ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Just heard on the news that non-entity who took over when Boris was in hospital (I think he’s called Raab) denounce the Russian state for trying to get hold of the research for an anti-Covid-19 vaccine:
”While others pursue their selfish interests with reckless behaviour, the UK and its allies are getting on with the hard work of finding a vaccine and protecting global health.”
He makes it sound as if an attempt had been made to hinder research that was being carried out on behalf of humanity. But as the headline makes clear it would have been an attempt to “steal” research results ie to get access to information that was secret and was in fact being carried out not to help humanity by “protecting global health” but to make money even if out of doing this. The situation is that rival capitalist groups are in a race to be the first to find and no doubt patent an effective vaccine and to make a profit from it.
So if anyone “steals” these research results and makes the public they would be doing humanity a favour. Even if the Russian state was doing it to get access to the vaccine more cheaply than otherwise to deal with cases in their part of the world that wouldn’t be pursuing their “selfish interests” any more than those who are keeping their research secret.
I think this has been mentioned here before but methane is only more “potent” than CO2 in a particular defined sense. See:
The other side of the coin is that as it only lasts in the atmosphere for 12 or so years (while CO2 lasts for much longer) its effects are easier to reverse. It’s CO2 emissions that are the biggest problem.
Revealing comment by an unnamed Cabinet member in today’s Times which shows that the decision to make masks compulsory has not been taken entirely on scientific medical grounds:
”Downing Street had insisted previously that shops did not require the same rules as trains and buses, but a cabinet minister said that encouraging the use of masks would also help to bolster public confidence as the government tried to tempt people back to work.”
It wasn’t “Europeans” who were to blame for the slave trade of course but capitalism and individual capitalists from Europe. The mass of people in Europe were as innocent of this as the mass of Africans were of selling slaves to the traders.
Someone has sent an email drawing this article from a Jamaican newspaper to our attention;
http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/focus/20151025/africas-role-slavery
I didn’t know all that. I knew that African rulers sold slaves to be shipped across the Atlantic but not that they lobbied against the abolition of the slave trade nor that they carried on until the 1880s.
Comment from a comrade in the south of Ireland:
”I read a little about the Green Party going into Government but to be honest I don’t think there’s a hugely significant amount of politics in this. They’re a centrist, capitalist party with an emphasis on the environment; nothing that the system can’t accommodate.”
Well, the pro-US section of the capitalist class beat the pro-EU section both in the 2016 referendum and in the general election last December and so get the power and legitimacy to implement their policy. So there’s going to more of these sort of restrictions to trade and barriers to travel to the Continent. The pro-EU capitalists are just going to have to lump it like the rest of us.
Elections are how the capitalist class settle disputes amongst themselves and why they attach importance to who controls political power. Our view too of course and why we say that the workers should aim at getting control of it too, both to take it out of the hands of the capitalist class and to use it to play a key role in the socialist revolution from capitalism to socialism.
https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/tolpuddle-martyrs-festival-2020-goes-online
There doesn’t seem to be any provision for online stalls !
The government has just announced, via that oddity Gove, that it is going to spend £705 million to make the border with the rest of Europe “the world’s most effective and secure border”.
https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-politics-53375713
What a waste and what an unnecessary inconvenience for ordinary people wanting to travel to the Continent and back. Less border controls not more would be better for them.
It reminds me of a Minister some years ago returning from Brussels and announcing that he had secured Britain’s exemption from some agreement amongst other EU member states abolishing border controls between them. He trumpeted this as a good thing but it meant that people from Britain would have to go through the hassle of queuing to show their passport to get back in while in large parts of Europe people could move from country to country as if there wasn’t a border.
It meant in fact that the border posts fell into disuse and became overgrown with weeds. Now that was good news about borders and is what will happen to them everywhere when we get socialism.
It seems that the government has decided to encourage, perhaps make it obligatory, for people to wear masks as a substitute for staying at home as this will not interfere so much with profit-making business activity. They know this will be less effective in stopping the spread of the virus than a lockdown but regard the extra cases and deaths that will result as a price worth paying.
They are trying to justify this in the grounds that capitalism is driven by popular consumption and so this needs to be revived (some of them may even believe this) but the fact is that capitalism is driven by business investment for profit. If this falls so does popular consumption as the main source of money for this comes from working for wages.
I am not sure to what extent they can be held personally responsible for the extra deaths as, after all, they are operating within the framework of a capitalist economy and such an economy can’t keep going for long unless profits are being made.
Good point. I read more into the ruling than was there. It’s not making the land the property of the tribes just a re-arrangement concerning which department of the US state deals with criminal cases involving members of the tribes.
Here’s the bad news. They like all landowners will be expropriated when socialism comes and all that is on and in Earth becomes the common heritage of all humanity rather than the private property of some rich individual or some group.
Yes, we are getting there. If Marx hadn’t added the bit at the end about issuing £1 notes being a “trick” well known to bankers, the passage could have been taken as a something that was theoretically possible. But the addition suggests that he was referring to something that had actually happened. Since he is talking about a situation where bank notes were convertible into a fixed amount of gold and since he specifically mentions £1 notes, this can only have been between 1821 (when convertibility was restored after the end of the Napoleonic Wars) and 1826 (when the issue of £1 notes was banned).
£1 notes had a bad reputation because they were considered as encouraging speculation and the Act that provided for the restoration of convertibility laid down that no new ones should be allowed to be issued after 1823. However, this was not implemented as bankers lobbied for the ban to be postponed, and it was until 1833. Bankers favoured £1 notes because it meant that they could lend to a wider group and so lend more (at that time bank loans took the form of giving the borrowers bank notes) and get a larger income from interest.
The extra lending that this led to was considered to be one of the causes of the financial crash of 1825 (the first capitalist crisis). Hence the ban on issuing £1 notes brought in 1826 Bank Notes Act.
In his ‘The role of Bank of England note issues amongst the causes of the panic of 1825’ George Pickering writes that “it was argued at the time that these small notes had played a significant role during the 1825 crisis, by raising prices, encouraging speculation, and driving specie out of the banking system” (emphasis added; ‘specie’ meaning gold).
This last was precisely the point Marx was making that, with a currency composed of gold coins and convertible paper money, the amount of currency could not be increased beyond what the economy needed and that any attempt to do so by issuing more paper money would merely lead to less gold coins circulating. He chose to use £1 notes as the example because this was what had happened in the period 1821-26 as a result of bankers having successfully lobbied for the postponement of the ban on issuing £1 notes that was supposed to have come in in 1823.
So Marx did not make a slip; he deliberately chose to mention £1 notes in view of their dodgy reputation.
What he was not suggesting was that the gold coins that were driven out of circulation ended up in the pockets of the bankers. What they gained was more income as interest on the more loans that £1 notes enabled them to make — until a lot of them went bankrupt in the crash of 1825.
Marx was not saying that bankers were all tricksters, as those who see problems that capitalism causes as being due to a flawed or fraudulent banking system claim. In any event, the “flaw” of banks being able to issue £1 notes was eliminated by capitalist legislation.
According to this, the Bank Notes Act of 1826 banned the issue of £1 bank notes and required their withdrawal from circulation by 1829:
https://encyclopedia-of-money.blogspot.com/2010/01/banking-acts-of-1826-england.html?m=1
It is significant that all the Newcastle £1 notes on sale date from the early 1800s and those after 1830 are all £5 or £10 notes. Incidentally, the person who made the forged one on sale there was taking a big risk as the penalty for forging notes was being put to death.
So no £1 notes would have been circulating in England when Marx was living there and writing Das Kapital (1850s and 60), though there will have been people alive who could remember them.
I still say it is curious that Marx should have referred to issuing one pound notes as if it was something bankers might do occasionally.
Did Marx make a slip or was he referring to a practice that dated from before 1826 (which, as Das Kapital was published in 1867, would be like us referring to what happened before the 1980s, e.g. pre-decimal currency and ten bob notes; which wouldn’t be unreasonable).
