ALB
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Yes I remember climbing up the stairs to see the view from the top. So that must have been before 1966.
The jury is still out as we don’t know yet whether or not there will be a second wave in those states that pursued a more or less strict lockdown, but it is looking as if the herd immunity policy pursued by the Swedish government on the advice their own mad professor has resulted in more deaths per person than in other states:
https://www.bostonherald.com/2020/06/08/sweden-backtracks-on-its-low-pain-coronavirus-plan/amp/
In any event, the admirers of the Swedish government’s approach have gone silent.
Meanwhile down the road at the stock exchange;
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/business/recession-stock-market-coronavirus.amp.html
It seems that capitalist investors are banking on pharmaceutical and technology companies making fat profits in a post-virus world. Think vaccines, drugs, working from home, and online shopping.
And the recession that came wasn’t the one that was anticipated. It was not the result of the normal operation of the capitalist economy but was deliberately brought about by government action to deal with a pandemic.
This was a stroke of genius in terms of good publicity:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-52954305
Much more intelligent than throwing bottles at the police and fire crackers at their horses.
I think we can expect quite a bit of statue toppling before and after the socialist revolution. There are plenty of generals and military “heroes” for a start, including one in the centre of London whose statue in Dublin was toppled some years ago.
So what? British workers are reluctant to work picking fruit and vegetables as it’s a shitty job that too is only done by desperate East Europeans.
But I thought a truce had been called between vegetarian propaganda and arguments to counter it. If one side won’t respect it there is no reason why those of us in the other side should either and the whole thing will kick off again.
More on the economics of golf courses in particular in Surrey in this old article from the Grauniad:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/apr/26/why-surrey-has-more-golf-courses-land-than-homes
Bijou, one reason why landowners and speculators prefer to use the land for golf courses rather than housing is that the Green Belt prevents houses being built there. Golf courses may be more profitable than agriculture but not more than housing. Developers are itching to build houses there but they are not allowed to.
The HuffPost has lent itself to a campaign by developers to be allowed to build houses on the Green Belt. And Shelter is being naive if it thinks that the houses that would be built on golf courses would be for the homeless, certainly not in Surrey for instance, They’d be luxury houses for stockbrokers and others who play golf.
Another reform of the post-war Labour government would bite the dust.
“The right to work is, in the bourgeois sense, an absurdity, a miserable, pious wish. But behind the right to work stands the power over capital; behind the power over capital, the appropriation of the means of production, their subjection to the associated working class, and therefore the abolition of wage labor, of capital, and of their mutual relations.”
Good description of socialism by Marx from 1850. But Lafargue wrote The Right to be Lazy in answer to the Right to Work as the Right to be Exploited. Which brings us back to UBI as envisaged by its more radical advocates who invoke Lafargue’s Right in support of it. Of course under capitalism it too is a “pious wish” even if not quite so miserable a one.
She makes one very relevant point when she points out:
“She called for people to be lifted out of poverty, pointing to its strong impact on the natural world, as people with no alternatives and who are desperate to feed their families will cut down forests to survive, and in urban areas will choose the cheapest food whatever the harm caused by its production, because they have little other choice.”
Capitalism will never “lift” everybody out of poverty as it is based on excluding the majority from adequate access to what they need so that they are forced by economic necessity to go out a work for the minority who own the means of life. Some get enough to maintain their particular high grade of labour-power and can afford not to buy the cheapest stuff available (and to do the noble things she urges them to do in the second part of the quote), but those without such skills and those who for one reason or another don’t or can’t find an employer or only one that will pay them shit wages don’t have this choice and have no alternative but to buy the cheapest food. Similarly, the excluded in developing capitalist countries are under the same sort of economic pressure to find a living in whatever way they can, be that cutting down forests or poaching endangered or protected species, or growing plants for the drug trade. That’s the way it is — and must be — under capitalism and so will last until capitalism is ended.
Under capitalism, as the bible puts it “ye have the poor with you always,” so there will always be these pressures and their negative effects.
Lesson: it’s no good telling people not to buy cheap food, or cut down forests or poach. People should not be working to try to make capitalism change its spots, but to get rid of capitalism and replace it with a world of common ownership, democratic control, production directly for use and distribution according to needs. Then there will be no “poor”. It’s the only way to abolish “poverty”.
These amounts are relatively trivial and are unlikely to have any negative effect on wage levels. In fact the amounts paid under the Alaska scheme are for most people about the same as the $1200 cheque the US government recently handed out and so too are unlikely to affect wage levels. You only get a significant amount if you have 3 or more children and then that would reduce any amount you might be getting under the US equivalent of the UK tax credit scheme.
Such payments are more xmas bonuses and in fact in Alaska are paid just before xmas. Crumbs for workers to pick up and eat without saying thank you is a better description than helicopter money.
A weekly payment to everyone of these amounts, on the other hand, would exert some downward pressure on wage levels. And that’s why UBI is a dangerous reform.
These articles deal with the antics of the Communist Party in the 1920s and with their attempt to pass off Lenin’s views about smashing the State as Marx’s.
Just added where Hardy deals with the antics of the CP in the 1920s and attempts to pass off Lenin’s view on the need to smash the State as Marx’s:
4 June, 2020: Added to the Edgar Hardcastle Internet Archive:
On illegal organisations, December 1921
The Collapse of Capitalism, February 1922
Socialism and Empire, October 1925
Socialism or Chinese Nationalism. A criticism from Australia, October 1927
The Irish elections. More Communist trickery, October 1927
Saklatvala on Socialism, May 1928
The ballot or the barricade?, May 1928
Ballot or barricade again, June 1928
Ballot or barricade? Mr Chapman’s last word, August 1928
Communist rioting, June 1929Good explanation of the two types of negative interest rates in Monday’s Evening Standard (I June), by HSBC’s Senior Economic Adviser, Stephen King. HSBC are of course against formal negative interest rates since, as he explains, this could threaten banks’ profitability but he explains clearly how banks work and where their income (part of which is profits) comes from. No nonsense about banks’ income coming from charging interest on loans conjured up out of thin air.
“Banks traditionally make money through the “spread” between the interest rate offered to depositors and the interest rate demanded from borrowers. With negative interest rates, banks would effectively have to take money, out of savers’ bank accounts, a deeply unpopular outcome. In the face of this banks might end up letting lending rates fall more than deposit rates, in effect cutting the “spread”. That, however, would lower bank profitability and reduce the volume of lending, the opposite of what policymakers would be hoping for. Borrowing costs would be lower, but a dwindling proportion of people would actually be able to get access to credit. The biggest objection to negative interest rates, however, is that they have the same redistributional consequences as periods of unexpectedly high inflation. In the 1970s, those with cash savings — pensioners, most obviously — ended up poorer as a consequence of inflation being continuously higher than interest rates. Now, the Bank of England is thinking of doing roughly the same thing, this time by making sure that interest rates are continuously lower than inflation (even when inflation itself is excessively low).”
It seems to be a case of Chauvin by name and Chauvin by nature:
