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The comrade who produces the Grist digest of news items has found this about the guru of the 1980s RCP on a local online news website:
Today members handed out the leaflet at the start of the counter-demonstration:
“Minister backs defence firms after protests” was the headline of an article in the Times on 29 January. The minister in question was John Healey, the Secretary of State for “Defence”. He was reported as saying “at a dinner hosted by the ADS, a UK defence industry trade body”:
“Britain’s wars will not be stopped by boycotting its defence industry, the defence secretary has said, adding that those targetting companies that build weapons for the UK military have ‘flawed’ intentions.
John Healey said it was ‘unacceptable’ that the defence industry was being treated like tobacco and gambling firms. (…)
National security is a ‘precondition for economic security, investor confidence and social stability’, he added.”“Britain’s wars” may not be stopped by boycotting its “defence” industry but they certainly won’t be by the Labour government.
“Our job is to work with businesses to create the environment that allows them to thrive.”
Labour, Tory, Same Old Story has never been truer.
The front page headline in today’s Times is:
PM invokes Thatcher in promise to cut red tape
Starmer: I’ll clear regulatory weeds for businessIt’s about a short article he has written for them in which he writes:
“Our job is to work with businesses to create the environment that allows them to thrive.”
Precisely. That in fact is the job of any government under capitalism and which any party which takes office must do.
Revealing too that a PM question time today the leader of the Tory party complained that the Labour Party had stolen their clothes.
Best I can do. Perhaps there is someone else here who knows how to post the image directly.
That’s because it appears in a previous issue. Apparently that link takes you to page 3 of the current issue. I’ll see if I can find a way of publishing it here. In the meantime (and until next week) you can read about Jeremy Corbyn’s cat who has died.
Credit Unions are the simplest form of a bank where, as the article explains, its members pay in money which the union then lends out:
“The idea of a credit union has been celebrated as a way of helping people by pooling local savings to then lend to people priced out of bank loans by high interest rates or with a low credit score.”
The high street banks are run on the same principle of borrowing money at one rate of interest and then lending some of it to others at a higher rate.
As banks are supposed to be able to lend more money than they have by waving a magic wand, how come that this bank has failed? Couldn’t it have created some money out of thin air to avoid this?
Answer: No, because banks can’t create money out of thin air.
We tried to join in the discussion in the columns of the Islington Tribune about whether or not the Labour Party is socialist, but they didn’t publish it. Here is what we sent:
Dear Friend,
It is heartening to see people debating the meaning of socialism in your letters pages, even if it is the context of the actions and policies of a Labour government. As the late Tony Benn said: “the Labour Party has never been a socialist party.”He was right, the Labour Party is a consciously and determinedly pro-capitalist party. Since poverty and unemployment are essential, not accidental nor incidental, features of the capitalist system, it follows that any vote or support for Labour is a vote in favour of poverty and unemployment. The policies of the Labour Party can only ever be consistent with ensuring capitalists get enough profit to ensure their system can continue.
To abolish a system based on exploitation, poverty and unemployment requires putting the productive capacity of the world at the disposal of the human community: democratic control of the means of producing and distributing wealth. If any of your correspondents genuinely want socialism, that is the only policy they should be proposing and working towards.
Your for world Socialism,
Bill MartinA bit over the top? Way over the top with its theme of “The Nazi Regime Begins.
Trump, Musk, and fighting the fascist oligarchy.”He does have a valid point about the severe limitations of single-issue protest demonstrations. The quote from Vincent Bevins that “At its most basic level, a protest says, ‘I don’t like this—you fix it’” is a good one.
Luxemburg and the ICC are being entirely consistent with their belief that capitalism cannot exist without outside of the system markets, to conclude that when these markets come near to being exhausted the system will suffer from increasingly severe economic, political and social convulsions.
The trouble is that their basic assumption that capitalism does not generate enough purchasing power to buy all that is produced. It is wrong. The surplus that Luxemburg imagined could not be bought is in fact bought by other capitalists. There is no built-in shortage of purchasing power.
Capitalism certainly suffers from convulsions, always has and always will, but one question of fact that arises is whether or not these are becoming worse. So far we have not seen a world depression worse than that of the 1930s nor a world war worse than that of 1939-45. In fact, in other respects there have even been some improvements, as in the condition of women and a decline in colour prejudice.
From their contributions here, the ICC seems to be switching the emphasis from economic convulsions to other types such as the growing atomisation of social relations and the threat to the global biosystem, which are certainly happening but can be explained without recourse to Luxemburgian economics.
“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that really threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom.”
This can be recorded just like Eisenhower’s about the USA being dominated by the “military-industrial complex”.
Both describe what the US has long been.
By coincidence this weekend’s Morning Star has a pull-out supplement putting the point of view of the Leninist-Stalinist “Communist Party of Britain” in which one of its leaders, Alex Gordon, expounds a similar essentially financial theory of crises:
“Beyond profits extracted from surplus value, capitalists amass capital via bank credit and stock markets. Fractional reserve banking creates new credit many times the original deposits. Stock markets likewise multiply the value of the original means of production. Marx called this fictitious capital, since it separates from and achieves value far beyond the original productive capital. Fictitious capital feeds the economy and finances debt out of all proportion to the means of production it is based on. When this bubble bursts this is a crisis.”
This is wrong on at least two counts.
First, banks can’t lend more than they have in terms of their own capital, deposits and what they themselves borrow. They don’t create credit out of thin air. Bank loans are an investment of real capital. They are not “fictitious capital”. Neither is money raised by share issues. It, too, is a real investment of money capital.
Second, trading of shares on the stock market does not (when share prices go up) increase the “value” of the capital originally invested in production.
Fictional capital is transforming an income stream into a notional capital sum which if invested or loaned would yield interest of the same amount.
Shares are a form of fictional capital calculated from the expected future stream of income coming from the profits made by the capitalist firm in which they give ownership rights. They are traded in their own right independently of the value of the capital invested in production. An increase in the price of shares is not an accumulation of capital.
Similarly a fall in the price of shares is not a fall in capital accumulation. The reduction or even disappearance of fictional capital is not a devaluation of existing real capital. In fact it will be a reflection of this — the drying up of the source (profits) of the stream of income that is turned into a notional capital sum.
There are sometimes purely speculative increases in the prices of shares. When such a bubble bursts what happens is that the share prices return to a more realistic reflection of the stream of future income their price is based on. The real economy is not affected.
On the other hand, a change in the real economy such as overproduction in relation to paying demand and so of real and expected profits can provoke a stock exchange collapse, as in 1929 and 2008. In other words, it is a fall in real profit-seeking activity that provokes a stock exchange collapse rather than vice versa.
Debt crisis? Whose debt crisis? In any case this is a quite different theory of capitalist crisis and collapse than we have been discussing up to now. It’s financial rather than economic.
You talk about “the recourse to debt as a solution to the debt crisis” but a state finds itself in trouble precisely when it can no longer do this. Those with money are not going to lend it to a state they know or suspect won’t repay it. A state in this situation has either to declare itself bankrupt or drastically reduce its spending.
What are you expecting? For the US or Britain to go bankrupt?
This article from a recent Socialist Standard deals with the view that capitalism is supposedly based on unsustainable debt:
