ALB
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I wouldn’t either, not even for one hour. But who are the people that are so determined to vote? Are they Trump or anti-Trump voters? Are there any figures on this? Have the Republicans been encouraging and organising their supporters to vote by post?
That last paragraph is not your view I hope ! We know from the Corbyn experiment here that you don’t win elections — and that’s the primary if not the only aim of capitalist political parties— if you have a candidate considered extreme. If Sanders had been the Democrat’s candidate Trump would probably walk it.
Capitalist political machines know how to win elections. Generally speaking they know what they are doing. It’s the leftwing progressives and reformists who don’t. And even if they sometimes win we know that the operation of capitalism is going to impose its priorities in the end and their government will fail to deliver on its promises and programme.
We should leave capitalist politicians do their dirty vote-catching work without trying to second guess them. It’s not our concern anyway. Capitalist politics is a side show that can sometimes provide us with some amusement perhaps but nothing else.
Sorry, LBN, I think “do-gooder” is a perfectly acceptable derogatory term. It refers to liberals and others who want to do good to or for others rather than want the group they have taken pity on to act for themselves. Socialists are not do-gooders. We are do-it-for-yourselves-ers !
No section of the working class is privileged. The only people in society who are are those who own and control the means of life as this enables them to draw a non-work income and lead a privileged lifestyle,
The suggestion that some workers may be privileged arises from the use of the word “underprivileged” to refer to some groups of workers. This implies that other workers are therefore “privileged”; in fact it implies that the group designated “underprivileged” is itself privileged but just doesn’t have enough of it.
I don’t know who invented the word — probably some do-gooder reformist— but it’s a word that should not be part of the socialist vocabulary.
Thanks. You’ve convinced me. He is that bad. Just a common or garden left wing poseur who came up with a dodgy theory of language and wrote boring books on US foreign policy. Ok, he did write one decent book about manufacturing consent.
Did Chomsky really say that that’s what should happen — vote Biden and then put pressure on him to adopt “progressive” policies? I didn’t think he was that bad or politically ignorant.
In his reply to your article in the Lesser Awful he said that voting Biden was just a costless gesture. The test would have been whether he would be prepared to stand in a queue for an hour or so to do it. He probably doesn’t need to as presumably he lives in Massachusetts where there is no chance of the members of Electoral College from there being delegated to vote for Trump. He just wants voters in swing states to do that.
That’s a bit of a coincidence. John Oswald drew our attention to this here on 11 April. Did you get this from him?
And of course there is Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophical theory, expressed in his The Essence of Christianity which “George Eliot” translated into English, that “God” was humanity’s distorted reflection of their own powers which they had yet to realise that they had. God as one big Fetish, from which his contemporary, Marx, would have got his idea of the “fetishism of commodities”.
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.“
