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Bernard Bortnick visited our Conference in London a couple of years ago and got into trouble with the SLP for saying something there without authorisation. Although the SLP and us are relatively near on political positions and the language we use, there seems to be a huge difference when it comes to internal political culture. We are open, equals and democratic.
Oh dear. Bad side-effects seem to be more widespread than the above suggests:
But if you haven’t got a history of allergic reactions you should be ok to get vaccinated. But the anti-vaxxers are going to have a field day over this.
Reminder that that there are risks to everything from a letter in Monday’s Times from some law professors:
”The government announced last week that Covid-19 will be added to the vaccine damages payments scheme so that in the extremely unlikely circumstances that serious side-effects occur, compensation can be granted via this no-fault scheme covering people who have become severely disabled as a result of vaccination.
”There are, however, numerous problems with this scheme : the severe disability threshold requires a 60 per cent disability which is too high and not well adapted to potential vaccine damage injuries; the £120,000 payment under the scheme is inequitable in cases of serious injuries, and below comparable court awards.”
Of course this is not an argument against vaccination (any vaccination). But it would be a publicity disaster for the anti-Covid vaccination programme if some prominent person such as the minister of health who has offered to be filmed being vaccinated was to turn out to be the one in a million or more to suffer a severe side-effect.
Just heard Johnston say again that, in the event of a no deal, Britain (British capitalism) will “prosper mightily”. I bet the capitalist class are hoping that he doesn’t really believe this but is bluffing as a negotiating tactic.
It looks as if a post-Brexit trade deal is being held up over two issues, neither of which is of any concern to workers — the UK demand for “sovereignty” and the EU ‘s demand for a “level playing field” (fisheries is said to be an issue but it’s so insignificant economically that it alone wouldn’t hold up a deal).
A political area is said to be “sovereign” if its rulers have the final say in matters concerning it. In reality the only thing that states have complete control over is the use of their armed forces. Beyond that, when exercising their “sovereignity” they are in the same position as Marx said humans were in making history. They do exercise sovereign rights but not “as they please”, not “under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already”. Those circumstances are capitalism which is a world system, the operation of whose economic laws means that states are restricted in what they can in practice do. From a political point of view they have the “right” to make the final decision — and exercise their “sovereignty” to make it — but it will be a decision ultimately circumscribed by these economic laws.
Even apart from this, all inter-state agreements involve surrendering a degree of their decision-making power to some other instiution to make final decisions on whether or not the agreement has been infringed. In the case of the post-Brexit trade talks it was never going to be the European Court of Justice but it will have to be some other body whose decisions both parties will accept.
It should be quite obvious that the arrangements a state make to exercise its “sovereignty” are of no concern whatsover to workers.
The EU’s concern is more pragmatic. They want a “level playing field”, by which they mean that the UK, no more than its own member states, should not have a competitive advantage in selling on the Single Market by subsiding (state-aiding) any of its industries or imposing less onerous standars on them (as over workers rights or the environment). The main problem seems to be over future changes. The EU wants a binding committment from the UK to make roughly corresponding changes. The UK is refusing to commit itseld to this in a treaty as it regards this as limiting its sovereignty. They probably will keep up with changes but as a “sovereign” decision by an “independent” state, not something they are obliged to do.
In theory some pragmatic arrangement should be possible. It seems to depend on how insistent the UK Vote Leave government under Johnson is on having (or appearing to have) full, formal “sovereignty”. Will they give priority to something symbolic over being pragmatic? Will they turn out to be the prisoners of the rhetoric that helped them win the referendum? We’ll see.
“By capitalist medicine I mean medicine controlled by the profit system”.
So, only the misuse of medical knowledge under capitalism in the pursuit of profit. Fair enough and a relief too. I thought that we might have another crank on our hands who might want assessing and approving vaccines to be the subject of a popular vote.
“Capitalist medicine”? What is that? I thought there was just medical knowledge. If there is some other, “non-capitalist” medicine, what is it?
Brexit has reared its ugly head again and the media will be full of it for the next few days and no doubt we’ll be discussing it here too.
But one thing is clear whether or not there’s a deal. Come 1 January, the only benefit that being in the EU had for workers in the UK — more or less free movement with the 28 members states — will come to an end. From then on workers will still be free to visit EU countries but it will no longer be hassle-free as it won’t be for capitalist exporters either. Those who have got only a UK passport will have to have more papers and pay more. It’s a step backwards that will make life under capitalism a little more difficult.
To be quite frank, even from a capitalist point of view this must be one of the riskiest (not to say counterproductive) measure ever taken by a capitalist state. Giving up a bird in hand (hassle free access to a big market on their doorstep and a say in its rules) in the hope of catching two in the bush (increased trade through yet-to-be negotiated trade deals with further away states). It’s hard to see them pulling this off. But that’s their problem. Meanwhile workers in Britain suffer the collateral damage of decreased freedom of movement.
There’s another Marxist criticism of MMT on the blog that the CWO have an Libcom (not sure how they got to have that — must be their antiparliamentarism rather than their vanguardism). It’s quite good.
https://libcom.org/blog/mmt-bankrupt-theory-bankrupt-capitalism-13112020
I have just checked with an old UK passport I had and see I had travel documents saying that I have been vaccinated against cholera, yellow fever and smallpox. But they are no longer valid. The cholera one was only for 6 months, the smallpox for 3 years and the yellow fever for 6 years.
So it is feasible that they could do this for COVID-19 but I don’t think they know yet how long immunity will last or whether being vaccinated will mean you can’t be a carrier again.
Given the choice between cholera, yellow fever, smallpox and COVID-19 I think I will vote for the least evil and plump for Covid-19.
It’s all very well being woke but if I was a non-white raking in £180,000 or more a year (nobody’s labour power is worth that — he must be getting a share of surplus value) I wouldn’t go on about whites being privileged.
My first reaction on reading this was to look up how much Barnados chief executive is paid. Three years ago in 2017 it was £180,000. What’s that? Charity boss privilege?
There is also the international aspect which would make doing that risky and even counterproductive. If one state is inflating its currency more than others that will raise its price level more than theirs, making imports cheaper and exports more expensive. It happened all the time in the 1950s and 1960s leading to balance of payments crises and devaluations (especially under Labour governments, forcing them to claw back some of the reforms they had brought in).
It still happens now in the era of floating currencies that came in after Nixon took the US off the gold standard in 1971. There are no longer any devaluations; the currency just sinks in relation to others.This helps exports but also makes imports cheaper. So there can still be a balance of payments crisis that would lead any such application of MMT (or Keynesianism, traditional or neo) to fail.
This used to be called a “capital levy” and was proposed, even by some capitalists and supporters of capitalism, as a way of paying off a part of the extra National Debt incurred to fight the First World War. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone here in Britain will or perhaps already has proposed this as a way to pay off the extra debt incurred to deal with the pandemic. Any takers, Labour reformists, or would that be too Corbynist?
Anyway, this is what we had to say about it at the time:
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-capital-levy-1924.html
The “Job Guarantee” is not the same as UBI but it’s from the same stable, i.e., a scheme to guarantee everybody an income (even if a bigger one) even if they are not producing profits or anything. Also there is no incompatibility between MMT and UBI in that the state could decree into existence the money to pay UBI. In fact I daresay that there are some UBIers who are also MMTers.
The trouble with both reform schemes is that they don’t take into account the economic laws of capitalism as a system of production for profit by wage workers. If the state guaranteed every able -bodied worker a job that would put workers in a stronger bargaining position with employers and reduce profits. I know this is a reason why some MMTers say leftwing reformists should support it, but it’s actually a reason why it will not be introduced and, if it was, wouldn’t work.
To refute an MMTer who claimed that MMT was compatible with Marxism, I would emphasise (apart from the obvious point that Marx envisaged socialism/communism as a society which wouldn’t need money) the different theory as the nature of money — its commodity origin rather than as an act of state.
More generally, Lapavitsas and Aguila put the case against MMT well in that paper that they wrote:
“MMT is also right to assert that the state can never run out of finance since it can always create fiat money, but that again barely goes to the heart of the matter. The formalities of constructing a budget and the mechanics of operating the bank account of the state do not alter the underlying principle that there are three fundamental ways for a capitalist state to finance its expenditure, namely creating fiat money, imposing taxes, and borrowing. All three methods amount to claiming resources produced by others, and it is entirely arbitrary to privilege one, i.e., issuing fiat money, over the rest. (…)
Financing expenditure purely with central bank fiat money appears to lie entirely within the discretionary power of the state. However, creating fiat money could always disrupt the operation of the unit of account relative to the spontaneous measurement of commodity values. Inconvertible central bank money was accompanied by sustained inflation in much of the developed world in the 1970s and 1980s. Moreover, the easy availability of central bank money could also disrupt the paying and hoarding functions of credit money since it could destabilise the financial system, generate bubbles, and lead to crises with profound distributional implications.” (page 16).
