[alanjjohnstone]

I'm wondering just how much importance there is in actual attendance to stadiums these days. Isn't much of the club's revenue and thus ability to pay star-players (60% of a clubs revenue), the broadcasting rights and sponsorship, both dependent upon intellectual ownership rights to ensure exclusivity? Michel's controlling cartel/network?My recent personal experience was searching for a strip for a present and being asked to fork out 55 quid. Sky high price, well above the labour and production costs and most likely based on the royalties demanded ( I resorted to the charity/thrift shops,btw)And i recall reading that for Scottish clubs, their main revenue to stay in existence is from passing players on through the transfer system…the wage-slave market, The social necessary labour time in coaching and training and nurturing talent but scoring big time when they discover a genuine skilled player but again the market is controlled by club contracts and not so much with the mobility of labour.But i think i digress from the topic although i think i have shown the theme is a bit more complicated these days than simply paying someone to turn up at 3 PM on a Saturday for 90 minutes to chase a ball around a field and folk paying for a ticket to watch while consuming a cup of bovril and a mutton pie.

[alanjjohnstone]

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It seems these companies are willing to go to any lengths to protect and further their interests.

Need we go any further than proving our case than citing the tobacco/nicotine industry which is still poisoning millions of people around the world legally.

[alanjjohnstone]

It appears to be more a play on a forum user's name drawing attention to what is perceived to be the tone of his responses by Michel, and i would be slightly hesitant in suggesting it possessed any racist undertones,  Tim-nice-but-dim,   from Al-everyone's-pal.I think there is a slight tendency with Party members to be overly harsh in their criticisms of people who, for very good reasons, have never heard the Party's very unique case and we seem to expect that their socialist views spring fully developed like Minerva rather than being based on a learning curve and education.Our website is very extensive and despite being fairly easy to navigate is still daunting to discover all of our positions and learn the nuances of our principles so even expecting some effort by visitors on their own behalf to search out out interpretations of Marxism can be too demanding at times.Eventually, real differences do arise and are not resolved but i hope visitors do go away with an increased understanding of the SPGB and are able to recommend to others the comradely reception they receive on the forum and perhaps we may well have a heightened interaction of traffic on the forum. 

[alanjjohnstone]

 

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I align more with anarchism, then marxism.

Michel, my comrades on the forum have suffered from my repetitive quotations so i hope they forebear with it, but perhaps this observation may well be new to you.It is a quote from a worker, a writer and a thinker who found favour with Marx and Engels, no small feat in itself – Joseph Dietzgen

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"The terms anarchist, socialist, communist should be so "mixed" together, that no muddlehead could tell which is which. Language serves not only the purpose of distinguishing things but also of uniting them- for it is dialectic." June 9, 1886"For my part, I lay little stress on the distinction, whether a man is an anarchist or a socialist, because it seems to me that too much weight is attributed to this difference…..While the anarchists may have mad and brainless individuals in their ranks, the socialists have an abundance of cowards. For this reason I care as much for one as the other…. The majority in both camps are still in great need of education, and this will bring about a reconciliation in time."- April 20, 1886

[alanjjohnstone]

Michel, others on this forum will verify that when Marxian economics comes down to equations and mathematics, my mind blurs into a blank. My apologies for getting lost on that last post.Just to take something that we can possibly agree upon

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If anything, had Marx hit a home-run, capitalism would have ceased to exist (this is why he was writing Das Capital). In my estimation, the problem lies in human nature as being both predictable and unpredictable, i.e., the ability to mix things up.

The SPGB has never been an economic determinist party that ever argued that capitalism would inevitably collapse because of its inherent contradictions and we are quite unpopular during times of recession and slump when we explain that it take human agency – a conscious working class to end capitalism. And we upset fellow Marxist economists to ascribing crises not to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall or over-production/underconsumption – but to disproportionality/disequilibrium in the production and market process of capital. We weren't the catastrophists the Left love to portray themselves as. Ignoring the lapse of your language (ie human nature and not human behaviour), this means we are engaged in an ideological battle, a war of ideas with the ruling class's prevailing accepted thinking, to undermine what Gramsci described a hegemony. No small feat considering the power of capitalist culture. So insidious is this dominating aspect, it does seem like the working class is its own worse enemy when they act against their own interests. Marx equated universal suffrage with a liberatory process. Little did he think that once they got the vote our fellow workers would succumb to the siren calls 0f the employing class and continue to put into office pro-capitalist parties. Why they do so is an entirely different debate. 

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Its no wonder so many humans struggle under capitalism, the parameters to function and thrive under capitalism are so narrow, limited and soul crushing, only those who with religious fanaticism for profit, thrive.Humans have to castrate a part of  themselves

It is as you say. The cash nexus is one that we have been deceived into thinking as part of our DNA.  And yes, we all suffer the consequences of estranged labour.

[alanjjohnstone]

Just to comment on competition and monoplies (and duopolies, oligopolies, and whatnot). Trusts and cartels are not new and has always been a bugbear for capitalism which it repeatedly tries to deal with through legislation and regulation. And of course for the right-wing, nationalised state-run industries for a monopoly that hinders competition. Michel mentions OPEC where even nations forms a monopolistic structure to determine prices via output and taxation but generally nation-states are rivals. It is a subject that has interested economists since Hilferding. And in modern day we have many who critique intellectual property ownership as a tool of monopolies. Marx identified a built-in tendency under capitalism towards ‘oligopoly’, though he called it the concentration and centralisation of capital, a trend which has been amply borne out as, through mergers and take-overs, the number of firms in all sectors of industry has become fewer and fewer.  The concentration and centralisation of industry corresponds to the logic of capitalism and cannot be overcome by government action. But no government is going to try to break up the oligopolies into smaller, more competitive firms despite the Roosevelt anti-trust legislation that simply re-aligned the cartels in a different manner. They were enabled to do so by the connivance of the Government. The SPGB isn'tsocialists aren't much bothered which activities of capitalists actually comply with its own laws or not, except perhaps to draw attention to the inconsistencies of the system and to show how it doesn't even live up to its own ideology: the “free” market just doesn't do what it says on the tin.  The real battle has never been one fought between capitalists, but rather, against them and their system.  

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Gates’ wealth is less than one percent of US economic output, whereas John D Rockefeller’s net wealth was nearly two percent of US economic output at the time. The robber barons all despised competition, as it reduced their profits, and were able to acquire valuable patents and enforce vastly-profitable monopolies. For instance, Vanderbilt controlled all the railway lines into New York, while by means of a cartel Rockefeller owned nearly all of the oil-refining business. Morgan’s US Steel made tremendous profits by buying up other steel companies, eliminating competition and keeping prices high…there is no basis for claims that capitalism used to operate by means of a free market with unfettered competition, with this having been replaced by crony capitalism, where the state provides licences and protection for some companies. There has always been state interference with the workings of the capitalist economy, and competition has always been limited in various ways.

In some  countries the capitalist class as a whole have dealt with the all too powerful monopolies by nationalising them, while the Americans have gone on a rather different line, choosing to leave a lot of monopolies in private hands, but to have them operate under Federal Government regulations.In one of our educational articles we explained that

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Surplus-value is not created by trading transactions, even by cartels or monopolies. A manufacturer may corner a market and grab the lion’s share of the profit to the detriment of other capitalist groups. But no monopoly can create surplus value. In any case, goods have to be produced before they can be sold, and the producing capitalist would expect to make a profit apart from his trading partner’s profit. The only possible explanation left to us is that surplus-value comes from labour-power…It is not our concern to take sides in disputes which occur from time to time between sections of the capitalist class …It is sufficient for our purpose to show where surplus-value comes from and not its final destination. We know it doesn’t go to members of the working class.

 It may seem to be then that throughout the large units of industry the margin between costs and selling price can by agreement among the various groups be so arranged as to realise a profit above the average or norm. It follows then that if the ability to affect prices so as to obtain an above the average profit, or what is known as maximum returns, characterises extant capitalist society, then maximum profit must constitute a profit norm. But it is a Marxist axiom that the distribution of profits can of itself add nothing to the sum of values produced by the social labour force. Ruling out that the extra profit is a deduction from working-class wages, the extra profit of some concerns can only come out of the pockets of other concerns. There can be then no such thing as a prevailing law of maximum profit, for it is fairly evident that as the power to raise prices spread from point to point of the economy, what some capitalists gained on the "selling" swings they would lose on the "buying" roundabouts. The net result would tend towards an equalisation of profit, even though the price structure of the economy would be distorted. It is true that firms do use monopolistic advantages to seek monopolistic gain. But if that be the measure of this "mutation," then mercantilism was a greater mutation than present society. It is the nature of capitalists to seek maximum gain. Even in laissez-faire capitalism they sought maximum gain, through any device or resources which gave them superior competitive power. Because the accumulation of capital is the most compulsive feature of capitalist society at any time, capitalists will use all available means to produce and reproduce their capital. That monopolistic practises have become one of these means in their attempt to do so, is itself a normal and logical development in capitalist society. Big monopolies compete against each other. Also the power of these big monopolies acts as a restraint on any one of them seeking abnormal returns. And even if a monopoly does seek to obtain super-profit, it faces the danger of other giants entering the field. Even those concerns that are suppliers of particular products often meet with fierce competition from substitutes.Again, powerful organisations of sellers bring into being powerful organisations of buyers, and strenuous price-haggling results. Not only do big buyers play one supplier off against another, but they are prepared to "roll their own" if the prices of supplies are too high.It is true that big monopolies make big profits, but in relation to their huge capital turnover, their rate of profit may be no more, even less, than that of many smaller concerns. Cartels chief function is to combat price-cutting in times of bad trade. Even so, there are always temptations for some firms to sell below the cartel price. Also price-cutting takes place in cartels by the granting of long-term credit facilities, quantity discounts, free delivery, etc.Neither does it necessarily follow that restriction of output and price manipulation by cartels allow of extra profit because restriction of output can keep low-cost firms back and preserve high-cost ones. Thus the spread-over cost will be considerable and profit margins correspondingly reduced to approximately competitive levels. In times of good trade the rules of cartels will be much less stringent and in some cases ignored. This is an alternative to price-cutting by the use of effective selling methods, although even then price-cutting takes place in the form of adding extras and variations to the product. Monopolistic competition confers, however, no power on firms to affect their own profit levels. The SPGB made this analogy  

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To say that a variation of competition from the cut-throat to the monopolistic is a transformation of Capitalism is like saying; that if knuckle fighting is replaced by boxing gloves with horse shoes in them, fisticuffs will be mutated, although the participants will still be mutilated.

I'm not too versed on Marxian  economics but i thought the above was necessary to mention for the benefit of visitors to this topic thread since you raised this aspect, Michel

[alanjjohnstone]

ABS has summarised various attitudes that a number of other members have approached with proposals in the past.No apologies in once more stating that if we do not arrange a structured conference that collates and coordinates the collective wisdom of the Party rather than all us individuals coming up with an assortment of ideas that are rarely if ever implemented we will continue our downward spiral. There is no disagreement that is what is required is to re-vitalise and re-juvenate Party but the issue always remains – just how that is done? I have heard some members take a very jaundiced view of our fellow-workers, that they are simply not interested in the idea of socialism and consequently these members face the reality that they must now fatalistically accept our inexorable decline to extinction or rely on some miracle which will raise our class's consciousness … something that is totally non-dependent upon the Socialist Party's existence, itself. So we wouldn't be missed if we did actually disappeared. Some may well say I am one of the main doom and gloom merchants. But in my defence, i have frequently suggested strategies, albeit controversial and unpopular, for avoiding such a fate. The worth, or otherwise, of those can certainly be called into question for I never claimed to have all the answers or possess the gift of special insight and prophecy but again I have always deferred to the position that we as a party should come together and set our minds into one …As Spock would say…engage in a mind-meld …and out of this engagement and exchange, we may well come up collectively with positive approaches to try. I congratulate ABS in trying to identify the problems of the party and suggest that there might be a remedy for them. But his post and this thread will soon be forgotten and not acted upon. The Party's future will continue to be aimless because I think we are all frightened what a good look at ourselves will reveal and the consequences of what changes will be required for a new make-over and re-branding.  But, as I say, some will still say a new make-over is not necessary and the fault of our falling membership does not rest with ourselves but the blame is on the ignorance and apathy of our fellow-workers – which means most of all – our family, our friends, our neighbours and our workplace colleagues. If we cannot convince them, just how are we going to persuade those we do not have any interaction with whatsoever – the vast vast majority.   

[alanjjohnstone]

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It was agreed that the branch invite younger party members to make a contribution to the meeting.

Do we have an age that might define what members might be the "younger"? 

[alanjjohnstone]

Just to prove that i am following this thread i thought this article made a point that might be relevant to the debate on wages.

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But some, those who play for the first teams of clubs (rather, businesses) in the Premier League, are paid fabulous amounts of money, by working class (if not capitalist class) standards. What is their income? Is it wages? Not really. It’s more like rent. Rent is paid whenever there is a natural monopoly in something that cannot be increased, normally land, mineral deposits, waterfalls and other natural features that can be employed in production. The rent of land and natural resources is essentially fixed by the paying demand for it. The higher the demand, the higher the rent.As Arsène Wenger pointed out, “you normally need special qualities to be a strong footballer”. It is these “special qualities – which are a sort of natural resource that cannot be increased – that enable the best footballers to command so high an income, but as rent rather than as the price for the mere sale of their labour power.

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2006/no-1221-may-2006/cooking-books-2-footballers%E2%80%99-wagesAfter all their productive working time is simply 90 minutes of labour (and i am sure we know many individual players that don't even do that on the pitch  )but it is also the socially necessary labour time involved…the training over the many years etcI guess the same argument can be applied to musicians and other types of artists. In fact, i am sure CEOs would also endeavour to claim their "talents" as a special resource, although that is much more debatable.

[alanjjohnstone]

In that case, gnome, I look forward to a comradely and constructive exchange and also hope that it is conducted in a manner that i might follow and understand. (People on the forum know i am not the brightest of sparks when it comes to the intricacies of Marxian economics and philosophy) I think we should also understand that many writers do not know or share our own tradition and history and may have reached their particular destination by a different route and collected their own baggage on that journey. It doesn't necessarily mean we are enemies, just in a disagreement that could be resolved.

[alanjjohnstone]

That's quite a detailed response, Robbo. It is a pity the author has not engaged directly on the forum to answer your queries about what he is actually meaning in places.Hopefully, he will discover this thread the same way as he did previously and this time answer the criticisms and i am sure it will lead to further clarification. I hope it can be accomplished in a comradely exchange.your comments have been very helpful.

[alanjjohnstone]

Michel Luc Bellemare, the author,  has responded to this thread in a lengthy articlehttp://dissidentvoice.org/2017/08/the-foundation-of-structural-anarchism-and-structural-anarchism-economics/Once more, i bow to my comrades better knowledge of Marxist economics to understand what he is explaining and how it relates to our own positions. Wher do we agree or disagree?(we can thank him for his helpful link to the forum)

[alanjjohnstone]

Is this a shift to the left for the DSA or a shift to the right by the radical left.http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/41519-a-turning-point-on-the-left-libertarian-caucus-debuts-at-democratic-socialist-conference

[alanjjohnstone]

Is this all a return to GDH Coles Guild Socialism – type of ideas?I recall my own union the postal workers were at the time very strong adherents to his views, for unlike the railway and mine workers, they were accustomed to being state owned and controlled and understood that nationalisation was no solution so they sought another form of workers control outside the State. As expected Mondragon is dragged up as a recommended option in the report despite the repeated de-bunking Radical leftists such as Richard Wolff and Gar Alperovitz seemed to have been overlooked but i am sure they are the inspiration for some of the left-wing proponents of so-called "post-capitalism". 

[alanjjohnstone]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/canada-wildfires-british-columbia-state-of-emergency-homes-evacuated-a7832191.html

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