restriction now satisfying public demand.
And we have a thread on crypto-currencies which you could contribute to using your professional experience
When American politician Omar was accused of anti-Semitism about raising the issue of dual-loyalty I never saw any reference in the media about the American senior official who has a remit of targeting Iran, Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Sigal P. Mandelker.
She is a Zionist and plays a significant role in the Trump administration’s Iran policy because of her position in charge of financial sanctions against the country.
She is Israeli born and there is a question about whether she has held or still holds dual-nationality. Her husband is a contributor to the right-wing Breitbart website
Netanyahu urges Boris to tighten the noose around Iran
Denying US manipulation
World War 2 created communal canteens which were widely regarded as a success and expanded the allotments
British Restaurants supplied an almost universal experience of eating away from home. Here a three course meal cost only 9d. Standards varied, but the best were greatly appreciated and had a large regular clientele. British Restaurants were run by local authorities, who set them up in a variety of different premises such as schools and church halls. They evolved from the LCC’s Londoners’ Meals Service which originated in September 1940 as a temporary, emergency system for feeding those who had been bombed out. By mid-1941 the LCC was operating two hundred of these restaurants. British Restaurants were open to all, but mainly served office and industrial workers.
From 815,000 allotments in 1939 the number rose to 1,400,000 by 1943. allotments were estimated to contribute some 1.3 million tonnes of food produce.
Prices do not balance supply and demand. They gauge effective demand, that is, the ability to buy, not the actual demand.
You no doubt heard the analogy…I wished to eat steak but had to do with hamburger because I couldn’t afford the steak because the price was too high to pay for. The actual real demand for steak is therefore hidden by the purchase of the cheaper substitute. We can apply this to many products, even to your Ferraris and Maseratis.
Socialism is based upon real demand, what people actually want and use. It is not about monetary accounting. The prices system involves vast quantities of resources and labour. In socialism calculations will be done directly in physical quantities of real things, in use-values , without any general unit of calculation . Needs will be communicated to productive units as requests for specific useful things, while productive units will communicate their requirements to their suppliers as requests for other useful things. Take construction, to build a house I require so many thousands of bricks. Under capitalism having completed what amount of materials require to build the house, I have to cost it all by translating that into prices.
A monetary economy gives rise to the illusion that the “cost” of producing something is merely financial . Money is the universal unit of measurement, the “general equivalent” that allows everything to be compared with everything else under all circumstances—but only in terms of their labour-time cost or the total time needed on average to produce them from start to finish. Such non-monetary calculation of course already happens, on the technical level, under capitalism. Once the choice of productive method has been made (according to expected profitability as revealed by monetary calculation) then the real calculations in kind of what is needed to produce a specific good commence so much raw materials, so much energy, so much labour. In socialism it is not the case that the choice of productive method will become a technical choice that can be left to engineers
By the replacement of exchange economy by common ownership basically what would happen is that wealth would cease to take the form of exchange value, so that all the expressions of this social relationship peculiar to an exchange economy, such as money and prices, would automatically disappear. In other words, goods would cease to have an economic value and would become simply physical objects which human beings could use to satisfy some want or other. The disappearance of economic value would mean the end of economic calculation in the sense of calculation in units of value whether measured by money or directly in some unit of labour-time. It would mean that there was no longer any common unit of calculation for making decisions regarding the production of goods.
Decisions involving choices of a general nature, such as what forms of energy to use, which of two or more materials to employ to produce a particular good, whether and where to build a new factory, there is a technique already in use under capitalism that could be adapted for use in socialism: so-called cost-benefit analysis and its variants. Naturally, under capitalism the balance sheet of the relevant benefits and costs advantages and disadvantages of a particular scheme or rival schemes is drawn up in money terms, but in socialism a points system for attributing relative importance to the various relevant considerations could be used instead. The points attributed to these considerations would be subjective, in the sense that this would depend on a deliberate social decision rather than on some objective standard. In the sense that one of the aims of socialism is precisely to rescue humankind from the capitalist fixation with production time/money, cost-benefit type analyses, as a means of taking into account other factors, could therefore be said to be more appropriate for use in socialism than under capitalism. Using points systems to attribute relative importance in this way would not be to recreate some universal unit of evaluation and calculation, but simply to employ a technique to facilitate decision-making in particular concrete cases. The advantages /disadvantages and even the points attributed to them can, and normally would, differ from case to case. So what we are talking about is not a new abstract universal unit of measurement to replace money and economic value but one technique among others for reaching rational decisions in a society where the criterion of rationality is human welfare.
Prices are indeed superfluous when society is organised on the basis of production for need and exchange-values are replaced by use-values to employ Marxist terms.
The function of cost/pricing is to enable a business enterprise to calculate its costs, to fix its profit expectations within a structure of prices, to regulate income against expenditure and, ultimately, to regulate the exploitation of its workers.
Socialist determination of needs begins with consumer needs and then flows throughout distribution and on to each required part of the structure of production
But with capitalist system, the information is a contra-flow of information. It flows from producers, through distributors, to the consumer. This information is the prices of goods determined by the accumulating costs of production and distribution plus profit. Prices are increased in each part of production, from mining through industrial processing, manufacture and assembly, then accumulating further through distribution until the final price is passed on to the consumer.
It is indeed questionable that prices can represent the social costs (the externalities) of allocation of resources. Try putting a monetary value on a beauty spot which is then lost by open-cast mining? It is the subjective judgement of a points based cost-benefit analysis of the pros and cons that will be the more accurate deciding factor , not the $ or £.
Nor does prices effective solve the dilemma of calculating opportunity costs. Prices simply are accounting technique.Apologies for the length of this response, and I fear since I use Robbo’s substantive explanation which you can read here he may well repeat some of this.
https://libcom.org/files/CommonVoice3.pdf
But to sum up.
The only calculations that would be necessary in socialism would be calculations in kind. On the one side would be recorded the resources (materials, energy, equipment, labour) used up in production and on the other side the amount of the good produced, together with any by-products. This, of course, is done under capitalism but it is doubled by an exchange value calculation: the exchange value of the resources used up is recorded as the cost of production while the exchange value of the output (after it has been realised on the market) is recorded as sales receipts. If the latter is greater than the former, then a profit has been made; if it is less, then a loss is recorded. Such profit-and-loss accounting has no place in socialism and would, once again, be quite meaningless.
Calculation in kind entails the counting or measurement of physical quantities of different kinds of factors of production. There is no general unit of accounting involved in this process such as money or labour hours or energy units. In fact, every conceivable kind of economic system has to rely on calculation in kind, including capitalism. Without it, the physical organisation of production (e.g. maintaining inventories) would be literally impossible. But where capitalism relies on monetary accounting as well as calculation in kind, socialism relies solely on the latter.
Evidence supporting Robbo. I saw little mention in the UK media of Mike Pence visit to Ireland where he pressured the Irish to make a deal with Johnson
We are not that different. If you have a proposal, detail and describe it in an e-mail to the general secretary requesting it be placed on the agenda for the next EC meeting to discuss.
We do have numerous committees but I am not sure if all are functioning as they should.
If it is a local initiative, you could try contacting your nearest branch.
“Do you gorge yourself to point of vomiting then start all over again? “
I have a confession, Robbo.
In my younger years, that was what I would do practically every weekend when it came to drinking beer…binge drinking and throwing up and then more pints 😳
I also went for the hottest spiciest curries until I realized that milder ones were tastier.
What youth learns with maturity, so will future society gain in wisdom with experience.
