ALB
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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:
I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that there are a disproportionately large number of blacks in the US army. Of course they are trained to obey orders and would do so but that wouldn’t change how they might feel in private.
Very interesting. Confirmation of our view that not “All Coppers Are Bastards” which is the view of anarchoid groups like Antifa but are workers with much the same views as other workers.
Incidentally, I once stayed in Camden for a few weeks when one of my brothers was living and working there. It is virtually a suburb of Philadelphia which is on the opposite side of the river that marks the border between Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
A headline in today’s Times echoes the title of this thread: “Coronavirus has united left and right on value of universal basic income” in which their Economics Editor says:
”If nothing else, the crisis has proved that there is a role for a guaranteed minimum income. Recessions are indiscriminate and means-testing is intrusive and dehumanising, not to mention expensive (£8 billion of the Department for Work and Pensions’ budget is spent on administration).”
Of course a guaranteed minimum income is not the same as a universal basic income. That exists today (in Britain it’s called Income Support) but is not unconditional as it’s means-tested. The term is being used here to mean that an unconditional minimum income.
And the idea is that it would be paid through the tax system as a “negative income tax” ie anyone whose tax return showed an income below the minimum income level would receive a payment from the state to make it up to that level. Nobody else would notice anything dramatically different.
Not quite the same as everyone receiving a cheque or bank transfer from the state for a given amount. It would also be sort of checked up on as the tax authorise will presumably want to do at least some sample checking that the figures in anyone’s tax return were accurate.
But this, rather some radical reform that would supposedly undermine capitalism and aid the struggle against it, is the most that all the campaigning for UBI will end up achieving.
One of the reason the “right” want this system is that they prefer to give people the money to spend rather than provide free services for them. For instance, they would abolish free health care and give people enough money to buy private health care. A fact alluded to in the report from France as you why some on the “left” are opposed to UBI.
This is better :
Trump has said that he wants to add an organisation called Antifa (short for anti-fascism) to the list of terrorist organisations.
I am not sure he can do this by executive decision. I hope not because that would give the President dictatorial powers to ban any organisation he decide was terrorist.
For those who want to know more about Antifa and their policy and practice of street violence, last year the online magazine Poliquads, edited by a former member of the Socialist Party of Canada and to which Party members have been invited to contribute ( including this one), did a special issue on them. It includes a defence of their pretty indefensible position but people can judge for themselves. Here’s the link;
