alanjjohnstone
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I once suggested that we invite Maryam Namazie of the Worker Communist Party of Iran to give a talk at HO. i still think it would be a good idea.A sign of solidarity with workers/socialists who have rejected religion and Islam and an opportunity for some much-needed publicity for ourselves.
Many thanks for the tip The pamphlet can be found herehttps://www.gold.org/sites/default/files/documents/1676.pdf
Quote:Except by fanatical christians, this reference is generally accepted as a forgery.I think you over-egg the pudding, ALB. Wiki appears to be more constrained in its claims.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_on_JesusWe should be aware that history interpretation constantly progresses and unless we consider there is a conspiracy among historians and theologists, the present predominant view is that some Jewish preacher called Jesus, originally a disciple of John the Baptist, did exist and had a small following which due to various complicated factors grew into a mass movement by fits and starts and incorporating other beliefs.But as you said, we have strayed from the "communist" traditions of the early Christian movement.While we sometimes highlight these traditions such as by a Party stall at the Diggers/Levellers commemorations, we do tend to decline any association with the early Church Fathers by endeavouring to link them to modern socialism and "convert" believers to socialism.I believe the book's author's purpose is to expose the Christian propertarians as the real "heretics" to be exposed.
Dan, i will concede that 1730 may not be as contemporary as we would hope but it is the earliest reference in English online and when it comes to other web sources, there is a serious lack of historical references and a reliance upon hearsay and assertion, (among them being the dubious out-of-context or even made-up quotations.} Your own inability to cite a similar source seems to suggest that there is an absence of such evidence to support your claims. Of course, the Bank of England was not the first bank in operation. The first banks were the merchants of ancient world that made loans to farmers and traders that carried goods between cities. The first records of such activity date back to around 2000 BC in Assyria and Babylonia. Later in ancient Greece and during the Roman Empire lenders based in temples would make loans but also added two important innovations; accepted deposits and changing money. During this period there is similar evidence of the independent development of lending of money in ancient China and separately in ancient India. The Templars began generating letters of credit for pilgrims journeying to the Holy Land: pilgrims deposited their valuables with a local Templar preceptory before embarking, received a document indicating the value of their deposit, then used that document upon arrival in the Holy Land to retrieve their funds. This innovative arrangement was an early form of banking, and may have been the first formal system to support the use of travellers' cheques. The Order of the Knights Templar arguably qualifies as the world's first multinational corporation. Banking in the modern sense of the word can be traced to medieval and early Renaissance Italy, to the rich cities in the north like Florence, Venice, and Genoa. The Bardi and Peruzzi families dominated banking in 14th century Florence, establishing branches in many other parts of Europe. Perhaps the most famous Italian bank was the Medici bank, set up in 1397. A bank was founded in 1609 under the protection of the city of Amsterdam. This bank at first received both foreign and local coinage at their real, intrinsic value, deduced a small coinage and management fee, and credited clients in its book for the remainder. This credit was known as bank money. Being always in accord with mint standards, and always of the same value, bank money was worth more than real coinage. At the same time a new regulation was introduced; according to which all bills drawn at Amsterdam worth more than 600 guilders must be paid in bank money. This both removed all uncertainty from these bills and compelled all merchants to keep an account with the bank, which in turn occasioned a certain demand for bank money.Events such at the appropriation of £200,000 of private money by King Charles I from the royal mint, in 1640 caused merchants to lose trust in the existing institutions and drive them to find more trusted alternatives such as the goldsmiths. The goldsmiths soon found themselves with money for which they had no immediate use, and they began to lend the money out at interest to both the merchants and the government. Finding substantial profit in this business, they began to solicit deposits and pay interest on them. The goldsmiths eventually discovered that the deposit receipts they provided were being passed on from one person to another in lieu of payment in coin, which prompted them to begin lending paper receipts rather than coins. By promoting acceptance of the receipts as a means of payment, the goldsmiths discovered they could lend more than the gold and silver coin they had on hand, a practice that became known as fractional-reserve banking. These practices created a new kind of "money" that was actually debt, that is, goldsmiths' debt rather than silver or gold coin, a commodity that had been regulated and controlled by the monarchy. This development required the acceptance in trade of the goldsmiths' promissory notes, payable on demand. Acceptance, in turn, required a general belief that coin would be available; and a fractional reserve normally served this purpose. The monarchy's urgent need for funds at rates lower than those charged by the goldsmiths, and the example of the public Bank of Amsterdam, which had been able to make an ample supply of credit available at low-interest rates, led in 1694 to the establishment of the Bank of England. The Bank of England succeeded in raising money for the government at relatively low rates.http://www.banking-history.co.uk/history.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bankingA description of the Fractional Reserve process can be found athttp://www.federalreserveeducation.org/fed101/fedtoday/FedTodayAll.pdf page 5"The fact that banks are required to keep on hand only a fraction of the funds deposited with them is a function of the banking business. Banks borrow funds from their depositors (those with savings) and in turn lend those funds to the banks borrowers (those in need of funds). Banks make money by charging borrowers more for a loan (a higher percentage interest rate) than is paid to depositors for use of their money. If banks did not lend out their available funds after meeting their reserve requirements, depositors might have to pay banks to provide safekeeping services for their money. For the economy and the banking system as a whole, the practice of keeping only a fraction of depositson hand has an important cumulative effect. Referred to as the fractional reserve system, it permits the banking system to "create" money." (The inverted commas round "create" are particularly appropriate. They should also have been around "money" as they are using the word to include "bank deposits" and nobody denies that the circulation of money through the banking system leads to an increase in the number of bank deposits.)The New York Federal Reserve also gives a rather more sophisticated explanation at http://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed45.html"Reserve Requirements and Money Creation: Reserve requirements affect the potential of the banking system to create transaction deposits. If the reserve requirement is 10%, for example, a bank that receives a $100 deposit may lend out $90 of that deposit. If the borrower then writes a check to someone who deposits the $90, the bank receiving that deposit can lend out $81. As the process continues, the banking system can expand the initial deposit of $100 into a maximum of $1,000 of money ($100+$90+81+$72.90+…=$1,000). In contrast, with a 20% reserve requirement, the banking system would be able to expand the initial $100 deposit into a maximum of $500 ($100+$80+$64+$51.20+…=$500). Thus, higher reserve requirements should result in reduced money creation and, in turn, in reduced economic activity. In practice, the connection between reserve requirements and money creation is not nearly as strong as the exercise above would suggest. Reserve requirements apply only to transaction accounts, which are components of M1, a narrowly defined measure of money. Deposits that are components of M2 and M3 (but not M1), such as savings accounts and time deposits, have no reserve requirements and therefore can expand without regard to reserve levels. Furthermore, the Federal Reserve operates in a way that permits banks to acquire the reserves they need to meet their requirements from the money market, so long as they are willing to pay the prevailing price (the federal funds rate) for borrowed reserves. Consequently, reserve requirements currently play a relatively limited role in money creation in the United States." (Note that the pyramid is based on the assumption that the money loaned on the basis of the original deposit is also deposited in a bank.)In sceptical accounts, such explanations are neglected and ignored with preference given to badly expressed and articulated explanations such as Graeber's "proof" in the B of E statement. Banks, in pursuit of profit, have every incentive to make as many loans as they can (since the more loans they make the more income they stand to get as interest) and that in recent years they overdid this by creating all sorts of complicated and dubious loans financed by money they had borrowed on the money market. This all came unstuck when the US housing construction sector "overproduced" houses (in relation to paying demand, not real need, ). That's the way capitalism works. In a boom, every capitalist enterprise (banks included) tries to make as much profits as they can. Then one sector overproduces and this has a knock-on effect on the rest of the economy. This happens every time and there's nothing governments can do to stop it. That's one reason why we've got to get rid of capitalism and its production for profit and replace it with socialism and production directly for use.Dan, the Marxist reply to premise of your argument is this. There are three main divisions within capitalist society which share the surplus-value which is socially extracted from the working class; the industrialist, the landlord and the banker. These divisions historically reflect the application of the division of labour to the specialised investment of capital in any field of production and distribution, any process of circulation, of which banking is part. Banks produce nothing. They are really middlemen or custodians of idle capital which must be available as a hoard, as potential money capital waiting to be put to use. Their profit is made during the process of circulation. The difference between finance capital and industrial capital is that the owner of money capital who wishes to earn interest on that money throws it into circulation not as capital for himself, but so that others can use it, and consequently gains a profit by this service.Contrary to popular belief, banks do not dominate the capitalist system (The two largest corporations in the world are WalMart, bigger than the Pakistan and Exxon bigger than the New Zealand economies). This mistaken view is due to the fact that wealth is represented by enormous quantities of money. All wealth under capitalism expresses its value in the symbolic money form, but that form tends to conceal the fact that capital exists in the physical implements of the labour, factories, minerals, buildings, ships, etc. If for some reason, whether it be that the market is already overloaded and cannot absorb further commodities, or that over-production has already taken place, then production will be scaled down, curtailed, or in some cases halted entirely, and workers will be laid off. In these circumstances, there will be little prospect of profit, and as experience has shown a number of capitalists, the smaller ones, go bankrupt All the machinations of the banks, either by advancing or retarding credit, whether charging low-interest rates or not, cannot alter this. At the moment there is no shortage of cash available for investment. However, in a failing market, there is little incentive to the industrial capitalist to commit himself to paying interest when the prospects of earning surplus-value on the borrowed money are extremely remote.Speculation involves buying cheap and selling dear. When it comes to banking, what banks are doing is borrowing money cheap and lending dear, pocketing the difference as profit. Basically the same as any merchant who buys below value but above the cost-price of the producer of the commodity, and then sell above their own cost-price. There is nothing very specialk about banks; they are not wicked finance capitalists against whom the anger of workers should particularly be directed, just capitalists with their capital invested in a particular line of business, no more nor less reprehensible than the rest of the capitalist class.Apologies for this long post, some i am sure you are already aware of, Dan. But to end, just a comment on Iceland. As you said, much to the delight of many, Iceland let the big banks topple and prosecuted the bankers. But it was a painful process with severe austerity policies implemented. 2015 saw a series of strikes in Iceland (even the police walked out) as the price of solving the financial crisis, just as elsewhere, fell upon the working class. Wages suffered devaluation and stagnated even when business profits had recovered. Capitalism,as a whole, had prevailed and nothing really changed.
There is a long and detailed thread on Libcom that may be of interest in the debate and well worth the read.https://libcom.org/forums/theory/book-first-second-century-christian-communism-using-david-graebers-work-28042017
Another example of suppression of free thought.http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/richard-dawkins-islam-muslims-islamophobic-row-twitter-tweets-atheist-kpfa-us-university-of-a7854751.html
Dan, as someone who has studied this issue for some years, perhaps you can help out.
Quote:The distinctions between credit and currency disappeared with the acceptance of the first receipts issued by the gold smiths by third parties, often made out on non-existent gold, the start of fractional reserve.Research by one of our members has traced back the earliest reference to goldsmiths and banking in Richard Cantillon's "Essai sur la nature du Commerce en General" written in 1730. Here's what he wrote:
Quote:"…If a hundred economical gentlemen or proprietors of land, who put by every year money from their savings to buy land on occasion, deposit each one 10,000 ounces of silver with a goldsmith or banker in London, to avoid the trouble of keeping this money in their houses and the thefts which might be made of it, they will take from them notes payable on demand. Often they will leave their money there a long time, and even when they have made some purchase they will give notice to the banker some time in advance to have their money ready when the formalities and legal documents are complete.In these circumstances the banker will often be able to lend 90,000 ounces of the 100,000 he owes throughout the year and will only need to keep in hand 10,000 ounces to meet all the withdrawals. He has to do with wealthy and economical persons; as fast as one thousand ounces are demanded of him in one direction, a thousand are brought to him from another. It is enough as a rule for him to keep in hand the tenth part of his deposits.There have been examples and experiences of this in London. Instead of the individuals in question keeping in hand all the year round the greatest part of 100,000 ounces the custom of depositing it with a banker causes 90,000 ounces of the 100,000 to be put into circulation. This is primarily the idea one can form of the utility of banks of this sort. The bankers or goldsmiths contribute to accelerate the circulation of money. They lend it out at interest at their own risk and peril, and yet they are or ought to be always ready to cash their notes when desired on demand. If an individual has 1000 ounces to pay to another he will give him in payment the banker's note for that amount. This other will perhaps not go and demand the money of the banker. He will keep the note and give it on occasion to a third person in payment, and this note may pass through several hands in large payments without any one going for a long time to demand the money from the banker. It will be only some one who has not complete confidence or has several small sums to pay who will demand the amount of it. In this first example the cash of a banker is only the tenth part of his trade…"Cantillon's full account of how the banks of his time operated can be found in Chapter VIAs this more or less contemporary account makes clear there is nothing about the goldsmith banker being able (or even trying) to lend more than the 100,000 ounces of silver deposited with them, as often ascribed in the many modern accounts. Whether the goldsmith acted as an intermediary or whether the lending was done directly the general effect was the same, i.e., the owner of the money (representing a command over goods) was lending it to a borrower, who would thus, for a specified time, have at his disposal the means of buying goods. It was not an act of “creating” goods or values, but only of lending them, the banks being intermediaries between lenders and borrowers. Fundamentally, the same process underlies the modern banking and credit system.Maybe, Dan, you possess primary sources of the time that may well give differing descriptions of the process and it would be very much appreciated if you could cite them.I was very disappointed that you associate socialist ideas with state-ownership. It appears that you haven't really looked at our website where we repeatedly explain that such economic structure is not socialism but state-capitalism. The socialists in our tradition have never been statists and it is made abundantly clear in our writings. A long, long time ago we determined, just as you say now that state-ownership would intensify slavery and exploitation. Planning is indeed central to the idea of socialism, but socialism is the planned, but not “central-planning” or the "command-economy". We envisage such organisations such as FAO, WHO and ILO and more local organisations continuing but with very much changed parameters.Nor, i think, we would be impressed by your continuance of capitalism in a new form. Why do you insist that the exchange economy should still persist when you acknowledge we have reached a technological where scarcity can be ended? The key feature of capitalism is production for profit. The motive for producing things under capitalism is to make a profit. The “Profit System” is another very good name for capitalism But from another angle, capitalism could also be called the “Wages System”. The key market in capitalism is the labour market, where workers are forced to earn their living by selling their labour power to an employer.Capitalism is an economic system where, under pressure from the market, profits are accumulated as further capital, i.e. as money invested in production with a view to making further profits. This is not a matter of the individual choice of those in control of capitalist production – it’s not due to their personal greed or inhumanity – it’s something forced on them by the operation of the system. And which operates irrespective of whether a particular economic unit is the property of an individual, a limited company, the state or even of a workers’ cooperative. The capitalist system is left unscathed. Nowhere is the market-driven profit system as such challenged. Nowhere is the “can’t pay, can’t have” society we have that consigns the greater portion of the population of the planet to lives of abject misery condemned. Capitalism is taken for granted and all that is being asked in the end is the end of corporations. It is just the demand for wider democracy and fairer trading conditions while allowing capitalism to carry on perpetrating every social ill that plagues us.Instead of capitalism, even a tamed version of it, our aspiration and vision is a global economy, an “association of associations”or "industrial democracy", i.e. by a co-ordinated inter-linked and inter-connected network of neighbourhood assemblies/councils and producer-controlled production units. That is what we call “economic justice” . Production will be to meet human need, each person or group determining their own reasonable needs in a social context. There will be no buying or selling, but instead, plenty of giving and taking, a system of generalised reciprocity. We hope to achieve world socialism where various and diverse federations of self-governing groups are largely concerned with their internal affairs yet all the time collaborating on the common purposes that concern all the groups.
Dan, many genuine and sincere activists want to solve the problems of capitalism but without changing its relations of production and so instead they find the flaws in some part of the monetary mechanism. By doing so they exonerate the industrialist capitalists to concentrate their attacks upon the bankers and financiers. It makes the proposed lever for any social transformation the alteration in the monetary mechanism yet leaves the capitalists in control of production. Groups such as Global Justice have the merit of recognising that the productive forces of capitalist society are being strangled in an economic strait-jacket: that poverty in the midst of potential plenty is shameful and unnecessary. They sincerely desire to abolish poverty and the miseries of exploitation, but this having said that they hope to do so without upsetting the existing social relations of production and without compelling anyone but a handful of bankers to yield up their power and privileges. They find the scapegoat in the “money power”, the credit monopoly of finance capital and not the profit system itself.The Socialist Party position strikes a different stance, Dan. We say the problem before society today is not a financial problem. It is a property problem. The banks belong to the superstructure of capitalism. Private property is the foundation. The financial crises and credit crunches etc. are nothing more than the reflections of the fundamental economic problems arising from the anarchy of production. No amount of credit supply to manufacturers, no amount of money-supply manipulation which leaves the question of property ownership untouched, can cure the crisis of capitalism.I think Jonwhite's point is that banks can only lend out what they have borrowed either from depositors or from their own borrowing on the money markets. It was an over-reliance on the latter that largely led to the collapse of Northern Rock and the near collapse of so many other banks. If banks could really create vast quantities of credit at "a stroke of a pen" then none would ever go bust. Neither would they need to tap the money markets for funds. What is of significance for those who describe themselves as Marxian economists (not that i am presuming you are one) yet espouse the idea of credit creationism is that runs counter to one of the basic precepts of Marxian economics, namely that value arises in the sphere of production not circulation. If banks could create credit with the stroke of a pen, that would mean in effect they could create wealth, and consequently, the Marxist Theory of Value would be shown to be wrong. However, as time passes the validity of the Labour Theory of Value, i.e. that wealth can only come into existence when men apply their energies to nature, is all too apparent. If credit creationism were true, the solution to society's problems would indeed be monetary reform, not socialism – exactly the sort of argument put forward by American right-libertarian anti-Fed Reserve conspiracy theorists of today. The continuous concentration of money capital into banks and the expansion of the credit system allows a great number of transactions to take place without the mediation of any money. This is due to what Marx calls the mutual settlement of accounts. If there is a series of exchanges based on credit such that Capitalist A owes £500 to Capitalist B, and Capitalist B owes £600 to Capitalist A, the only amount of money necessary to realize the £1100 of commodities is a £100 — the £500 owed to each (£1000 in total) are simply cancelled on the books and no money is necessary to intervene in the realisation of this portion of the value of the commodity capital. The amount of actual money intervening in giant purchases is surely very small. The bulk of purchases takes place against credit, where the mutual settlement of accounts is always possible. The move towards a "cashless society", debit and credit cards, can be seen as increasing the velocity of circulation of the currency.The Socialist Party have no love for banks. A world without banks would be a wholly better place. However to blame the banks for creating our debt-ridden society is just too biblical, like a re-run of Christ expelling the money-changers from the temple. Even if the banks were state-owned, they would still have to lend. If they didn't there would be no point in them existing. Banks and interest are not the villain of the piece but capitalism and production for profit. We need to abolish money before we can get rid of banks. But to get rid of money we need an end to property. And you can't abolish property relations until you abolish capitalism.
We're swamped by pro universal basic income messages on progressive websites and although this is the conservative-minded NYT, i think this article on the Finnish experiment introduces a much-needed healthy dose skepticism. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/opinion/finland-universal-basic-income.htmlIt explains the purpose – to encourage workers to accept low-paying jobs and while this experiment has been publicised, less reporting has been on its austerity cut-backs on benefits.
It was an excellent letter of rebuttal and the editor can be forgiven for associating Robin as a member.But i find it strange that a non-member, regardless of how close and sympathetic he is to ourselves, was the only person to respond to the unfair criticism of the SPGB especially as i had made a point of drawing the forum's attention to the need of a reply. Why the reluctance of actual members to defend the party when we are assured of publication by WW's open editorial policy?
Chris Hedges on Debs https://commons.commondreams.org/t/eugene-debs-and-the-kingdom-of-evil/43298/19
An article related to this thread – Redneck Revolthttp://www.alternet.org/activism/redneck-revolt-armed-leftwing-group-wants-stamp-out-fascism
Luxembourg has become the first European country to offer a legal framework ensuring that private operators can be confident about their rights over resources extracted in space.http://news.trust.org/item/20170714135747-aioqx/
I have no idea of John Master's actual politics but i hope we can do better in our criticisms than simple name-calling. As for attacking the ideas of the CPGB, our article in the current issue disabusing his supporters' faith and trust in him is an example of opposing one of the CPGB positions.I have frequently in the past commended the editorial policy of Weekly Worker for its willingness to publish letters from myself and fellow members as well as many other CPGB non-members and non-sympathisers. We have a very limited audience and we should avail ourselves of every opportunity to present the SPGB case wherever possible.
