ALB
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Fair point. The mainstream unions to which members belong also have dubious international — and national — links, so why be more harsh on the IWW than on them? If it’s ok to join them as long as their core activity remains bargaining over wages and working conditions, the same should apply to the IWW. In other words, treat the IWW as just another trade union. Some mainstream unions too say (in their rule book) that they are anti-capitalist.
Here is the chapter on “Socialism and Law” which Pieter Lawrence published privately. It puts his case for retaining “law” in socialism.
He also brought out a pamphlet on it.
What he insisted on calling “law” most of the rest of us called “regulations”. Is there a difference?
Here’s an article from 1909 about what the SDP (as by then the SDF had become) said about taxation. We would have inherited it from them but applied it more consistently.
Is that view based on what your fellow trade union members think or on what people down the pub do?
I agree, though, that understanding what we say about tax is not incompatible with believing in “a fair days wage for a fair days work”. In fact it is an aspect of it. Insofar as “a fair day’s wage” means anything it is being paid the value of your labour power. Which implies a higher money wage if the cost of living goes up or take-home pay goes down, because of a tax rise.
Personally I think many workers do “get” what we are saying about taxes (and subsidies) especially those who are active trade unionists — in fact it will be one reason why they are active in their union.
I think they can work out too who pays (on who it falls) your $400 in the end.
Anybody know what the writing in Burmese (if that’s what the language there is called) on the front cover of the March 2021 Socialist Standard says.
Just as a matter of interest, would the mistake be the same in spoken Cantonese which I think will be the main dialect spoken in England and so likely to be noticed ?
Our Chinese speaking (Mandarin), writing and reading comrade confirms:
“Yes, it is a mistake, and the two ‘tang’ characters aren’t even pronounced the same (different tones). So I think it does need a correction, even though very few readers will notice it.”
Our apologies. Not sure, though, that it deserves the description “disgraceful”. It was a genuine mistake.
Good idea. I think he is based in Goldsmiths college (yes, that’s its name and who endowed it) which is not all that far from our Head Office. Could be an entertaining as well as an educational evening. Writing off for a review copy anyway.
I can’t think what possessed the Independent to devote so much space and publicity to an exposition of the purest currency crankery. Mosse seems to be an unthinking follower of the notorious currency crank Richard Werner. Werner is on record as claiming that, if banks’ loans can be 10 times their cash reserves, this means that when somebody deposits £100 in a bank that bank can then lend £900 whereas in fact it means they can lend only £90.
M4 is a measure of total bank lending and is only called “money creation” because making a loan is, misleadingly, defined as creating money. This is misleading as it suggests what is lent is not purchasing power that already exists but new money that is created from nothing. And is believed by economic illiterates like Mosse on the say-so of cranks like Werner.
Mosse’s recounting of the Goldsmith’s Tale is all wrong. For a start, at the time the currency was silver and that not gold was what was “usually” deposited with them; their deposit certificates never became “the generally accepted means of payment”; and none of them took the risk of committing the foolhardy business practice (and criminal act) of issuing more certificates than the value of the silver deposited with them.
These mistaken views are refuted in detail in chapters four and five of our pamphlet The Magic Money Myth.
Mosse blames the banks for resources being devoted to what is most financially profitable rather than to what is socially needed. This does happen of course but it is the result of private capitalist firms aiming to maximise their profits. It is capitalism operating normally. Banks don’t cause this; they only channel spare capital towards it. So, restricting their lending won’t end this. In fact, it would probably — no, certainly — spark off a huge economic crisis. One good reason not to vote for the Green Party which swallows this nonsense too — they might even try to implement it.
Yet another experiment in a non-universal basic income scheme — you have to be poor to be eligible:
“Participants would be chosen by lottery and the criteria for eligibility were simple: applicants had to be over the age of 18, live in the city of Los Angeles, have one or more dependents, and be living in poverty according to the federal poverty guidelines.”
So just another scheme to tweak the Poor Law system.
“ the unstated premise here is that labour power always exchanges at its value (the so-called Law of Value).
Yes it is. Or, to be more precise, tends to do so in the long run with fluctuations below and above cancelling each other.
In challenging this you are challenging a key concept in Marxian economics — that labour power is a commodity whose price reflects its value. You seem to have argued yourself into the corner of saying that the value of labour power is only what is “necessary” to keep a human alive. But it is much more than that. It is the cost of what is necessary to reproduce and maintain the ability to do a particular job. This cost is the money cost of living. Which is much higher than bare subsistence, the poverty line or the minimum wage. The vast majority of workers get more than these because the value of their particular kind of labour power they are hired to exercise is (due to ability, training and/or the kind of work they do) higher than this.
If you really are saying that most workers are able to get themselves paid more than the value of what they are selling then you need to explain how they are in so powerful position compared with other commodity sellers who are unable to do this.
In fact the link between wages and the cost of living is so empirically obvious that even non-Marxian economists recognise it. Here, for instance, is Investopedia:
“The cost of living is the amount of money needed to cover basic expenses such as housing, food, taxes, and healthcare in a certain place and time period. The cost of living is often used to compare how expensive it is to live in one city versus another. The cost of living is tied to wages. If expenses are higher in a city, such as New York, for example, salary levels must be higher so that people can afford to live in that city.”
Or have you some other explanation as to why wages in New York are higher?
The Marxian theory of taxation is really a corollary of the Marxian theory of wages as the price, reflecting the value, of labour power. As is the theory that anything provided free or at a subsidised price won’t lead to a permanent increase in the standard of living of workers as it will eventually lead to lower money wages.
I suppose people find this counter-intuitive because an increase in tax, direct or indirect, does leave them worse off in the immediate just as a free service or a state handout (like UBI would be) or less expensive imported food makes them better off for a while.
But is it all that difficult to explain or understand that, due to the operation of market forces, these will only be temporary? In any event, those on both sides — employers and unions — who negotiate wage rates understand this perfectly, the one side pointing to price increases the other to measures that mitigate this, in the course of reaching a deal.
And would be filled up with twice the number a few weeks later such is the desperation of many people to try to get a better life.
My guess would be that the most likely “solution” would some processing (and maybe detention) centre in France with all the Iraqi Kurds and others who don’t qualify as “refugees” being rounded up and shipped back.
But if we are in the game of thinking up ideal solutions within capitalism, how about ending sanctions on Syria and Iran or the support given for Saudi bombing in Yemen?
Unfortunately capitalism is capitalism. Geopolitics, wars and other conflicts of economic interest, together with mass poverty and misery are built-in to it.
All we can do is describe and record this.
The problem with your suggestion about what the capitalist state could do to deal with the problem (lay on air flights, instal in hotels, etc) is that many of the migrants cannot be classified as “refugees” under international law. A lot of them are self-confessedly economic migrants. It seems that most of those who drowned in that disaster were Kurds from Iraq. The Kurdish autonomous region there is probably the safest place to be in Iraq so I can’t see how anyone from there could meet the criteria for being a refugee under international law.
This is not to criticise them or say that they should be left to their fate as many are probably trying to join family members who were political refugees from when Saddam Hussein was oppressing the Kurds and who are already established in Britain or are even now British citizens.
In any event, I can’t see the point of speculating what capitalist states could do if they wanted.
Our case is not that taxes are not levied on things that workers buy or on wages but, wages being tied to the cost of living, anything that increases or decreases the money cost of living, including an increase or decrease in taxes, will affect the money wages paid. It won’t necessarily affect what workers consume, their standard of living, which will remain the same as what they need to consume to recreate and maintain their (particular type) of labour power.
This works both ways. The standard of living will not be permanently increased if taxes on what workers consume or taxes on their money wage are reduced or removed, as money wages will eventually adjust to the decreased money cost of living. The standard of living (what workers consume) will remain the same. So anything that decreases the money cost of living is ultimately self-defeating. It won’t increase the standard of living.
Similarly, the standard of living won’t be permanently reduced if taxes on what workers buy or on their pay are increased. In so far as this increases the money cost of living it will eventually lead to an increase in money wages, leaving workers with the same standard of living as before.
So, who benefits from a reduction in taxes or suffers from an increase since, in either case, the workers standard of living remains the same? On which class in society are taxes a burden? On who do they fall in the end?
Actually, in the period we are talking about (pre-WW1) this theory was employed more to show that a reduction in taxes on what workers consumed would not benefit them rather than to show what would happen if taxes were increased. The question of direct taxes on wages did not arise as it was generally accepted (by capitalists too) that workers simply weren’t paid enough to allow this ie that they couldn’t pay this as they didn’t have enough money to.
You introduce a new element by arguing that today workers are paid more than enough to buy what they need to consume in order to recreate and maintain their particular type of labour power:
“But what if the “necessary” cost of reproducing labour power is well below the average wage, as it is in most countries of advanced capitalism today?”
In other words, you are challenging the basic assumption that money wages are tied to the money cost of living as a worker, and are claiming that they are in fact higher than this.
But are wages really higher than the cost of creating and maintaining a modern worker’s labour power?
The floor is yours to try to make that case.
