ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
At one extreme of what socialist society could look like is Zeitgeist. At the other is this. Anitra doesn’t indicate how small the “Yenomon” (No Money, after Samuel Butler’s “Erewhon” if you haven’t worked it out) communities are to be but the background music suggests smaller rather than even medium-sized, I imagine.
Given where we are in terms of societal development, technology, urbanisation and population density, I would have thought Zeitgeist were more in tune with the spirit of the time.
having said that, the thing about socialism is that, once humanity has got rid of capitalism and the operation of its economic laws acting on humans like uncontrollable laws of nature, humanity will be in control of its destiny and can decide what it wants.
Anyway, the idea of a future moneyless society is catching on. There’s not much that we could disagree with in the first couple of chapters of her book Beyond Money where she puts the case against capitalism and its production for trade (as she puts it). It’s reviewed in this month’s Socialist Standard here:
Looks as if I should have gone to Kings Cross. It seems that Enough is Enough rather than Don’t Pay has won the franchise to organise these protests. Predictable, I suppose, as the unions are bigger and have more experience at organising these things than community activists.
That’s what Wednesday’s paper said. I suppose the clue could have described them as “reformists” rather than “reformers”.
Went to the one in Windrush Square, Brixton. Have to report that it was a flop. Only 4 organisers turned up. No burning of energy bills. Maybe people in London went to the ones in Kings Cross and Lewisham instead.
Anybody go to one of the other ones?
Interesting answer to a clue in the crossword in Tuesday’s Times:
Russian reformer disheartened monk disturbed by even his reforming (9)
I don’t agree that a tax on land values is incompatible with capitalism. Hasn’t it been implemented in a number of places? The argument against it is not that it is a fantasy but that it wouldn’t make any difference to wage earners.
In so far as it replaced other taxes it would mean that capitalists would have to pay less tax and so keep more of their profits. More of the burden of taxation would have been passed on to landowners. It wouldn’t have any effect on wages.
I don’t disagree that it is a good approach to ask those who are against ground-rent because it is a property income why they are not also against profit.
According to this,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Party_of_Great_Britain_debates
we last debated them in August 1991 at the offices of their paper “Land and Liberty”. The subject was: “Who was right: Henry George or Karl Marx”. Their speaker was Fred Harrison of the “Centre for Incentive Taxation”. Harrison is still a leading propagandist for Georgism in Britain:
https://shepheardwalwyn.com/fred-harrison-author/
There was also a debate in November 1950 against the Henry George School of Social Science.
In that 1889 debate between Hyndman and George, Hyndman made some good points:
“The mean of production are monopolised by the capitalists, with the landlords as their sleeping partners, and those who have no other property than the force of labour in their bodies are compelled by that monopoly to sell it for practically a subsistence wage.”
“We do not particularly hate landlords more than capitalists, or capitalists more than landlords. The alligator and the crocodile; it matters not which it is from the point of view of those upon whom they feed (Laughter.) We wish to get rid of both, and what we are aiming at is the abolition of the wages system – (Hear, hear.) – and that aim can only be accomplished by the abolition of private property in the means and instruments of production including the land. (Hear, hear.)”
“The landlord, after all, in this country, and even in America, is but a sleeping partner in the process of expropriation which is carried on at the expense of the workers. (Cheers.) If you kill the sleeping partner and leave the active one at work what better are you? (Hear, hear.)”
George, on the other hand, looked backwards, promising workers that his Single Tax on ground-rent scheme would give them free access to land to work on their own. Mind you, at that time the radical wing of the Liberal Party thought promising “three acres and a cow” was a vote-winner.
Here (for those able to get round the censorship) is Putin this afternoon playing the anti-western-imperialism card:
For those who can’t get to read his speech, here’s an extract on this point:
‘The West is ready to go to any length “to preserve the neocolonial system which allows it to live parasitically – and factually to pillage the world thanks to the power of the dollar and the technological dictate. To collect tribute from humanity,” Putin said.’
I think we can guess how the government is going to get itself out of the hole they dug themselves into — they are going to cut back on government spending on social measures (it’s not going to be on spending more on the military). So it will only be a few weeks after promising to deliver “world class public services” that this has gone by the board. Normally it takes a little longer for such promises to be exposed as empty.
Fair enough but I am not sure that starting a conversation about Henry George would work today as a way of introducing socialist ideas to those only marginally interested in politics. At most it would be appropriate for discussing with Georgists. Most people today will have never heard of him.
In the last decades of the 19th century it was different. Georgism was a mass political movement. George himself got 30 percent of the votes when he stood for Mayor of New York in 1886. At that time it was useful to try to persuade his followers that his criticism of landlords also applied to capitalists. In fact this worked and many Georgists did become socialists.
Here is one of the debates that went on at the time:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/hyndman/1889/07/tax-debate.htm
We have also debated them ourselves more recently. But today’s Georgists are not half so radical as George himself or his followers of years ago. They are more concerned with the minutiae of reforming the tax system so that land values are taxed without alienating those who are freeholders or leaseholders of the land on which their house stands.
A simple rule for deciding whether a country is capitalist or not is to see if the producers are excluded from ownership and control of the means of production and are forced to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage to live.
But is the dollar overvalued? What seems to be happening is that the dollar is being “revalued” (the opposite of devaluation) and so is rising against all other currencies, more against some than others as in the case of the pound due to the unsound (from a capitalist point of view) policy of the British government.
I don’t think imports and exports play as an important role in the US economy as in some other countries. The fact that international speculators and governments are buying dollars to buy US bonds will be more significant. This is driving their price up and so their “yield” (effective rate of interest) down, meaning that the US can, and is, borrowing more, more cheaply. This enables them to fund their huge war machine among other things.
As Marx pointed out in that letter, Henry George was not the first to realise that landowners were able to use their position of monopolising a piece of desirable land to extract wealth for nothing.
But it wasn’t from the workers who produced it, but from their capitalist employers who had already stolen it from their workers. In other words, it was an argument between two robbers over a share of stolen booty — in which the workers had no interest in taking sides.
In any event, George was not a critic of capitalism but thought it would be ok if the landowners’ rents were taxed away. He criticised landlordism because it distorted the workings of the free market. It did, but so what?
In short, he had nothing useful to offer, not even the beginnings of a critique of capitalism.
Sir Keith Starmer KC is saying that “the government has lost control of the economy” (https://mobile.twitter.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1575108711487766533 ) but governments don’t control the economy anyway. They can only react to what is thrown at them and navigate by sight. When he becomes prime minister in a couple of years as now seems likely (how can a Tory government recover from being treated by “the markets” as if there were a government led by Corbyn?) he will find this out as all previous Labour governments have.
We also seem to be seeing confirmation of a remark of Marx’s that while no banking legislation can avoid a financial crisis, bad banking legislation can make it worse.
For the record, what Marx wrote (in chapter 30 of Volume 3 of Capital) was:
“Ignorant and mistaken bank legislation, such as that of 1844-45, can intensify this money crisis. But no kind of bank legislation can eliminate a crisis.”
“All “socialists” who support a Land Tax scheme have this in common—they aim to leave wage labour and hence the capitalist mode of production in existence, while bluffing themselves and others that if Ground Rent were transformed into a State Tax all the abuses of capitalist production would disappear.”
Say that again, Karl! The same applies to other single reform reformists such as Gesell.
Meanwhile here’s what Keynes said about Gesell. Good point at the end that, if ordinary money lost value if not spent in time, substitutes would be found, but what’s the point anyway?
