ALB
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So he has gone and done it. The other thing is that if she is appointed she will have a say if the result of the election is contested and goes to the Supreme Court.
Another example of the flaws in “democracy” in the US — one of the candidates gets to appoint a member of the jury that will have to decide on the election result. That’s the sort of thing that the president of Belorussia would love to do.
She certainly knew her stuff. I thought this from the second article was good;
“There are those who accuse us of being, to say the least, “unpractical,” because instead of trying “to help where we can” we demand a revolution. I maintain that we Socialists alone are truly practical, because we alone dare to go to the root of the ill. Ask a doctor to cure a patient living under absolutely unhealthy conditiens in the midst of pestilential air and unsanitary surroundings. He will tell you you must change these surroundings if you would save the life of the individual. We but apply to many, to all individuals — i.e., to society — what the doctor applies to the one. We say so long as human beings are the slaves they now are — whether they be the slaves of wealth or of poverty — this disease must continue.”
And in fact the instance she was writing about of child prostitution is still a problem 135 years later and for the same reason she said : poverty forcing some children to sell themselves for sex.
A further attempt by the present Vote Leave government to emulate Trump and place its supporters in a position to pursue its agenda:
I know you don’t like the BBC, Alan, but you’re going to like it even less.
“Merchant capitalism”, where those with money invested it in trading ventures which make a profit by buying cheap somewhere and then selling it at a higher price somewhere else, did precede capitalism as we know it — the investment in production by wage labour to make a profit out of the unpaid labour of the workers (what Marx translations into English call “surplus value”). But essentially as one of the ways in which the original (“primitive”) accumulation of money that was the other condition to a landless proletariat for the take-off of capitalism.
I am not sure, though, of the extent to which the money acquired by merchant capitalists was invested in capitalist production in Spain and what we now know as Italy. Wasn’t it rather lent to the rulers of absolutist states? Somebody must know.
Yes, TM, your namesake described well in the middle of the 16th century, what was going on at the time in his Utopia with “sheep eating people” as people were driven off the land to make way for sheep raising for wool to export, so creating one of the conditions for the development of capitalism — a landless proletariat.
The Tudor State made some attempts to deal with this, eg the Poor Law, but basically it was obliged to let capitalism develop. This doesn’t invalidate that in the end the autocratic state that the divine right of kings sanctioned proved to be an obstacle to the further development of capitalism. Hence the pressure to overthrow it in order to permit capitalism to spread more and more rapidly Hence in England the Civil War or English Revolution or whatever you want to call it, which resulted in the victory of what later in France was called the “bourgeoisie”.
According to the Cromwell Association, there is some controversy about his social and economic status quoting one historian that
”when Cromwell lived at St Ives, as ‘his standing … was essentially that of a yeoman, a working farmer’, and he was “even in danger of moving down ‘from the gentry to the “middling sort”’. Morrill is quick to point out that Cromwell never actually left the ranks of the gentry – he retained the lineage, education and social network of the well-born – but, in economic terms ‘Cromwell was not, then, as he is often portrayed, the typical country squire’.“
Farmer Oliver? The cultivation of Cromwell’s image during the Protectorate
Not that it really matters any more than Lenin’s.
I was thinking, Wez, more of the 18th and 19th centuries than the 17th and said so. But how do you get from this “two types of capitalist” in the 1600s? That’s not my view. For me the landowning class is essentially the same as the aristocracy (whose privilege Clause 6 of our declaration of principles speaks of ending as well as plutocratic privilege).
I think, TM, you may be confusing ground rent with interest and/or house rent (which is a price). Yes, there are small capitalists living off the interest on the money they have invested either in shares or in bonds who are sometimes called rentiers. House rent is the price of occupying a house or part of it owned by a capitalist who has invested money in buying it.
Ground rent, on the other hand, is a payment that the owner of a piece of land extracts from those who want to use it eg to build a factory or a house or to mine minerals (when it’s called a “royalty”), the more desirable the land is the more they can extract. To get it, they don’t have to lift a finger or invest a penny; it accrues to them simply because they have property rights over the land. They are parasites on parasites, forcing the capitalists to pay them a share of the surplus value they get by exploiting wage-labour.
Two provisos. Most land is not virgin land but has had capital invested in improving it so that part of the income of a landowner is interest on this.
Second, while this was the system of landownership that existed in Britain, in other parts of Europe different systems existed giving a different class configuration, in particular a large class of peasant-owners.
“If landlords relied on land rents etc., does this mean feudalism was still the system of society?”
No. I don’t think so. It means that at one point capitalism was a three-class society.
In any event I can’t see how they can be called capitalists.
Seems that for Charles I, “L’Etat, c’est moi” and that’s what the “middling sort” was struggling against so that the state became them or at least their executive committee.
I would hesitate to describe the landowners of the 18th and 19th centuries as capitalists. Some were that as well, but the classical political economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo analysed the capitalist economy as involving three classes: landowners who owned the land (whose income was ground rent), capitalists who invested capital (whose income was profit) and workers who produced wealth (whose income was wages).
Marx inherited and worked with this, identifying ground-rent as a levy on profits extracted from capitalists for the use of a portion of the Earth that landlords happened to monopolise. There was therefore a conflict of class interest between landowners and capitalists which played out on the political field in the 19th century, with the capitalist class gaining more and more political control until finally assuming full control with the emasculation of the House of Lords in 1910. Since then, I think it can be said, the landlord class has been absorbed into the capitalist class both through inter-marriage and through the investment of the proceeds of ground-rent in capitalist enterprises.
I would not say that the landlord class were feudal but that they were not part of the capitalist class. The royal family can be classified historically as members of this class rather than as capitalists. It would be interesting to know how much of the personal incomes of Charles I and Charles II came from ground rent as opposed to any profits from the commercial activities they might have happened to have been engaged in. Are there any studies on this?
If the Supreme Court dared to ban abortion all hell would break loose. I don’t think they will even with a raving Roman Catholic as one of them.
They can’t say they weren’t warned what would happen if they let the students travel all over the country to their universities. The lecturers union warned that this would spread the virus. And it has. And now they don’t know what to as they can’t led the students go back home now.
This government is proving to be a bunch of incompetents over this issue even from a capitalist standpoint. True, they are under pressure from sections of business and their delegates in parliament and as the traditional party of business they have to take this into account.
The Bolshevik themselves long thought that the coming revolution in Russia could only be a “bourgeois revolution” (they described both 1905 and March 1917 as that) in the sense of establishing a democratic republic within which capitalism and the working class could develop further and that it would be this even if the worker-peasant alliance they advocated came to power.
In fact this position is the origin of the theory, developed by later leftwing critics of the Bolsheviks, that the whole of 1917 was a bourgeois revolution without the bourgeoisie and even against the bourgeoisie. For instance, the Dutch Left Commuists who published a pamphlet under the title of The Bourgeois Role of Bolshevism.
I know we have taken this up but calling 1917 a “bourgeois revolution” still seems odd. A revolution carried out on behalf of the bourgeoisie from which they came to benefit is one thing and a revolution which annihilated them as such is another.
At the end of the 1920s with the Bolshevik government in difficulties many thought that the private capitalists who had grown up under the NEP would overthrow the Bolshevik regime and that this meant that a reconstituted bourgeoisie would be the beneficiaries of the revolution. Kautsky did. And so did Stalin who took drastic steps to stamp out this possibility. People also talked about the leaders of the Bolshevik party becoming a “red bourgeoisie” but that would be stretching things a bit even if this group were the beneficiaries of 1917. And of course 70 or so years later a new bourgeoisie did benefit from it.
A “state capitalist revolution”, leading to the rule of a new state capitalist class, might be a better way of putting it. In any event, it was a political revolution (fundamental change of who controlled political power) that paved the way for the easier development of capitalism — just like what happened in England in the middle of the 17th century.
By the way some capitalists did in fact support the 1905 uprising by letting their workers go on strike and by financing the revolutionaries.
He must be joking. How can they appoint a strict Roman Catholic who therefore takes orders from the pope on certain issues to the Supreme Court. Even on their terms it’s against the US constitution as the judges have to swear to uphold that and not take orders from abroad.
Daniel De Leon once write a pamphlet against “ultramontanism” which this would be. And surely it won’t appeal to evangelicals and other know nothings (or should that be Know Nothings?) who are part of Trump’s electoral base.
