ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
“We must collectively do whatever’s necessary non-violently, to persuade politicians and business leaders to relinquish their complacency and denial,” the open letter stated, which was signed by Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, and the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, among others.
There are still appealing to “politicians and business leaders (!)” to do something that economic conditions, not complacency or denial, mean they can’t do — politicians because they can’t undermine the competitivity of their exports by taking unilateral action, business leaders because they would have to sacrifice profits (unless they switch to investing in selling renewables technology, sea defences, carbon capture equipment, etc).
Basically what they are doing is appealing to politicians to put the longer-term overall general capitalist interest before short-term national capitalist interests, while what they should be doing is campaigning for “system change” to socialism as a world of common ownership and democratic control by and in the interest of the whole world’s population.
What a joke ! Fifty renowned reformists draw up “a bold new blueprint” proposing an impracticable reform to capitalism and we’re supposed to take them seriously. As if “huge levies” on the profits of capitalist firms wouldn’t lead to them cutting back on their investment in production, leading to an economic downturn during which the problems the “left-leaning” reformists set out to solve would get worse.
The time and energy that would be needed to get majority political support to implement this doomed plan would be better spent on working to win over a majority to socialism as a society based on common ownership and democratic control with production directly to meet people’s needs instead of, as now, for sale on a market with a view to profit.
Yeah, and it also causes reduced sperm counts, autism, nut allergy, and ….[fill in, to improve your chances of getting research funding and publicity for the results]
Seriously, this is not what this study found at all. It’s a study by building engineers about how buildings design could be changed if increased CO2 emissions lead to the amount of CO2 generally in the atmosphere rising to a level that affects human thinking ability. They didn’t carry out the research on the effect of CO2 on the brain.
There is such research and it has been known for ages. Because humans breathe out CO2 its levels in enclosed places where humans congregate such as offices, classrooms, submarines, etc rise to quite high levels (which would be reached in the general atmosphere only in the really, really worst-case scenario). In so far as this is a problem it is independent of global warming and could have been with by building design at any time in the last two hundred years or so. A few pot plants might help too.
We need to apply more critical thinking to what we read in the papers or hear on the media.
Here’s the view of David Graeber, the celebrity anarchist. While I think he might have a bit of a point about bread-and-butter struggles tending to be different today, due to “financialization”, compared with fifty years ago, he is clearly exaggerating when he sees these as revolutionary, even insurrectionary. They are no more revolutionary than traditional trade union action.
Anyway, here’s what he argues.
Yes but the initial reduced consumption of workers would effect the profits only of capitalists investing in the production of goods that workers buy.
Here’s a rough translation of an extract from a Socialist Standard subscriber/sympathiser from a French-speaking country currently in France:
“At the beginning I was suspicious about the gilets jaunes movement but now I strongly support it as there is a need to give it a perspective. This is more than ever the moment, especially if one wants a society rid of money. At the beginning it was a movement against the increase in the price of fuel and was supported by small employers (“petits patrons”) and so did have a flavour of poujadism, but in the end that quickly became minoritised as the movement passed from a vague spontaneous citizens’ movement into a struggle against the high cost of living and the anti-social policy of the government of Macron and Philippe, a movement which the workers’ movement has joined. That is why the extreme right should not be allowed to occupy the ground and more than ever why the need to get involved in the movement to give it a political and alternative perspective. This is also the sense of the struggle for socialism”.
Not that small lifestyle changes are going to do much to solve the problem. That’s shifting the blame and responsibility from capitalism on to us. Under capitalism if workers consume less what would happen is that a bigger proportion of what is produced would go to the capitalists as profits. No, the whole capitalist economic system of production for profit and capital accumulation, which is impeding the matter been dealt with effectively, has to go before anything lasting can be done.
Yes, sort of. The general theory is that employers have to pay workers enough to enable them to recreate and maintain their particular working skills. This reflects the cost of living as the cost of what workers need to buy to do this. If this is high as a result of taxes on what workers need to consume then wages will have to be higher too. If there is a direct tax on wages like income tax then, here too, employers will have to pay higher money wages as, if they didn’t, workers would not have enough money to spend on recreating and maintaining their working skills and so wouldn’t be able to work so well.
In other workers, in effect, taxes on what workers consume or on their wages get passed on to the employers. So, while workers may pay taxes, in the end taxation is a burden on the propertied classes (capitalists and landowners).
The position becomes complicated when there is an increase in a tax. Obviously, in the first instance, workers have to pay this and suffer a reduction in the amount of money they have to live on, but the increased taxes will exert an upward pressure on wages just through the operation of the law of supply and demand. Fortunately, this can be speeded up by trade union action. If the government takes steps to prevent this, pressure will built up over time and eventually there will be a wages explosion as in France in May-June 1968.
Also, the amount that workers need to recreate and maintain their working skills is not a rigid fixed amount. Apart from changing over time as new items of consumption come into being, it can vary up or down within a certain margin. Which is once again something that can be influenced by the struggle between workers and employers, i.e. it is determined by the balance of class forces in the context of the state of the labour market.
Looks as if the State got its act together this weekend and managed to contain the protests.
Meanwhile here is a list of the demands:
Looking through it you can see it is an amalgam of “leftwing” and “rightwing” demands. What struck me in particular was the demands to protect small businesses and self-employed artisans:
– Promote small businesses, villages and city centers. (Stop the construction of large commercial areas around big cities that kill small business + free parking in city centers).
– Same system of social security for all (including artisans and self-entrepreneurs). End of the RSI ( the social regime of the self-employed).
– Protect French industry: prohibit relocation. Protecting our industry is protecting our know-how and our jobs.
– Prohibition of charging retailers a fee when their customers use the credit card.
I think this used to be called “poujadism”.
Also noted this:
– That the causes of forced migration are treated.
– That asylum seekers are well treated. We owe them housing, security, food and education for the minors. Work with the UN to have host camps open in many countries around the world, pending the outcome of the asylum application.
– That the unsuccessful asylum seekers be returned to their country of origin.
– That a real integration policy be implemented. Living in France means becoming French (French language course, History of France course and civic education course with certification at the end of the course).
The protestors were reported as singing the French national anthem, La Marseillaise. This was originally a (bourgeois) revolutionary song (“Aux Armes, Citoyens!”) but is intensely nationalistic. Imagine British protestors singing the national anthem — in fact they probably are on Tommy Robinson’s “Brexit betrayal” march in London at this very moment.
I would have thought that what applies here, rather than just our analysis that in the end taxation is a burden on the capitalist class, is our analysis of the ‘welfare state’ as a ‘redistribution of poverty’. Just as the PAYE tax system and family allowances together redistribute income from single people and couples without children to those with children so this proposed measure would be redistributing income from the over-40s to the over-70s. In other words, a redistribution of income within the wage and salary working class.
Yes, we are obliged to as a registered political party and would have to refuse any donations from abroad.
A left reformist case for a No Deal Brexit, which accuses the likes of Johnson, Rees-Mogg and Davies of being incapable of delivering it:
And here’s the old, failed pre-1980s Labour Party programme that he proposes:
Of course, after we leave, we will recapture a lot of powers from the EU which can be used to transform our economy. With those powers, we should propose an economic programme that would rebalance the economy towards industry, away from the services sector and, in particular, the bloated financial-services sector. That should go alongside turning key resources into public property, like trains, energy and water, and investment in infrastructure. And we need to start redistributing wealth – Britain’s inequality is at ridiculous levels for an advanced country.
The Communist Party and the Morning Star are plugging the same (and perhaps this is what Corbyn still secretly thinks). But they don’t seem to realise that left reformist state capitalism in one country has been tried and failed.
It failed, and would fail again, because all capitalist states must compete with other states on the world market and the measures proposed would increase costs of production, undermining competitiveness and provoking an economic downturn. Under capitalism Profits Rule. Infringe that at your peril. Capitalism is a trap from which there is no way out except socialism as the common ownership and democratic control of the world’s natural and industrial resources..
The French riots have an old-fashioned (not to say “petty bourgeois” in the classic sense) ring: protests against a rise in taxes and attacks on tax offices. It’s something they’ve been doing there since before the French Revolution. Haven’t people that George Rudé and EP Thompson written abut riots as a tactic of the pre-industrial poor, a “plebeian” rather than a working class tactic?
One thing I hadn’t realised is that, as from 1 January, France is going over to a PAYE system:
The tax offices have become the latest flashpoint in the yellow vest revolt because on 1 January France switches to a pay-as-you-earn system that will reduce everyone’s monthly take-home pay. Until now, the French received gross pay and paid income tax the next year after filing an annual return (today’s Times).
Of course it’s swings and roundabouts as in the end either way it’s your after-tax pay that you have to live on, but, under the old system, there were more chances of tax-dodging (and why not).
The review did not say that Sraffa was a Marxist, but merely that he was not hostile to Marx in the way that the exponents of “Sraffian economics” are. Obviously, any theory that tries to explain how capitalism works without the concept of “value” and just on the basis of technology and prices can’t be described as Marxian. I don’t think there’s any record of Sraffa saying “All I know is that I am not a Sraffian” but there might be.
That’s both revealing and disturbing. The old RCP and their magazine Living Marxism (or Dead Leninism, as we used to call it) seemed to make a point of saying the opposite to the rest of the Left. It looks as if some of them have put earning a living before principles. But, then, there have always been Trotskyists who have accepted money from dubious sources, such as the WRP accepting money from Colonel Gaddafty in the 1980s.
Some of the things they now defend (but are they really still Trotskyists?] are the same as us: secularism, opposition to no-platforming and to multiculturalism and its offspring identity politics. And some of their writers have produced some good stuff such as Kenon Malik’s writings exposing the unscientific concept of race and James Heartfield’s book showing that the second world war was just as much an imperialist war as the first.
