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The editorial in today’s Times talks about “Labour plans for socialist revolution” and says “Jeremy Corbyn’s election manifesto is a blueprint for a socialist revolution.”
Of course it is nothing of the kind. It is merely an attempt to put the clock back to the 1970s when there were council houses and nationalised utilities before Thatcher set out to undo all that the post-war Labour government had done. If Corbyn is a “socialist revolutionary” then so would Attlee and Harold Wilson have to have been too. But nobody called them that.
A real socialist revolution would see all productive resources transferred to the community so that they could be used, under democratic control, to directly satisfy people’s needs, both as individuals and as a community. There is nothing about that in Labour’s manifesto,
Someone on the BBC got it right when he described Labour’s manifesto as “radical reformism”. That’s more like it. Not that capitalism can be reformed to work in the interest of the many. All Labour governments, as government working within the framework of capitalism, have ended up imposing austerity through, for instance, “wage restraint” and “wage freezes”. We’ve seen the past and it doesn’t work.
“… capitalism is heading unavoidably, in purely economic terms, towards a final, insurmountable breakdown that is destined to strike much earlier than a zero rate of profit – and, indeed, that the next, looming crisis will at some point see all fiat currencies collapse against precious metals,…”
How many times have we heard that before ! It might have been the view of Henryk Grossman but it wasn’t that of Karl Marx, who pointed out that “permanent crises do not exist” (Theories of Surplus Value. Part Two, p. 497). Grossman purely mathematical demonstration that capitalism would collapse were refuted at the time by Anton Pannekoek.
Capitalism goes through an endless sequence of boom/slump cycles (periods of expansion and contraction or stagnation) in which the periods of slump prepare the conditions for the next period of expansion. There is no such thing as a permanent slump. There is no reason to suppose that the capitalist economic system suffers from a fatal flaw that will lead towards its purely mechanical breakdown.
By coincidence the WSP (India) has just sent a chapter of a book they are preparing on “The Future of Capitalism” which has this to say on collapse theories:
“(1) A recession is an inbuilt consequence of capitalism.
(2) A recession can invigorate capitalism.
(3) Capitalism is not likely to collapse of its own accord any time.
(4) If collapse theories were true, all socialists would need to do is to sit back with folded hands.
(5) Even if capitalism did collapse, it wouldn’t necessarily mean that socialism would follow.
(6) Inauguration of Socialism is the task of the working class and can only come about by the actions of a class conscious majority understanding and wanting socialism.
(7) Collapse theories therefore undermine the real work of socialists, just as do time and energy spent on reforms and alternative systems within capitalism such as cooperatives, fair trade, communes etc.”After the Liberals’ “pledge” (what is the difference between a pledge and a promise — a political pledge is just a worthless piece of paper) to “build an economy that works for everyone, not just the richest”, Corbyn pledges, in the foreword to their manifesto published today, that
“Labour will rewrite the rules of the economy, so that it works for everyone.”
But that’s precisely what the experience of all the reformist governments that there have been has shown cannot be done : the rules of the economy — the capitalist economy — cannot be “rewritten” to stop profits and profit-making having to have priority.
Where you have got class ownership of productive resources and production for sale with the aim of making a profit, definite economic laws come into operation which act with the force of laws of nature and impose themselves on governments, whatever governments may want to do (or have pledged).
Governments do not control the way the economy works; it’s the other way round. Governments have to conform to the imperative of allowing profit-making to continue unless they want to provoke an economic downturn. In the end, all governments are compelled to recognise and act on this. A Corbyn government (if it ever happens) would discover this is within a couple of years.
Capitalism simply cannot be reworked so that it works for everyone. It is a profit-making system that can only work in the interest of the few who live off profits.
The LibDems are not that nice. They are prepared to be nasty too. The non-entity who is their current leader is enough of a psychopath to be ready to press the nuclear button without hesitation. The good news is that she will never get the chance. The bad news is that someone else will.
Here’s how Lucian described the Christians of his day (the second century);
“The poor wretches have convinced themselves, first and foremost, that they are going to be immortal and live for all time, in consequence of which they despise death and even willingly give themselves into custody; most of them. Furthermore, their first lawgiver persuaded them that they are all brothers of one another after they have transgressed once, for all by denying the Greek gods and by worshipping that crucified sophist himself and living under his laws. Therefore they despise all things indiscriminately and consider them common property, receiving such doctrines traditionally without any definite evidence. So if any charlatan and trickster, able to profit by occasions, comes among them, he quickly acquires sudden wealth by imposing upon simple folk.”
No wonder their views appeared outlandish to the educated people of the time. Unfortunately they had the last laugh and suppressed the views of people like Lucian until they were rediscovered by Erasmus and others.
Lucian’s short satires are still worth reading today with his merciless denunciation of superstitions and the charlatans who peddled them whose equivalents still exist today.
The Passing of Peregrinus is a good example and can be found here
I noticed that in the match last night, when they were both asked what book they would give each other for Christmas. Corbyn replied quick as a flash “A Christmas Carol” so Johnson could identify himself with Scrooge. Johnson hesitated and fumbled the answer. I thought he was going to say another copy of Das Kapital but he didn’t. Anyway, Corbyn won that round.
In the meantime on the same day that the LibDem leader, some non-entity who imagines she’s going to be the next prime minister (the men in white coats must be waiting be in the wings to take her away to the place where others with similar delusions are kept), was telling the CBI that her party was the “party of business”, a leaflet from them came through my letter box which said:
“The Liberals Democrats will build an economy that works for everyone, not just the richest.”
They can’t have it both ways. Either they are “the party of business” and so support an economy that works “for the richest” or they are for the pipe dream of an economy that doesn’t. A pipe dream as no government can make “the economy” work for everyone as it’s based on profit-making and can only work in the interest of those who get richer and richer out of the profits businesses make.
Our election address for Cardiff has been approved by Royal Mail and is at the printers. If all goes to plan it will be delivered to the 45 500 households in Cardiff Central next Thursday 28 November.
Election addresses only need Royal Mail approval to see they conform to their layout design and don’t introduce surreptitious advertising. It is not censorship though too blatant racism is banned. Ordinary xenophobia is not.
Interesting that he stills retains a left wing perspective, And his defence of a reformist position is better than Kliman’s if only because it doesn’t claim to be revolutionary.
The LibDems are continuing their campaign to regain their old position as the main party of the British capitalist class or “party of business”. Here’s their leader and here’s their deputy leader pitching for this. We can let them, the Tories and Labour slog this one out. What about the “party of the workers”?
Fair enough but the Amit Pandya that wrote that article is an American lawyer. The Amit Pandya I knew happened by pure coincidence to live in the same street as me in North London in the late 1960s and so I knew him fairly well. I understood that he came from Kenya (one of the articles he wrote in the Socialist Standard was about that country) and that he had to go back there to serve in the Kenyan army to protect his family’s tea plantations (there was a law saying that companies there had to have a Kenyan national on the board). I always wondered what happened to him. Strange, though, that an American lawyer should be a member of the Labour Party.
Appears alright on my browser. The interview with Paul Mattick Jnr was in the October 2011 Socialist Standard and the one with Andrew Kliman in April 2014.
Sounds interesting. I wonder how the author handles the contradiction in Rosa Luxemburg between her mistaken theory of capital accumulation and how military spending supposedly helps capitalism from collapsing.
The trouble with Michael Roberts is that he stands for nationalisation of the banks and thinks that this has something to do with socialism.
Are we sure it is an ex-member? There was a member of that name but there are more than one person with it even from East Africa. Just put it in a search engine and see how many come up.
The Basque tourist board would say that, but, apart from being the oldest living language in Europe, it’s unverified — and unverifiable — hype. Nobody knows, and never will, what language cave men spoke and it’s certainly unlikely to be “at the seeds of articulate language”. Some people do talk nonsense but in this case I don’t suppose they really believe it.
I don’t know what the Catalan nationalists are complaining about. As far as their language is concerned— the only thing that distinguishes them from other workers — they have got full cultural autonomy just as they would in socialism. The only people to benefit from a separate Catalan state would be local capitalists who wouldn’t have to pay so much tax as they would no longer be taxed to pay subsidies to the poorer regions of Spain.
But there’s a risk it could end in tears if some idiots form a Catalan Liberation Front or a Catalan Republican Army and start assassinating people and throwing bombs around. The Spanish state, with its superior might, will react and the same sort of cycle of violence will begin that the Basque Country and Northern Ireland suffered and have only recently escaped from.
All for nothing, especially since Catalan-speakers cannot even claim to be oppressed because of the language they speak — and if they were the solution would be cultural autonomy not the establishment of a Catalan state.
