ALB
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Actually Janet it’s not that complicated. You don’t need O level economics just common sense. Anybody can see that the only way that new wealth (things and services) can come into existence is by humans working on materials that originally came from nature. And that merely shuffling money, which is all they do in financial centres like the City, does not, cannot, create new wealth. All it can do is redistribute wealth that has already been produced by people working.
First thing, this is not cranky or conspiracy theory stuff but a genuine study (though the bit about the clerk from the City sitting at the table in the House of Commons is overdone; this is a historical leftover that shows that the merchants of the City did once have some special influence, but they don’t any more).
What goes on in the City of London (and other financial centres) is a redistribution of wealth (surplus value) produced elsewhere and so is a zero-sum game; no new wealth is produced so those capitalists and chancers who get wealthier do so at the expense of other capitalists and foolish workers who put some of their savings there who get poorer.
What I would challenge is the study’s view of the source of the wealth that is redistributed/gambled there. They suggest that it comes from the productive sector of the UK economy. Some will of course, but most comes from the surplus value part of wealth produced (mined or manufactured) in other parts of the world. The City is an international financial centre which attracts surplus value produced in all parts of the world and, in doing so, does contribute to increasing the UK’s GDP as a statistic.
The City has always done this but at one time UK capitalism also had a large manufacturing sector. This largely ran down in the 1980s when the then Tory government (under Thatcher) decided to give absolute priority to the City as a source of GDP income, mainly from abroad. This policy was continued by successive governments including that of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (so the study is right to say Labour has been just as much responsible as the Tories for prioritising the City over manufacturing industry).
Corbyn and McDonnell are promising to reverse this. If they are assuming that they can simply divert to UK manufacturing industry the surplus-value sucked by the City from abroad they (and the authors of this study) are in for a shock. Capitalism doesn’t work that way and the money that now flows to the City will flow elsewhere, e.g. New York, Frankfurt or Amsterdam. If Labour gets elected and their policy fails (as it will) prepare for the blame to be put again on “the gnomes of Zurich” as Harold Wilson did for the failure of his Labour government in the 1960s. Unfortunately we’ve seen it all before.
Oh good, we can discuss the policies too of this bunch of reformists. I thought this about Amazon being “anarcho-capitalists” which you posted on libcom was amusing (incidentally libcom’s forum seems as alive as ours, must be a sign of the times):
In particular:
Capitalism is failing in America, and Amazon is both the cause and beneficiary of much of the breakdown … In the most extreme form of capitalism taxes do not exist. This is called “anarcho-capitalism.” Among all corporations, Amazon may be the leading advocate of this philosophy. They haven’t paid federal income tax for the past two years.
So, Amazon was must be singled out and dealt with because it has helped make American capitalism fail and pays no taxes. Bash Amazon to save American capitalism. There could be some vote-catching mileage there.
There is also something there about the wages and conditions of its workers (which I can see Dave reading out at Conference), though the word “exploit” here is used in its popular sense of being treated worse than most other workers (in the Marxian sense all workers are exploited, whatever their pay or however good their conditions).
Off topic? This whole topic is off topic. Just a list of more or less obscure American professional politicians who have thrown their hat into the ring to become 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate. So I looked for something to liven it up and introduce a bit of a socialist element. It worked.
I think you should have published the whole extract:
Item 26 Manchester Branch “The party is against capitalism, not individual particular capitalists”
In response to a promotional suggestion, one forum post commented ‘Amazon is the last company in the world we should contemplate having any truck with’. This seems to imply there are particular capitalists who we treat differently, some with more rancour than others. Perhaps some members think the party view is that surplus value can be extracted from workers more ethically by some capitalists than others? Perhaps some members think our case against capitalism is that some capitalists are extracting surplus value from workers not as ethically as they could be.
Aside from the practicalities of agreeing what an ethical extraction of surplus value under capitalism looks like, this has the potential to be a serious impediment to the party doing necessary business (or business judged beneficial for us) with capitalists for goods and services, to carry out the party’s job of making socialists. This isn’t an objection to singling out individual capitalists for propaganda purposes (in the Standard etc.). But in using it as an objection to doing necessary or beneficial party business with individual capitalists, this puts a non-systemic case against capitalism that is not Marxian and more akin to the Green Party.Something else on that story I came across when looking for something else. I suppose it has some marginal relevance for us as even some of our Party’s members seem to have been affected by the view that the “big tech” companies are worse than other capitalist companies. According to a motion down for this year’s Conference, the EC has twice turned down a proposition to sell our books via Amazon Advantage, apparently on the grounds that this means associating with them. There doesn’t seem to a similar objection to us using Facebook. Anyway, the membership is going to get a chance to decide on this.
I wonder if there is any significance in Trump using the less incendiary “anti-Jewish” rather than “anti-Semitic”? Even so, his statement infringes that IHRA definition of antisemitism by identifying all Jewish people with Israel. It’s probably just vote-catching anyway.
Actually, that quote from Lenin is not all that bad (incidentally, I don’t think Varouflakis quoting him means he has Leninist sympathies). For the benefit of those who didn’t read the link, here’s the quote (from October 1913):
There can be no doubt that dire poverty alone compels people to abandon their native land, and that the capitalists exploit the immigrant workers in the most shameless manner. But only reactionaries can shut their eyes to the progressive significance of this modern migration of nations. (…) capitalism is drawing the masses of the working people of the whole world (…) breaking down national barriers and prejudices, uniting workers from all countries (…).
The full article (and full quote) can be found here.
ZJW, her stupid and nasty remark has been widely mentioned in the media. Just type “McDonagh antisemitism” into a search engine. I wouldn’t say that it has been taken up as part of the current smear campaign against Corbyn and the Labour Party. In fact most commentators have been critical. I would agree with the view expressed in this headline in that sensationalist rag the Daily Express that the interviewer himself was surprised at what he heard. Listen to exchange there and judge for yourself.
McDonagh is a friend of Joan Ryan, the chair of Labour Friends of Israel until she resigned to join the breakaway “Independent” group of MPs. So I imagine that this is the sort of thing they will have discussed privately as something to say but the main reason for the antisemitism smear campaign will be Corbyn’s pro-Palestine position rather than the anti-banksterism of some new recruits to the Labour from the Occupy milieu. Still any stick will do, though I suspect this one could be counter-productive. After all, “capitalism” has become a bit of a dirty word again and “anticapitalist” sentiments (if not understanding) have a fairly wide audience.
The Petition to recall Fiona Onasanya, the ex-Labour MP for Peterborough just released from prison, has been launched:
https://www.peterborough.gov.uk/news/council/notification-received-from-speaker-on-recall-petition/
They’ve got 6 weeks from 19 March to get the signatures of 10% of the electorate (about 7300 names). Be interesting to see how and if this works. The last one, in North Antrim, failed because they only got 9.4% of electors to sign in the time period. If they get the 10% the MP will be recalled and a by-election held.
Meanwhile the Gang of Eleven, who have betrayed their mandates (rather than merely lied to the police about a minor traffic offence), get away with it and can keep their seats (and their salaries) till the next General Election (scheduled for May 2022).
A review of that book by Doctorow has been lined up for the April Socialist Standard.
In the meantime I’ve tracked down a quote from Tony Cliff and Russia and Ford:
About the second argument, that in Stalinist Russia there is a planned economy, while under capitalism there is no plan. Not correct. The characteristic of capitalism is that there is a plan in the individual unit, but no planning between units. In the Ford factory there is a plan. They will not produce one and a half engines per car, nor three wheels per car. There is central command about how many engines, wheels, etc they produce. There is a plan, but there is anarchy between Ford and General Motors. In Stalinist Russia there was a plan for the Russian economy, but there was no plan between the Russian economy, and, let us say, the German economy.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/2000/millennium/chap05.htm
Did I hear right, Alan, did he just say that we should live in mud huts in the future? I think he said his name was Ted Trainer.
This is more like it:
https://boingboing.net/2016/01/12/keep-your-scythe-the-real-gre.html
Love the title of the book being reviewed: Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts. It seems to make some good points too:
…[G]rowth under market conditions also requires pollution/extraction/waste/overproduction:
“The firm not be able to pay for new materials or labour or the upkeep of its machines and will go out of business. This is why capitalists, left to their own devices, have no choice but to pollute or extract or pump out CO2 or catch fish at a rate that is heedless of what remains of our store of resources. It is not that they are evil or greedy. If one capitalist says to herself “To hell with the profits! The planet is more important!” then she will quickly be beaten by a rival who is not so scrupulous. To keep going, they will have to give up on such high-minded thoughts. And this is true regardless of size, whether a globe-rogering, $11-bajillion-market-cap, Taibbian vampire-squid investment bank or a mom-and-pop corner shop that sells nothing but thimbles of rosewater-scented whimsy and hand-sewn felt puppets of characters from Wes Anderson films. If right next door, a big-box chain-store Whimsy-Mart opens up with vats of all-you-can-eat cut-price Owen Wilson dolls and that small business doesn’t toughen up, then they’re fucked.”
Companies can only abstain from harmful conduct when the market is regulated — no longer “free” — and they are required to do or not do certain things that the state has banned. If all companies are required to follow the rules, then following them won’t mean being undercut by a competitor. But regulation can’t solve the problem, because it’s always fighting a rear-guard action:
“…[H]owever much we want to regulate capitalism, there will always be some new commodity or market inadvertently ‘polluting’ that has yet to be regulated. So the regulator is always playing catch-up. Further, capital’s need for self-valorisation tends to strain at the leash of regulatory restraint, as there is always some jurisdiction where this regulation does not exist. Which means that there is a force in the economy constantly pushing toward pollution that we are forever trying to push back against, a beast we cannot tame or cage. This is why social democracy goes further toward preventing pollution than less regulated forms of capitalism, but cannot absolutely prevent the problem.”
Here’s another book from the same stable (spotted by comrade Imposs1904):
https://boingboing.net/2019/03/05/walmart-without-capitalism.html
We gotta review it. Bound to better, as the reviewer says, than the hair-shirt stuff and people scratching around for potatoes that we’ve been hearing about.
I recall that in his original book on state capitalism in Russia Tony Cliff did liken the USSR to Ford, i.e. as a single capitalist entreprise without internal competition or market links between its sections. Not sure, though, that the USSR was like that as there were market links between the legally-different state enterprises.
