ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
I wouldn’t deny that our “rites” as a group of socialists, eg big public meetings, rallies, don’t have the same opiate effect as religious ones. As humans are social animals you would expect humans to enjoy feeling part of a larger community.
Marx wasn’t of course religious but his criticism of religion was not that of those atheists who see it as a con for religious leaders to get a good living at the expense of their gullible followers. It was that capitalist conditions were so bad that they gave rise to the need for consolation— religion as “the heart of a heartless world” as he put it. And his answer to the pure and simple atheists was that their justifiable criticism of religion should give rise to a criticism of the social conditions that gave rise to the need for it as a consolation.
I was going to quote that sane passage from Mattick too as it explains well enough why and how “quantitative easing” raises stock market prices. However, his explanatoion as to why it has not caused general inflation is still based on the assumption that businesses have the ability to raise – or not raise — prices at will.
His argument is that, because businesses are making capital gains from the stock exchange boom QE generates, they don’t need to raise prices
“Basically, none of this costs business anything, while the rise in stock prices disproportionately benefits the small super-wealthy minority who disproportionately own stocks, so there is no motivation to raise prices—especially under the deflationary conditions of a global business slowdown—producing an inflation-free expansion”.
So, he is saying that businesses are choosing not to raise prices even though they could do. But why would they not do so if they could since that would enable them to make more profit, which after all is their primary “motivation”?
The fact is that businesses don’t have a choice in the matter. They sell at a price that the market can bear and in a recession the market will not bear an increa. Mattick in fact undermines his whole argument by adding “especially under the deflationary conditions of a global business slowdown.” Precisely. In other words, they don’t raise prices even with QE because they can’t. It’s not that they choose not to since they are already making enough money from capital gains on the stock market, but because they can’t.
The reason why QE hasn’t led to general inflation is that the extra money is injected only into the financial system but not into the general economy. So it inflates only the price of shares not prices generally, as explained in this article:
It is government policy to inflate the general price level by about 2 percent a year. This they do by increasing the supply of “basic money” (M0) in the usual way of allowing banks to withdraw money from their accounts with the Bank of England in the form of bank notes.
It seems it is beginning to happen — renewal energies becoming cheaper than fossil fuels— which is the only thing that is going to make capitalism switchover to them. So, it might not all be doom and gloom. However, to make full use of them there’s going to be a need for a larger and more efficient grid for distributing electricity which will be quite costly.
As usual good eg this bit about Keynesianism but there’s something towards the end that is odd (it’s the bit added in bold);
“Despite economists’ beliefs, what determines the scale of production is neither the human need for goods and services nor the quantity of money in the hands of consumers, but the profitability of monetary transactions or paid businesses. Goods are not produced in capitalism because people need them, but when they can be sold at a satisfactory profit. An economic recession signals a decline in profitability, which makes business owners uninterested in further investment on a scale adequate to employ the potential wage-earning population. The Keynesian idea was that governments could take (by taxation) or borrow the money entrepreneurs were not spending to expand production, to purchase goods or hire workers directly. This additional spending, by increasing demand, would “jump start” a slowed economy, leading to a return to prosperity. Under prosperous conditions, expanded profitable production would produce money available for taxation to pay off the government debt.
As we know, this is not what happened. Government spending did not in itself increase the profitability of private capital, since the money the government handed out for paid businesses for such products as fighter jets and bombs was taken from already-existing business profits, through taxation or borrowing. The most this spending could accomplish by recirculating uninvested funds was to tamp down the hardship, to businesses and workers alike, while the processes of the business cycle—basically, the devaluation of invested capital, including the liquidation of unpayable business debt, along with the decline of labor costs as unemployment rises—opened the way to an increase in profitabilityand the renewal of prosperity. Meanwhile, paying off the debt and the interest on it required taxing business profits, or further borrowing on the capital market, which raised interest rates, a cost for businesses. Businesses defended their bottom lines by raising prices; workers fought for higher wages to defend their standard of living, usually more slowly than the price increases to which they were reacting. Prices increased throughout the economy as different business sectors struggled to make others pay the costs of the debt: the dread stimulus-induced inflation.“
This is the theory that businesses cause inflation (a rise in the general price level) by raising prices. But businesses normally charge what the market will bear and how can the market bear an increase in prices when trade is bad in a recession? It can’t. So another explanation must be sought. The one we have offered is that inflation is caused by the government overissuing an inconvertible currency (what the Americans call “fiat money”); this causes the currency to depreciate reflected in a rise in the price level, Hence the result of Keynesian policies was inflation in a recession — “stagflation”
This article from the Socialist Standard of May 1919 describes the English Revolution in the following way:
”By the time the bourgeois had arrived at wealth, then, and desired to become the ruling power, the Crown had secured the powers of government into its own hands, but at the same time, the necessities of the regal exchequer had compelled the feudal party to concede certain privileges and powers to the new class, and in this way the former helped to dig its own grave.
At the outbreak of the Revolution the parties taking part were : The Court Party, the lords and large landed proprietors ; the merchants ; the small farmers or country squires ; the town shop-keepers ; the political adventurers or opportunists ; and underneath all the poor of town and country.
The actual struggle commenced in 1642, when the Commons strove for the right to control the militia, and so take the military power out of the royal hands. In spite of the refusal of Charles to grant this request the militia were rapidly enrolled and lord lieutenants appointed.
The Lords desired to limit kingly power, the Commons to abolish it. In the early part of the war the Lords or Presbyterian party predominated and the policy of compromise was adopted. Underneath the Lords, however, were the Independents, growing daily in strength, menacing the policy and position of the Lords, and eventually compelling them to go over to the Court.
The Independents appealed only to Reason. Institutions, laws, customs everything, was by them brought before the bar of Reason and called upon to order itself according to the will of man, i.e., mercantile man. Equality of Rights, the “just” distribution of social property, was their cry.
The principal figure in this party was Oliver Cromwell, a country squire of Hundingdonshire. Cromwell was a descendant of the unprincipled adventurer chosen by Henry VIII. as his chief instrument in the confiscation of the monastic lands, in which, process Cromwell the elder succeeded, by embezzlement, in amassing an enormous amount of wealth. Cromwell’s parents had further augmented the monastic spoils by the profits derived from a lucrative brewery business. Such were the origin and connections of the man who was to lead the wealthier merchants to victory.
He organised a band of religious zealots drawn from the ranks of farmers and tradesmen, who contributed much to the earlier successes of the Parliamentary forces and also considerably exalted the power of their commander.
As the war progressed the Independents gradually gained the ascendant, and Charles I. was executed Jan. 30, 1648.
By 1649 the Independents had become strong enough to declare a commonwealth with a single House of Commons and Council of State, Cromwell managing to manoeuvre himself into the position of Lord Protector. The final working out of this was that all the executive power was centred in his hands. Then commenced the much desired epoch of the Merchants.“
So now it’s Trump who’s the Lesser Awful.
By accident I came across the first post in this thread thinking it had just been posted and thought you were being a bit bold when I read:
“I now make another new prediction…Trump will win his second term against Biden is Sleepy Old Joe.”
But then I checked the date and noticed the opening line:
“Well, never place faith in any of my predictions.“
Here is the considered position we took up at the time. Basically, that it was up to the Spanish workers to decide what to do in the circumstances. We respect their decision whatever our doubts.
”Whether the Spanish workers were wise in participating in a struggle so costly in human lives may be debatable, but as they have decided to take the plunge, and as they have the most violent partisans of capitalism against them, Socialists are, of course, on their side. It must be assumed that the Spanish workers weighed up the situation and counted the cost before deciding their course of action. That is a matter upon which their judgement should be better than that of people outside the country.”
It looks as if the alarmists have it, then. Not that those that say they think this are going to get up and do anything about it — because they don’t think anything can be. Alarmism tends to have that effect.
Interesting. No wonder he had no compunction after the war in giving a list of state-capitalist Russia’s fellow travellers to British intelligence. For which he has often been criticised — by other admirers of Russia.
By the way, by coincidence there is a talk and discussion in Orwell this Friday at 7.30 on Discord.
“Marx and Engels are Marcos’ gods, after all.”
I don’t think they were as he made clear Anyway, you and Robbo have driven him off this forum,
“I also wonder ALB just how much of it was related to their disputes with Bakunin.“
Possibly, as Bakunin had some nasty things to say about Germans and Jews, especially German Jews. But I think it will go back more to the revolutionary wave in Europe in 1848 which Marx and Engels took part in as in effect radical bourgeois democrats and German nationalists (as they mistakenly believed that a bourgeois revolution in Germany would be quickly followed by a proletarian one), Engels even as a fighter. German democrats and radical nationalists regarded Russia as a major threat should they have won.
Our 1950 pamphlet quotes Engels as writing that at the time:
” Our foreign policy was simple: support for every revolutionary people, call for a general war of revolutionary Europe against the great mainstay of European reaction, Russia …”
I think that sticking to this position will have been at the root of their mistakes: Marx’s paranoia about Russia and Engels’s completely unacceptable comments about various Slav peoples.
You are exaggerating again TM. I don’t know why. Engels was both out of order and proved to be wrong on this matter but he didn’t go as far as you are trying to make out, mirroring professional “anti-communist” websites.
The words “peoples without history” is more usually rendered as “non-historic peoples” which, according to this article, meant peoples that did not have the capacity to constitute an independent nation-state. Which is not at all the same as saying that the peoples he had in mind did not have a history. He was well aware that the Czechs in particular did as he wrote about it elsewhere.
At the time the peoples (language groups) he was talking about were largely subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Independently of Engels, it was not the policy of the Social Democrats there to support the breakaway nationalism of the Czechs and Croats.
After the first world war artificial states such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were set up but didn’t last the century.
I think that the violent language Engels still employed after 1848 in private about them would have been due to the fact that it was troops from these peoples that were used to put down the revolutionary wave in the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1848. It seems he never forgave them. He should have of course since you can’t hold people responsible for what their ancestors did.
So he was not talking about China or Mexico as these were already established states and he was certainly not saying that China had no history. As to American Indians, although it could be said that they didn’t have the capacity to become an independent nation-state, that had nothing to do with it. In fact in his The Origin of the Family, Property and the State he was quite sympathetic to them as was Lewis Henry Morgan on whose work he based a large part of his pamphlet. He recognised that they had a history and wrote about it.
As I said, I don’t understand why you want to be put the worst possible interpretation on the mistakes Marx and Engels made, in line with those who seek to use these to malign the whole idea of socialism.
That’s a later, revised edition brought out in 1970 but with the cover of the 1950 one. I have dug out my copy of the 1970 one with a view to sending you its front cover to put there instead. I will send you it later today. The text if the 1950 version is not there .
“A techno-feudalistic society”
Another example of how the word “feudalism” has come to be associated with directly political forms of economic exploitation. It was the ideologists of bourgeois revolutions that made “feudalism” a dirty word, so using it in this way is a tribute to their success. There are better words to describe this sort of thing, which don’t give credit to these ideologues and which they won’t like, such as “crony capitalism” and “oligarchy”.
Incidentally, I think the old Deleonist SLP of America used to call the state capitalist USSR “industrial feudalism”.
Yes, that is where we have explicitly stated that we disagree with the political stance taken up by Marx and Engels and that they were wrong.
Their justification for taking up these positions was that Tsarist Russia was a threat to the “European Revolution” by which they meant not the socialist revolution but the revolution to establish and consolidate capitalist political conditions, ie political democracy in a nation- state, throughout Western and Central Europe.
This led them to take up the aberrant political positions you mention — and other such as support for the Franco-British-Turkish side in the Crimean War, opposition to all Slav nationalism (except Polish — they saw an independent Poland as a buffer between Tsarist Russia and Europe ) since those speaking Slavic languages and practising Orthodox Christianity were seen as actual or potential tools of Russia, taking sides in European wars (in fact in all wars as in the US-Mexican one you mention).
Marx had what can be called an obsession about Tsarist Russia, arguing that it had been plotting for centuries to conquer the world and advancing a conspiracy theory that the British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston was a Russian agent.
What Engels wrote about the non-Polish Slavs was also completely out of order, though I think he meant they should be Germanised rather than literally exterminated. Incidentally, no wonder Kautsky should object as he was half-Czech and had been a Czech nationalist before he became a socialist.
In their attitude towards Russia and the other Slavs (except the Poles) they were behaving as old 48ers as those German bourgeois democrats and nationalists who were involved in the abortive German Revolution in 1848-9 were known. And they were wrong. But, as was to be expected, they were products of their time.
The explicit repudiation by the Party of these positions taken up by Marx and Engels is in chapter 13 of the original 1950 edition of our pamphlet The Socialist Party and War. Unfortunately it is not in the pamphlet section on this site. Maybe I will scan it as it should be ( unless somebody else wants to volunteer).
