ALB
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Do we need to revive this thread as another one possibly hits the dust?
At least it shows that freemarketeers are equally at the mercy of how capitalism works as leftist reformists. The Institute of Economic Affairs, from where Truss got her ideas, is just as unrealistic in thinking that capitalism can be controlled as Labour left wingers.
The present fiasco is further confirmation that governments can’t control capitalism, but that they are just navigating by sight in the choppy waters of capitalism..
Using inflation to mean an increase in consumer price indexes (rather than its original and more helpful meaning if an over-issue of the currency), he is right. The increase in the rate of increase of these indexes did start before the Ukraine war and was attributed mainly to supply problems in the aftermath of the covid epidemic and was expected to slow down and stop when these supply problems were overcome. But the Ukraine war, and the economic war the West declared on Russia has made it worse and longer lasting.
The US has raised its interest rates which has attracted more lenders. This has led to the dollar (which is the main currency in which states now hold their reserves) going up in value compared with other currencies.
The revaluation of the dollar means in effect a devaluation of all other currencies and so makes the imports they have to pay for in dollars (such as oil and gas) more expensive. So the “Global South” is being affected in the way Ross says. But not just them.
Incidentally, he is wrong about Keynes when he writes:
“As John Maynard Keynes explained, it is much easier to cut real wages by high inflation than by directly reducing money wages.”
Keynes did not advocate high inflation but a mild inflation that workers wouldn’t really notice. Obviously workers would recognise a high inflation and react, as they are now.
Jeremy Corbyn is the only British MP to speak out against the government’s war policy in Ukraine. In every other NATO country, including the US, there is a significant minority of parliamentarians opposed (except in the revanchist Baltic states who now have a free hand to oppress their 20-25% Russian-speaking minorities).
“Well, for what it’s worth, Truss says she remains “absolutely” committed to not making public spending cuts.”
Oh yes?
Was just reading about that myself. More backtracking. It was the obvious thing for a capitalist government to do (most others have). It has even been suggested that the energy companies concerned prefer a temporary windfall tax to signing unfavourable longer-term supply contracts.
Another obvious thing to do, to assuage ‘the markets’, is to cut back government spending on social “benefits” and other reforms. I doubt they will abandon increasing military spending or removing sanctions on Russian oil and gas. So Guns before Heating is the most likely outcome. We will see.
I thought I would check what the Socialist Standard of the time said about that demonstration on 18 November 1910 on which the musical is based.
Nothing as it happens because the December 1910 issue was taken up with the general election that month. There was an answer to a question about the franchise, saying that enough workers already had the vote for a socialist-minded working class to win control of political power, prefacing this with “The Socialist Party is not opposed to Adult Suffrage”.
The demonstration was not in favour of votes for women but for votes for rich women only (Votes for Ladies, as it was known as). Here is how Wikipedia describes the Bill they were demonstrating in favour of. The MPs behind the Bill
“proposed legislation that would have enfranchised female householders and those women that occupied a business premises; the bill was based on existing franchise laws for local government elections, under which some women had been able to vote since 1870. The measure would have added approximately a million women to the franchise; it was kept to a relatively small number to make the bill as acceptable as possible to MPs, mostly Conservatives.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(1910)
I wonder if the musical brings out that point.
It is probably not without significance that after the much wider but still limited extension of the vote to women after the War, Emmeline Pankhurst became a Tory and had been adopted as a candidate for them just before she died in 1928.
That the Suffragettes struggled for votes for women is one of the biggest political myths of our time. Their official policy was votes for women on the same conditions as men. At the time about a third of men didn’t have the vote either. So perhaps as much as half of adult women would still have been left without the vote.
Sylvia, on the other hand, was for a while a Left Communist who clearly understand what socialism was. Even before that, unlike her mother and sisters, she campaigned for adult suffrage.
A well-argued case on behalf of the “isolationist” section of the US capitalist class that Bijou mentions:
https://www.newsweek.com/us-needs-change-course-right-now-ukraine-opinion-1749740?amp=1
Musk, too, seems to be talking sense for once.
Will the currently politically dominant section of the US capitalist class really allow — and arm — the Ukraine regime to ethnically cleanse Crimea and the Donbass, with the massacres and streams of refugees this will involve?
Interesting, even intriguing, thesis. That it’s a conflict between two different models of capitalism — classical Western-style capitalism and “political capitalism” where the ruling capitalist class use the state to further their own personal interests (and so have an interest in extending the state’s borders and so a bigger state to feed upon).
I am not sure it works as an explanation of Russian expansionism. There are obviously geo-political and economic factors involved too.
And Putin as a Bonapartist like Louis Napoleon in France in the 1850s and 1860s?
Stephen says Ishchenko has moved to Germany. A wise move as the regime in Kiev is unlikely to look favourably on the view that the war there is a conflict between two different models of capitalism.
This is the wing of the old Militant Tendency that stayed in the Labour Party after the other lot left and tried to steal our name and who are now appropriately known as SPEW. But they were prescribed by the Labour Party last year after Starmer revived the “bans and proscriptions” of a previous Labour Party era.
Might be interesting to go along to see what they are up to but not sure about paying to hear Trotsky regurgitated.
Judging by their paper sellers at demonstrations, they seemed to have attracted quite a few young people. I can’t think why. But as somebody once quipped, “left to themselves, students can’t develop beyond a Leninist consciousness.”
Thanks for sending me a copy but what has happened to Ishchenko? Has he been rounded up or forced into exile?
Trump agrees with the Pope:
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-blames-us-almost-forcing-putin-invade-ukraine-1750145?amp=1
I must confess that I am surprised at the extent that the US-led capitalist bloc is prepared to go to weaken capitalist Russia — besides imposing pain on ordinary people, they are sacrificing the “neo-liberal world order” by abandoning free trade and disrupting the international payments system. It doesn’t make ordinary capitalist profit-making sense. They are imposing pain on themselves too.
I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that it has to do with the US capitalist state wanting to maintain its world domination. I say reluctantly because this is what the “anti-imperialist” left say. But they seem to be correct on this point, even if their support for any capitalist state opposing US imperialism is wrong.
Can anyone think of some other explanation for the capitalist West apparently acting irrationally from a capitalist profit-seeking point of view?
I would expect more and more people in this country to come to realise what Patrick Cockburn says in today’s i paper (and which many in other European countries already have):
“Liz Truss and her ministers keep saying that the worldwide cost of living crisis is the result of ‘Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine’. But it would be truer to say that the economic turmoil is the result of an ill-considered decision to wage economic war against Russia which was never likely to work”.
In other words, we are suffering a cost of living crisis because of the West’s deliberate policy. We are collateral damage in the struggle between the capitalist West and capitalist Russia over into whose sphere of influence Ukraine should fall. The government thinks that this pain is worth us suffering so they can achieve their aim. And we are expected to put up with it.
