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Looks like the Islamist savages in the land of Isis are on the march again and another part of the relatively civilised world risks falling under their sway.
Labour thrilled at not losing:
Maybe if Caines hadn’t stood, the Greens might have won.
The Corbynists are seeing it the other way round. For example:
“I feel compelled to express my frustration with the Green Party’s decision to stand a candidate in this election. It was clear they had little chance of winning, yet their decision to run may have split the vote and prevented Jackson from achieving an even better result. To me, this highlights a level of selfishness that undermines the broader goal of supporting candidates like Jackson, who are genuinely dedicated to improving the commmunity.”
And even:
“Shame re green, socialist and other independent voters.”
It is true that the Greens only stood a paper candidate. No leaflets and just one letter in the local media. They didn’t seem to want to win.
Here’s the result in more traditional form:
POTTS, James Christopher (Labour Party) 785 40.4% (-22.0)
CAINES, Jackson (no description) 550 28.3% (New)
OSBORNE, Devon (Green Party) 219 11.3% (-11.2)
JONES, Rebecca (Liberal Democrats) 156 8.0% (+0.9)
WILKIN, John (The Conservative Party Candidate) 113 5.8% (-2.1)
POTTER, Brian Steve (Independent) 97 5.0% (New)
MARTIN, Bill (The Socialist Party of Great Britain) 22 1.1% (New)Turnout: 21.33%
We are only “new” in the sense that we didn’t stand in the last previous election but had stood there three times before.
In any event, a democratically-organised socialist-minded working class majority is not going to allow a recalcitrant minority of capitalists and a few of their supporters to impede the democratically arrived at will to replace capitalism with socialism. They would be dealt with, using armed force if necessary.
This has always been our position and one reason why we insist that the working class should aim at winning control of political power.
Incidentally, it is not us, the party, who would assume political control but the working class. There can be no question of a socialist party taking political control as a minority (as the Trotskyists preach). That wouldn’t and couldn’t lead to socialism, which by its very nature requires majority agreement and participation.
The Trotskyists are obsessed with the Russian Revolution, but conditions there — political as well as economic — have nothing in common with conditions in developed capitalist countries today, let alone with those which will exist when a majority of workers want and understand socialism. They are living in the past and posing irrelevant questions!
If the ceasefire works it can only be welcomed. As we said in the Peace Manifesto we issued in the middle of WW1:
“Every Socialist must, therefore, wish to see peace established at once to save further maiming and slaughter of our fellow Workers. All those who on any pretext, or for any supposed reason, wish the war to continue, at once stamp themselves as anti-Socialist, anti-working class, and pro-capitalist.”
Here’s Corbyn saying that his candidate will win:
I wouldn’t say Werner’s views were “interesting”. They are just bog standard currency crankism by someone who has someone managed to get the title “Professor” to go with his name which gives them a credibility they don’t deserve.
His views are dealt with in chapter 4 of our pamphlet The Magic Money Myth entitled “The Pure ‘Thin Air’ Theory of Banking’.
According to this, a meeting to protest against the erection of a tower block in the ward was held on Tuesday 19 November to which it had been announced that candidates in the by-election had been invited:
https://www.savearchwaycampus.org/news/community-rallies-against-plan
Apparently the Labour, Corbynist and LibDem candidates spoke at the meeting. So either the other 4 candidates weren’t invited, turned down the invitation, or didn’t speak.
Our candidate did not receive an invitation. We have contacted the presumed organisers for more information, asking to where any invitation was sent.
If we had known about the meeting we would at least have leafletted it.
The position our candidate would have expressed would have been along the lines of the (unpublished) letter to the Islington Tribune in message #254865 above.
Found the passage you are referring to:
“If the bank has found from experience that it only ever needs to retain 10% of deposits as cash to meet the needs of its customers, then it can loan the remaining 90%. So, here, if the bank starts out by loaning £10,000 to B, who uses it to buy a lathe, this loan appears as £10,000 of bank capital, against which the bank can then make additional loans. So, on this basis, it may make a further loan of £9,000, to C, which then also appears as additional bank capital. The bank can then make an additional loan of £8,100 to D, which then appears as additional bank capital making possible a loan to E and so on. Instead, of just issuing a loan of £10,000, this initial bank capital of £10,000 enables the bank to issue loans of up to £100,000, and each of these appear on its books as capital, whilst in fact this £100,000 is only fictitious capital, it is only able to earn interest to the extent that the money loaned out is used to buy productive-capital, and thereby generate surplus value.”
https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/12/fictitious-capital-part-4.html?m=1
The first sentence is correct but what follows is not. If a bank lends a capitalist £10,000 to buy a lathe, when the capitalist actually buys the lathe then the bank has to transfer £10,000 to the bank of the person who sold it. The money has then gone. The asset represented by the IOU from the borrower has been liquidated and cannot be used to make another loan of £10,000 (In fact, the initial loan could only have been £9,000 but we can let that pass.)
There is, however, one circumstance under which theoretically it could — if the seller of the lathe happened to bank with it. There would then be a fresh deposit of £10,000 and the bank could lend 90% of this, ie £9,000. If the seller again happened to bank with it then it would have a new deposit of £9000, of which it could lend out 90%, or £81,000. This process could continue (assuming the sellers always banked with it) until total loans of £90,000 had been made. But this would have been balanced by total deposits of £100,000.
Of course this is a quite unlikely, not to say impossibke, scenario for a single bank but, applied to the banking system (all banks) it is the theory of fractional reserve banking which used to be taught in university economic courses. It is not incorrect but doesn’t mean what it is sometimes interpreted as meaning that (with a cash ratio of 10%) a single bank could lend 9 times an initial deposit.
Michael Roberts in that blog from 2014 does indeed seem to be putting forward a thin air theory of banking even if he doesn’t call it that — as the “bank capital” he bases it on does disappear as soon as the borrower spends the loan and the bank has to transfer money to the seller.
This is explained in chapter 5 of our pamphlet The Magic Money Myth:
I don’t know if he still adheres the view he expressed in 2014 but in a later blog he explicitly repudiates the thin air theory of banking embraced by David Graeber:
The LibDem candidate puts in a belated appearance:
From last Wednesday on the last 900 leaflets were distributed, bringing the total number distributed to 2950, covering every letter box in the ward not behind a gate or in a block of flats with no free entry.
So that part of our campaign is over. All we will be doing now is intervening on social media such as, if anyone wants to join in:
https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1081857983939883&id=100063470743031
Junction ward by-election – Thursday 28 November 2024
byu/comrademikey inislingtonPolling date is next Thursday with the result being announced within a couple of hours of voting closing at 10pm.
This weekend’s i paper has an article entitled “Banks accused of ‘ripping off’ savers over interest rates”. Amongst those making this accusation is Positive Money:
“Simon Youel, head of policy and advocacy at research and campaign group Positive Money, said: ‘Banks have made record profits from increasing interest rates for borrowers while paying depositors insultingly small rates on their savings.’”
This is true but it is odd coming from an organisation which denies that banks are financial intermediaries borrowing from some at one rate (savers) and lending to others at a higher rates (eg mortgages) and claims that banks can create money out of thin air simply by making a loan.
If this claim was true then banks could make even bigger profits by simply creating the money to loan so avoiding having to attract and pay interest to savers. But the fact that they do need to attract savers shows that the claim is not true.
But then currency cranks are nothing if not illogical.
I’d also suggest instead of having “how we are different” from other parties, instead we should have “Why X doesn’t work”.
Actually, we do have something on our website that does this (even if it is not very easy to find):
