ALB
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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.
We would need to be clear as to who the pamphlet is directed: would it be at xenophobes like the average Brexit voter or at those who voted Remain because they opposed the xenophobia of the Brexiteers or at ourselves to provide a historical and theoretical analysis of the origins, role and dangers of nationalism?
If the first it would have to be very basic. And of course we would have to refute Theresa May’s nasty claim in her speech to the Tory Conference this year that
if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.
Incidentally, I was not proposing that we really reprint our 1911 pamphlet on tariff reform. I mentioned it to make the point that workers today, as then, were getting worked up over the trading arrangements of the capitalist class.
Alan, did you miss out a “not” in this:
And if there is another referendum, even if the politicians and media make the economy the central focus of the campaign – are we sure people will [not] simply vote from their original prejudices – anti-foreigner.
In any event, I don’t think we can be sure that they won’t. One thing that is certain is that the Brexiteers would pull out the stops and play the anti-foreigner card to the maximum, resulting in more attacks on East Europeans in the streets and children whose parents came outside Britain including even from Italy and Portugal being handed notes to take to their parents telling them to leave Britain, as happened last time.
Personally, I’m dreading another referendum but I can’t see how the political representatives of the capitalist class are going to avoid calling one.
It looks as if we might be heading for a yes/no referendum on the government’s deal with the EU. At least that wouldn’t be as bad, in terms of being an occasion for a festival of xenophobia, as a re-run of the 2016 one. It is pathetic, though, that workers up and down the country in pubs and on social medias are arguing with each other about what terms “we”, i.e. the capitalists, should trade: WTO, Norway, Single Market, etc. Who cares if there’s a regulatory border in the Irish Sea? What difference is it going to make to anybody’s ordinary life? Perhaps we should republish our 1911 pamphlet on “Socialism or Tariff Reform”.
It looks as if the far-right as well as the usual leftist suspects have been trying to jump on this bandwagon. Tuesday’s Times reported:
The far-right agenda was laid out in a brochure distributed to protesters by another group National Synthesis. The brochure blames immigrants for the violence and says: “The nationalists … have come to inform the yellow vests that they should engage in a veritable combat to save our nation and our civilisation.” It calls for an end to capitalism, globalisation and France’s membership of the EU. The group’s website is more explicit, calling for a “national, social, popular and identitarian revolution”.
That sounds like leftwing Nazism, as propounded by Strasser before Hitler, once in power, had him eliminated.
The anecdote I like is:
On Saturday Mr Benedetti and his ultra-right followers encountered a group of antifas during the protest in Paris. Both sides were wearing yellow vests, but that did not prevent them from having a punch-up.
Who says that a government in Britain can govern without the support of a majority in the House of Commons and that parliament is just a talking shop that has to accept what the government decides?
As the author of that article says:
Look, I get it. Poland mines a lot of coal. It gets 78 percent of its power from coal. It has a vested interest in keeping coal alive from an economic and political standpoint, and this conference gives the government a chance to lay that vision out.
Today’s Times reports the President of Poland as saying that
his country had no plans to stop burning coal, which produces 80 per cent of its electricity. He said that coal guaranteed Poland’s energy security and sovereignty and “it would be hard not to use it”.
This illustrates the point that the differing economic interests of the various states, in the context of the competitive world of capitalism, is going to mean that any agreement won’t, in fact can’t, go much beyond the lowest common denominator as it would be something that will either disadvantage no state or disadvantage all states equally.
If there were a world state that could enforce something in the longer term overall capitalist interest perhaps something more could be done, but there isn’t. Certainly neither street demonstrations (or stunts) or a Green Party government in one country won’t be able to enforce this.
After all, if you were the government of Poland would you agree to anything that put capitalist business there at a disadvantage? Would you agree to become dependent on gas from Russia just because it’s less polluting? Other coal (and oil) producing countries will be taking up the same position for the same economic and strategic reasons. In fact, no state is going to agree to anything that puts its capitalist businesses at a disadvantage compared to their competitors from other states or its energy security at risk..
