ALB
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The privatisation that has gone on in the NHS has been to pay contractors an amount that allows them to make a profit from providing services to it, not (yet?) to directly provide medical care for profit. In this way health care remains free for patients. Except that dentists have long been allowed to charge and make a profit out of actually providing health care, which NHS doctors are not.
I don’t understand why you have posted this here and not in the coronavirus thread. Your point can’t be that workers in the meat industry have died from the virus, therefore become a vegetarian, can it? If so, what conclusion should be drawn from the fact that (many more) bus drivers have died?
Interesting new study here which brings out the co-evolution of tool-making and the human brain. Benjamin Franklin was nearer to the mark than he thought when he described humans as tool-making animals.
This is a key feature distinguishing humans from other animals and which has meant that human societies have changed along with the tools (instruments of production) they make and use. No other animal society can change in this way.
But like all other animals how humans procure what they need to survive shapes their behaviour, the only difference is that the others’ is unchanging while humans’ changes in line with the tools they use.
Negative interest rates, knowingly and voluntarily offered by the lender, mean that the lender is in effect paying the borrower to store their money; which would reflect the fact that the alternative uses of the money are more risky. This is what appears to have happened the other day with some government bonds ( which are loans to the government); some capitalists must be buying them because they don’t think much of the economy’s profit-making chances.
The government has also been reported as contemplating a negative bank rate ( as it used to be called) as the rate the Bank of England, as the central bank, pays commercial banks on deposits with or borrowings from it. In this case it would be a (probably forlorn) attempt to get the banks to lend more to productive capitalists by penalising them for letting their money lie idle . People will always want to borrow money for some money-making project but banks have to judge whether these projects are viable so as to be sure they get their money back. When profit-making opportunities are not good, the government can’t force banks to make risky loans. You can bring a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. as governments have repeatedly discovered.
Allowing inflation to reduce the real purchasing power of a loan is a ploy governments have traditionally employed to reduce what they have to pay back. This may happen with the loans governments have taken out to deal with the pandemic. But it would go against the practice of recent decades of favouring the lender rather than the borrower. Some reformists have been campaigning, with their calls to cancel debts with a “jubilee”, to reverse this and favour instead the borrower. Not much chance of that happening, I would have thought.
Forgot to add that all this confirms that what is important for the operation of the capitalist economy is the rate of profit not the rate of interest.
From a capitalist and a reformist point of view that Marx is right. If you want to help “the poor” why not simply tweak the welfare state instead of proposing a massive reform which will have all sorts of consequences and complications?
It is true that paying the unemployed a basic income whether or not they are looking for work would benefit them in that they would no longer be harassed by officials to report on their search for a job, etc. But if the scheme was just for them then it would no longer be a “universal” basic income.
In any event, governments responsible for running capitalist affairs are unlikely to agree to doing even this watered-down version as it would tend to undermine the wages system. As the report on the Finnish and other pilot schemes concluded, these schemes didn’t encourage people to seek employment. Which was why they were judged failures.
This particular reform like workers coops is no solution but it’s now something all “progressives” have to advocate. But both really are practicable diversions from what is the way forward and we should hammer them every time they rear their ugly heads, emphasising that what is needed is a society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of life, with production directly for use and distribution on the principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.”
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/how-ignorant-british-policy-inflamed-war-syria
Well, well. It was only Parliament that prevented Cameron doing a Blair and going over the top. So it does have its uses even under capitalism. In any event, more effective than extra-parliamentary marches and protest demonstrations which failed to stop similar action in Iraq.
Actually there is no longer a lockdown in England. Everybody can now leave their house as often as they like and travel in their car to Land’s End or the border with Scotland if they want.
The only rule now is “social distancing”. You must stay 6 metres (the length of two supermarket trolleys as they are helpfully pointing out in case you don’t know what a metre is) apart from anyone else. But even this is unenforceable outside shops and workplaces, where it’s up to people’s sense of social responsibility. You’re not supposed to invite anyone into your house not even close relatives but, if what my neighbours on both sides do on a regular basis is anything to go by, this is widely ignored.
Dave, was there one in Manchester?
It is being reported that the bosses of the profit-seeking businesses that run “academies” as schools that not under local government control are more eager to open them than those still run by local councils. Revealing confirmation of the pressure market forces exert to put profits before health.
What a bunch of time-wasting reformists ! Luckily they are not calling themselves socialists.
Incidentally, Chomsky’s comment on the review if his book in this month’s Socialist Standard can be found in the Feedback section here;
Chomsky has sent the following comment on the review of his book:
Thanks. It’s quite true that this talk (it’s a slightly expanded talk ) was not directed to the question of large-scale social change and what should we aim for (topics I’ve discussed extensively elsewhere). Rather, it kept to urgent issues that will have to be overcome largely within existing institutions, as comparison of time scales suffices to show. At the same time we should not abandon the Bakuninite task of building the germs of the future society within the present one.
“An omen? The Republicans win Congress seat in California from the Democrats.”
Of course under the undemocratic way of electing the US President, where the voters in each state elect representatives to an electoral college who then elect the president, a vote for the minority party in a state doesn’t count. What makes it worse is that (except in one or two of the states) it’s the winner takes all with the party with the most (not necessarily even a majority) votes in a state taking all its seats in the electoral college.
California is traditionally Democrat and it’s inconceivable that it would vote for Trump so any vote for the Republicans there is a wasted in the sense that it doesn’t count towards the election for the president (it’s not wasted of course as an expression of the voter’s political view). The same applies to all other parties. This has the advantage for leftists living in California and other safe Democrat states that they can vote for a minority party (like the new one mentioned on another thread) without splitting the anti-Republican vote. They can have their cake and eat it and vote Green or Progressive or whatever as this won’t split the anti-Trump vote while urging people in the swing states who think like them to vote Democrat.
The argument against meat-eating from the appalling conditions both for the animals and the workers in slaughterhouses under capitalism today is not an argument as to why humans should stop eating meat. At most it would be an argument against eating some meat under capitalism.
It is also unfair because I am sure Alan could trawl the internet and find many examples of the appalling conditions under which workers have to work today under capitalism to produce food from plants, on tea plantations or in processing factories for instances. But those conditions are not regarded as a reason for not it eating plants.
In both cases they are conditions that arise from capitalism and reflect its competitive pursuit of profits in which the firm that can produce the cheapest wins. These conditions would not exist in socialism.
The question “If you eat meat, would you be prepared to work in a slaughterhouse?” is similarly unfair. The same sort of question could be posed to plant-eaters: would you be prepared to pick tea leaves or root crops? In fact, would you be prepared to clean the sewers?
In other words, why can’t people take advantage of the division of work? Why do we have to be prepared to work at producing everything we use or eat?
In any case you are not going to get people to change their eating habits by criticism or argument. I wouldn’t dream of trying to convince a plant-eater to eat meat. That’s their choice. Them trying to convince people not to eat meat comes across as virtue signalling. Which gets up people’s noses.
J.O. has sent in this. He’s the second from the right. The rest of us are the one in front of him.
