ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
How are we supposed to know what this is about or whether it’s worth watching if there’s no introductory comment? Is he a comedian or a professor of anthropology or maybe an advocate or critic of “national anarchism”?
I think society could work on a completely non-political basis, even anti-political, without any sort of political authority, at any level. In other words, once capitalism has been formally abolished out of existence, the various parliaments and assemblies captured by socialists would then take the final step of abolishing themselves.
We need to be clear what we are meaning by the word “political” in this discussion. The Socialist Party associates the word with the State as the public power of coercion. Once a socialist majority wins control of the State, of political power, then the aim will be to use it briefly to abolish capitalism and then to quickly dismantle it, by lopping off the powers of coercion. What will be left would be an unarmed administrative centre.
On this definition it follows that in socialism “politics”, as activity involving the policy a State should pursue would no longer exist, only non-political democratic debate would.
I don’t see any reason why the various elected assemblies would necessarily need to be abolished. It’s just the coercive aspects of the current administrative centre that would need to go. The elected assemblies could continue to exist, no doubt made more democratic. Or they could be replaced by entirely new assemblies. Who knows? We can’t second guess the future course of events or the decisions of those who establish socialism. But there’s no point to start from scratch just for the sake of it.
But your objection doesn’t seem to be to the central administrative of society being armed (our objection) but the traditional anarchist objection to one existing at all (in fact to define the “state” they wish to abolish as any central administration).
I don’t think this is realistic. Society needs an administrative centre for some matters (world matters like global warming, research into how to avoid the Earth being hit by an asteroid). Other matters can be dealt with by regional centres, still others, most day to day matters in fact, by local centres.
I don’t see decisions taken by any of these centres being an infringement of the “right of the individual” or the “tyranny of the majority” as individualist anarchists do. Obviously there will be limits as to what they can decide and rules on how they decide, but these too can be decided democratically (or even inherited from existing elected assemblies). What’s the problem?
We were there. Report from a comrade who was present:
“I thought heavy rain may stop play but luckily it stopped around 2.30pm. Managed to get rid of a box of Socialism or your money back, a good pile of Standards and some of the new leaflet.
It was quite entertaining with Stop Oil blocking the roads, Diane Abbott MP and the usual shouting speech head-bangers for reform.
A lot of Police present but all seem to pass peacefully.
Free food too, had a nice pasta with beans stew.”There’s this online book launch tomorrow (5 November) if you can work out what time 3pm EDT is in your part of the world:
It looks as if it is not only God that is on both sides in this war but the Devil too:
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/medvedev-says-russia-is-fighting-a-sacred-battle-against-satan/48030508
Well, in my book saying that capitalism is “viable”, ie works successfully, is praise. That it is extant is of course an in incontrovertible fact. So is that it can never be made to work in the interest of the majority class of wage workers and their dependents.
That’s not logical. To say something is the “only” game in town is higher praise than saying it is the “best” game in town as this suggests that there are at least two other games about. No?
Got my increased winter heating allowance of £250 and interest rates on savings are going up to 3%. Lizzie must be right that capitalism is the best game into town.
It certainly shows that capitalism cannot exist without a state and that a pure “free market” capitalism is just a libertarian pipe dream. It has never existed and fortunately never will.
On the question of a “permanent arms economy” see this recent article (scroll down to the second item):
The shape of things to come even if the whole of Britain gets a Labour government. They’ll be forced to make cuts just like the Tartan reformists in office in Edinburgh are.
In the end reformists governments can’t be any different from conservative ones — because they both accept the capitalist economic system and have to work within its constraints. They can only act as caretakers for capitalism.
Lenin talked about waiting for “all the people”. But only “most” people need be in favour of socialism before they can establish it. Lenin was just caricaturing the case against his view that a minority — a vanguard party — could. It couldn’t of course because of the nature of socialism as a participatory democracy — and look what his view led to when he tried to carry it out.
We all know that the aim of the Labour Party is for its leading members to be the government. That is their priority and everything else is subordinate to it. Policy doesn’t come into it except as vote-catching promises. Once in office they may begin by trying to improve things but will soon find out that all they can do is manage the day-to-day affairs of the capitalist state in the context of a capitalist economy whose operations no government can control. That won’t worry them particularly since, as career politicians, they will have achieved their ambition of becoming government ministers. And there are people calling themselves socialists who say we should vote for this particular bunch of careerists. Yes, we mean you SWP, SPEW, CPB, etc, etc, etc
If you hang around long enough Ken might lend you the £100 Alice borrowed from the bank and then you can lend it to Mike. It’s one of the other games in town.
We are agreed on this:
The key point here is that Barclays does not need to have £100 in its vaults when it grants Eve an entitlement to £100. However, Barclays must be able to get its hands on £100 when payment in actual money is demanded, i.e. when satisfying payment demands with promises to pay does not suffice. Barclays’ ability to grant credits and collect interest on them is premised on its success in managing its income streams and financial assets.
That is, banks do not simply take possession of cash and then hand it out for a fee (emphasis added).But not on this:
they create ability to pay. A bank cannot create ability to pay “out of thin air” but it creates it out of its and other financial institutions’ power and success in turning credit advances into financial assets and out of the thus produced creditworthiness.
We might even be able to accept the first half of this with some amendment to make it clear that the central bank can “create ability to pay” and pass this on to the clearing banks. But it would need to be specified that, as with Hilferfing’s Austrian guilder, if this resulted in more being created than the prices of what was for sale this would result in a depreciation of the currency and so not be an effective new “creation”. If it happened to be more or less what the economy required then there would be no depreciation and no rise in the general price level (everybody would be happy except the G7 and the states that follow its leads who want their currencies to depreciate by 2 percent a year).
What is beyond the pale is the claim that, even without the intervention of the central bank, banks can “create” even an ineffective “ability to pay” by “turning credit advances into financial assets”. That would be double counting.
From our/my experience I can recommend starting a reading group on finance capital.
I don’t think Alan will like that and the rest of us know it all already !
Anyway, there are more urgent things to do. I will have to miss Michael Roberts’ exposition of his value theory of inflation because we need to leaflet an anti-climate change demonstration fixed for the same time outside the Shell Centre on the other side of the Thames.
