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I don’t know who these people are or where they are coming from but it’s something to put into the dossier on the current Labour government:
Of course Labour never had any “socialist values” to “step away from” but they do seem to be stepping way from the reformist values they once proclaimed and are just into managing capitalism in accordance to how the system requires.
Just shows how useless the “United” Nations is. The US has clearly violated its paper charter and there is nothing the UN can do about it.
The charter outlaws wars unless they are in “self-defence”. That has just meant that states that want to go to war invoke this let-out clause. Israel possibly could invoke this but the US certainly cannot in this case.
Capitalism is war-prone and scraps of paper like the UN haven’t and can’t prevent wars breaking out.
Even the mad mullahs in charge of Iran know that what’s at stake is not a Jewish State controlling Jerusalem but resources, trade routes, markets and fields for investment. Here’s the chief one himself, ayatollah Khamenei, in October last year:
“The insistence of the United States and its allies on ensuring the security of the usurping regime serves as a cover for their murderous policy of transforming the [Zionist] regime into a tool to seize all the resources of this region and use it [this regime] in major global conflicts. Their policy is to transform this regime into a portal for exporting energy from West Asia to the West and importing Western goods and technologies to the region, to ensure the survival of the usurping regime and the dependence of the entire region on them.”
In their reply Talking About Socialism quote Conrad as saying;
“My fear is that what they’ll produce is something at least along the lines of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. This is a maximalist programme that rejects all notions of reform, all notions of transition between capitalism with capitalist state power and communism.”
And
“The comrades in TAS are more inclined to the SPGB approach than what I would describe at least as the sort of classic Marxist approach”
Actually, TAS’s reply to the charge that it “rejects all notions of reform” is the sort of reply we might give (except of course that we don’t think that a socialist party should itself advocate particular reforms):
“‘Only when confronted by the power of the working class will the ruling class and its state be forced to make concessions (reforms), to temporarily appease the majority, fearful of losing complete control, only to take those concessions back when events become more favourable to them. The task of socialists is to strip away the veneer of impartiality from the State, to reveal its class content. While fighting for any reform or concession from the ruling class, the working class must always have its eye on the ultimate goal – fundamentally breaking the power of the capitalist class and the capitalist state and inaugurating the basis of a new society.’
You will find similar formulations throughout our material. Communists must fight for all reforms, to improve the position of the working class in society. But we fight against reformism as a political strategy. Our aim is not to reform capitalism into something that can work in the interests of the working class, that is impossible. We do not aim to manage capitalism but to abolish it.”
There was another mention of us in that issue of the WW, an article by their leader, Jack Conrad, on his favourite subject — the Bolshevik party. In it he has this to say about the group that his is supposedly going to merge who are drawing up their programme.
“My fear, though, is that the TAS comrades will produce a hodgepodge, an incoherent nonsense, a parody of the maximalism of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.”
https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1542/learning-some-elementary-russian/
We are still being mentioned in the context of this (though the merger between the two groups to form a “mass” party is looking less and less likely).
Here is Andrew Northall in last week’s Weekly Worker:
“The TAS group (now) chooses to use the words interchangeably, but when they talk of socialism/communism, this does not appear to be what (say) the Socialist Party of Great Britain or the WWG in its Draft programme would define as ‘communism’: ie, a stateless, moneyless, free association of producers, where people would work voluntarily as a pleasure, choose to produce the necessary goods and services in relative abundance to enable all needs and wants to be met, and people would freely access all the goods and services they require. People would consciously choose to work responsibly and would equally consciously (and conscientiously) choose to access goods and services responsibly.
This would seem to me to require a very high level of socialist/communist consciousness and among a very high proportion of the population and I suspect would take a number of generations of what communists would generally call ‘socialist society’ to be able to meet all these necessary conditions of full communism. (Incidentally, the question of full communist consciousness is one the SPGB comrades conspicuously fail to respond to, when challenged on their own version of the “world socialist revolution” and “immediate transition” to full socialism/communism).”Actually the deleted link could have been posted here too as the practices of Islamic banks are also relevant for the discussion here.
“Murabaha or cost plus selling: This is the most common product in asset portfolios and applies only to commodity purchase. Instead of taking out an interest loan to buy something, the customer asks the bank to purchase an item and sell to him or her at a higher price on instalment.
Ijara or leasing: Instead of issuing a loan for a customer to buy a product like car, the bank buys the product and then leases it to the customer. The customer acquires the item at the end of the lease contract.”
These practices of Islamic banks raise an awkward question for Thin-airists: where does the bank get the money from to buy what it re-sells or leases to customers? Does it simply decide to create it from nothing or must it have the money already? The answer is obvious.
It is also poses a problem for the conventional theory that banks create money when they make a loan: does an Islamic bank do so when it buys something for a customer since no extra deposits are created?
More on how the central bank in Britain gets more money into circulation from David Smith, Economics Editor of the Sunday Times in his column into today’s Times.
“Commercial banks, overwhelmingly the high street banks we all use, always retain some reserves at the Bank [of England]. Under the regulatory environment in which they operate, they need to hold high-quality liquid assets to draw on when they need liquidity, and reserves at the Bank are perhaps the easiest form of such assets. Those normal reserves were swelled by quantitative easing (QE). Under what was colloquially known as ‘printing money’, commercial banks’ reserves were created at the Bank. Andrew Bailey, its governor, describes them as ‘ultimate form of money’”.
What happened was that the Bank bought government bonds off the banks and paid for them by increasing a bank’s reserves with it. That solves Link’s mystery of how new electronic money gets into circulation. It is created by the central bank and distributed via the commercial banks.
This Islamic hypocrisy has been going for a long time, as this news item quoted in the September 1946 Socialist Standard shows:
3 Per Cent, by Another Name
“New York, Friday.—A U.S. agreement to lend £2,500,000 to Saudi Arabia, announced to-day, contains no mention of interest payments.
The word ‘interest’ was omitted because Moslems oppose on religious grounds the charging or paying of interest. Under the heading ‘Thanksgiving,’ however. Saudi Arabia will pay the usual 3 per cent.” (Daily Mail, 10/8/46.)“Ex-IAEA chief warns Israeli attacks may encourage countries to seek nukes
Mohamed el-Baradei, who won a Nobel Peace Prize as the head of the UN nuclear watchdog in 2005, says Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities are illegal.
He warned that the assault on Iran “is a sure way to destroy” the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, saying that it “sends a clear message to many countries that their ‘ultimate security’ is to develop nuclear weapons”.”
I think that’s right. Under capitalism where relations between states are based on “might is right” Iran’s fate at the hands of Israel will lead other medium-sized states to draw the conclusion that they need the “might” of nuclear weapons to deter being attacked.
That Treaty was only scrap of paper anyway.
Israel, the US’s rogue proxy in the Middle East with its own agenda, initiated the current war by attacking Iran with the declared aim of physically preventing it acquiring the nuclear bomb.
According to Netanyahu, Iran’s possession of the nuclear bomb presents an existential threat to the state of Israel. The suggestion is that, if Iran had the bomb, it would use it annihilate Israel. This is just propaganda as Iran wants the bomb for the same reason as the United States, Britain, France, China, India and Pakistan have it — as a deterrent against being attacked. If Iran did have the bomb it would be very foolish of it to use against Israel as Israel itself is a nuclear state.
The real reason for the war — and why the United States, Britain and the others are behind Israel in practice — is to maintain the current the balance of power in the Middle East. In relations between capitalist states ‘might is right’ and Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons would increase its ‘might’ and so shift the balance in its favour. It’s this that the Western states, who currently dominate the area because it’s the source of much of the oil and gas they need to power their production, wish to prevent, ideally by diplomacy but Israel has forced their hand.
To maintain their own domination of the Middle East is why the Western powers are so concerned that Iran should not have nuclear weapons.
I am not sure where to post this. Here or on the thread about the black record of the Starmer Labour government.
Anyway, it looks as if Britain is ready to support the most aggressive capitalist state towards its neighbours since Nazi Germany.
Everybody certainly does not accept the Bank of England’s (accurate) description of a bank’s business model. Some of those you quoted in your book don’t. Aaron Sahr, for instance, who you summarise as saying
“money is quite simply a product of using a keyboard as the banks create money by making and recording loans on their computer”.
and
“The whole financial system is based on creating money out of thin air. The whole financial industry really is just based on creating electronic assets (ie, virtual money) that are loans on which interest can be charged”.
He, for one, thinks (if you have summarises him correctly) that a bank’s business model is not to make money by borrowing at one rate of interest and lending at a higher one. He thinks that a bank doesn’t need to borrow money at all but can simply create it by a keyboard stroke and then lend it at interest. There is no “spread” between the two rates of interest; to calculate its income, the interest from lending does not have to be reduced by what the bank pays as interest to those it borrows from. Its income is the whole of the interest from lending.
The difference between the two models is that, in the one case, a bank’s income is its interest from lending net of the interest it pays; in the other case, it’s the whole interest from lending.
The question people who argue like him should ask themselves is: why does a bank borrow any money? Why does it seek deposits or loans from other financial institutions? That would seem to be pointless even counter-productive as the interest it has to pay reduces its income.
I think that the Bank of England’s point is that a bank is not a simple intermediary as, today, the commercial banks are part of a banking system centred on the central bank. They are arguing that it is the banking system as a whole, not single banks on their own, that create money. That may be true but it doesn’t mean that a single bank is not an intermediary between lenders and borrowers.
No wonder, in the context of capitalism where the relationship between capitalist states is based on the principle of “might is right”, that the Iran regime wants to develop its own nuclear bomb.
Look what happens if you get into a conflict with another state and haven’t got one. And of course it’s the only reason why no other state, not even the US, doesn’t attack North Korea.
As the Romans said, if you want peace, develop a nuclear bomb.
