ALB
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This is bog standard currency crankism based on the ideas of the 19th century American currency crank Edward Kellogg. The author is arguing for the maximum rate of interest to be set at 1 percent. As you suggest, it shouldn’t really be on this thread but only the 100% banking one. The author is in fact critical of MMT.
Incidentally, the passage about banks in that review of Keen’s book is not Keen’s but that of the “neoclassicists” which he goes on to criticise. Despite their other misconceptions the “neo-classicists” are right on this one — banks are essentially financial intermediaries.
We had this debate in the Party years ago. One side argued that what was important was the Party case and it didn’t matter if it was printed on bog paper. Another in that school of thought said that there were no photos in Das Kapital. Others took a more reasonable position — that people will be more likely to read an article if it was accompanied by an illustration to break up a solid block of text.
You don’t want the Standard to look like the ICC’s “World Revolution”, do you.
Fitzgerald was referring to the anti-revisionist wing of international Social Democracy and by “Socialist and nothing else” he meant that non-Marxists should be excluded from future congresses like in particular the ILP in Britain (which was against invoking the class struggle and based its “socialism” on the Sermon on the Mount) and Jaurès in France who was little more than a leftwing bourgeois democrat. It was not a reference to advocating socialism “and nothing else”. Things didn’t turn out as he, writing in 1906, expected. In fact it got worse as the Labour Party, which didn’t even claim to be socialist, was admitted. That was why the SPGB decided not to be represented at future congresses, ie dropped out of the Second International.
As to the 2004 article, Luxemburg and Pannekoek would be the sort of individuals envisaged but many other, anonymous socialists. Incidentally, up to the outbreak of WW1, the mass extra-parliamentary action they envisaged was to extend or democratise the franchise ( even in Russia) and not to get socialism. I don’t know why you say that would be “an abomination” to us? We have often said that workers living in a state without political democracy should struggle for it. But how else could they do this except by extra-parliamentary mass action?
What’s worth noting is that, despite Johnson being as guilty as hell about breaking the covid rules and lying to Parliament, not a single cabinet or other minister has yet resigned. No wonder most people think that politicians are just in it for themselves.
I think the answer to my question is that you are not supposed to have access to iPlayer outside the UK and that technical measures to stop this are in place but which you can probably and with difficulty get round if you are a computer whizz-kid.
Anyway it’s all academic for the moment and it’s not planned to happen till 2028. That’s a long time, long enough for a Labour government to be elected which won’t be so open to pressure from the BBC’s commercial rivals who have been lobbying for the BBC’s wings to be clipped. But who knows with the Labour Party.
Isn’t that begging the question when the issue is whether what happened that day was a planned insurrection or a riot that got out of hand ?
Can’t you get it via BBC’s iPlayer which is free to join (though you are supposed to have paid the licence fee)? Or don’t they allow people from outside the UK to download it? I don’t know.
Lord Deben used to be known as John Gummer. He was environment minister at the time of the mad cow disease crisis and notoriously made his daughter publicly eat a hamburger to try to show that it was safe to eat beef. Luckily she survived.
From his Wikipedia entry:
“He had responsibility for food safety during the mad cow disease epidemic in 1989–90 which eventually claimed 178 British lives. At the height of the crisis in May 1990, he attempted to refute the growing evidence for BSE/Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease by feeding his four-year-old daughter Cordelia a burger in front of press cameras.”
No wonder he changed his name.
How about this for the dark future of the UK. As the Daily Mail says, maybe they should get the weather forecast right first.
Boris has had in for the Courts since the Suoreme Court ruled against a previous occasion when he tried to pull a fast one by suspending Parliament.
If Boris gets the boot his Brexiteer cronies like her will go with him and maybe the new PM will abandon the policy of undermining traditional Establishment institutions like the BBC and the Courts.
More reformist pie in the sky but that’s what think tanks seem to be be all about. Interesting though that there is a group in Britain proposing this too.
I see the situation in Germany is the same as everywhere else:
“The richest 10% own two-thirds of total private wealth (some €12 trillion in assets); the richest 1% own a third, while the richest 0.1% own up to a fifth.”
Why do these people not see that the solution is not a less unequal distribution of wealth but the common ownership of the means of wealth production so they can be used to turn out what people need and not for sale on a market with a view to profit?
Here’s Labour’s position on Ukraine. Why should we be surprised. They have always taken the side of US imperialism against Russian imperialism. And, despite the sham fight in the House of Commons, it’s, as the saying goes, Labour Tory, Same Old Story.
“In the first overseas trip by a shadow foreign secretary for two years, David Lammy chose to fly to Ukraine in a show of defiance against the Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Lammy flew with the shadow defence secretary John Healey to Kyiv today to meet ministers, officials, and civil society activists.
His choice contrasts markedly with the ambivalence about Putin shown by Labour during periods of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party. Corbyn was sharply criticised for his response to the Salisbury poisoning seeking more evidence that Moscow was behind the attack.
Allies of Lammy said it was vital that Ukraine understood there was cross-party support for its sovereignty across the UK.
The two Labour shadow cabinet members will not be visiting the areas of conflict in the east of the country.
Due to the Covid restrictions Lammy’s predecessor, Lisa Nandy, now transferred to the brief of levelling up, did not make any overseas visits, but as travel restrictions lift Lammy is determined to show his face abroad as much as possible. He already has strong personal contacts with White House Democrats built up since the Obama presidency.
To the extent there are any differences between Labour and the Conservatives on Ukraine, they centre on concerns the government’s integrated review on foreign policy placed too much emphasis on the Indo-Pacific, as opposed to defence of the Euro-Atlantic area. Labour is also pressing the Conservatives to do more to close down the loopholes that allow post Soviet oligarchs to store their cash in the UK.
Last week in the Commons Lammy defended Nato’s strategy on expansion saying:
‘The truth is that Nato and the European Union’s enlargement was not the west moving east, but the east looking west. These were free, sovereign states seeking a future of security, prosperity, co-operation and peace in a democratic Europe.’”Added to the Jack Fitzgerald Internet Archive.
Includes debates on “socialist industrial unionism” with the SLP and the IWW. Also one with TA Jackson, then in the ILP, in which Jackson puts arguments we still hear from Trotskyists and other reformists.
Emigration, June 1906
The Socialist Party of Great Britain and the Socialist Labour Party, August 1906
Debate on Industrial Unionism, October-November 1906
The Socialist Party and Trade Unionism, February 1907
The Rout of the Railway Men, December 1907
Bounteous Bournville, October 1908
Why This Resignation? The I.I.P. and its Leaders, May 1909
Mr. Garvey’s difficulties, June 1909
Labourism versus Socialism. A Debate, December 1909
Who supplies the brains?, February 1910A scientist warns of the danger of adolescent girls not eating enough meat.
