ALB
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Eureka. That was a quote from Alan J. Now I now how to do bold and italics as well.
Why does the passage quoted appear so large?OK. Should have ended /blockquote. Like this (I hope).
I am not accustomed to having to do html to use bold or italics or whatever. Was bad enough having to quote/unquote on the old forum to copy and paste.
OK
I am not accustomed to having to do html to use bold or italics or whatever. Was bad enough having to quote/unquote on the old forum to copy and paste. </quote>
That didn’t work either. What I was trying to do was quote something using <blockquote cite= What should I have done?
Alan Johnstone wrote:
Since we can’t do a preview (something else to be noted to add) I have to experiment in public how this HTML tag to quote works (if it does).
Actually, “flexitarian” is quite a good description of human behaviour generally not just eating habits. It sums up “human nature” rather well. That’s what the behaviour of homo sapiens is: adaptable, flexible. Maybe we should adopt the word.
Thanks, Matt, for taking me through the complicated way to rejoin. It worked (I hope). Soon find out.
Young Master Smeet wrote:I've picked up the frase book, and it's quite interesting, and well worth reading (it's short, more of a pamphklet, really).Just to pick out one thing I want to drill into a bit more: with the Communist Utopia it describes, the book suggests Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a mechanism for the rapid abolition of buying and selling. The argument runs, as the UBI is raised, labour becomes scarce, and leisure time abundant: capitalists will spare labour, and invest in labour saving technology, while the free time of workers becomes redirected to servicing communal needs.(…)This gives us a plausible model (beyond Socialists win election and proclaim socialism) of how the abolition of commodity relations could be managed as a rolling programme.A socialist majority throuigh political action could institute UBI and a deliberate programme of cheapening productive capital (an attack on rent seaking, strategic nationalisation, subsidies, etc.), so long as it was clear in advance that this was not an end in itself, but a means ot achieve the socialistic goal, it would work. With the added advantage that such moves would divide the capitaalist class, as some would benefit while others lost out.In this version, our standard critique, that wages paid directly would fall as employers compensated for the living costs of UBI, would actually work in its favour, as it would keep those capitalists still in business running, and aid labour intensive industries.It would enable a decentralised change to a new society, without having to go through central planning.Peter Joseph of Zeitgeist has suggested a similar idea. A standard objection would be it would be just as difficult to convince a majority to support such a course as to convince them to go the whole hog and establish socialism straightaway.Also, others such as Ernst Mandel in his book on Marxian Economics have suggested other economic mechanisms to bring about "the withering away of commodity production" and money. The trouble is that these assumes the existence side by side of a capitalist (producing for the market, and profit, and employing wage-labour) and a socialist sector (producing direcctly for use) of the economy, which couldn't work.
jondwhite wrote:Bastani no-showedhttps://www.workersliberty.org/story/2018-07-04/bastani-time-answerthey did debate Positive MoneyOh dear. Their understanding of money and banking seems as ignorant as Positive Money's:
Quote:Today, however, only a small proportion of money, about 3% in Britain, is notes and coins created by public authorities. The other 97% of so is balances with banks, effectively tradable debt. That 97% is created by banks.Imagine Iris has £1000 in cash. She will keep only £10 on her, and put the rest in the bank. The bank does not just sit on the £990. While Iris still has £990, Mya will also have £990 when the bank gives her a mortgage to buy a house from Helen, and that £990 then reappears as new bank-balance money held by Helen.The bank then gives out £900-odd again as an overdraft to Aniqa. Aniqa banks or spends that money, and then a bank uses it to make a loan to Lara…Already there is almost £4000 in circulation. The banks have to keep something in the vaults — it used to be a “reserve requirement”, today more usually a “capital requirement” — to be able to pay out when one person or another decides to cash out her whole bank balance. But that stash in the vaults need only be a small proportion of the total stock of money in circulation.No, there is not almost £4000 in circulation. It's just that £990 has circulated 4 times, being used to make payments of almost £4000. That's what money does. It circulates. Banks facilitate this, not create new money (see long-running thread on this).
Interesting description of how the "securitisation" of mortgages that preceded the Crash of 2008 worked in this book published a couple of years ago by Corporate Watch:
Quote:Unlike traditional mortgage lenders, investment banks didn't have deposits that they could use to make mortgage loans. Instead they invented a new technique called mortgage backed securitisation (MBS). They borrowed money by issuing bonds secured against the expected repayments on the mortgages.Bassically, this works as follows:• The mortgage company, with its arrangers and lawyers, sets up a kind of paper company called a 'special purpose vehicle' (SPV).The SPV issues a bond, promising to pay interest to the bond investors who buy it.As the mortgage borrowers pay back their mortgages over, say, the next 30 years, the company will pay the money into the SPV.So long as the money paid out to the bond investors is lower than the money paid in by the mortgage borrowers, the SPV is in surplus. The mortgage company keeps the difference as its profit – after paying out cuts to the banks that arranged the deal for it, the lawyers who wrote up all the complex SPV paperwork, any insurers who underwrote the deal, etc (page 27).Surprising too since the author seems to be a bit of an anarchist and fan of David Graeber who does endorse the crackpot view that financial institutions can create money out of thin air to lend and then charge interest on it. Anyway, the author clearly recognises that these companies had to borrow the money to give mortgages. Incidentally, this practice has now spread to financing car loans and credit card loans where it is even more obvious that the finance companies involved can't have just conjured up the money they lend.
Dave B wrote:I have just started reading Paul Sweezy’s the theory of capitalist development.It is quite good really and I am onboard with his analysis of chapter one. He is understandably the anti Christ for post 1970’s neo Marxists as with his total un offending innocence as regards chapter one being about simple commodity production.If what our Study Guide here says on this book is accurate, then you are going to be disappointed as you read on.http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/study-guides/books-and-pamphlets-marxian-economicsSo he's a bit of an Anti-Christ for us too, but for a different reason — for being an underconsumptionist, which comes out again more prominently in the book on Monopoly Capital he wrote with Baran.I see he has something to say on the subject of this thread:
Quote:Chapter VII on ‘The Transformation of Value into Prices’ contains a fallacy about the organic composition of capital invested in luxury industries having no effect on the rate of profit and is important only because Michael Kidron bases his argument in Chapter 3 of Western Capitalism Since the War about arms production offsetting the falling rate of profit on it.On the general topic, surely the "neo-Ricardians" and others using their mathematical model make the elementary mistake of assuming that once a commodity has been produced it keeps its value, whereas its value can vary after it has been produced for other reasons, e.g. a new, cheaper method of producing the same commodity being adopted or becoming more widespread (in which case its value will fall). They can't take this into account because their calculations(deliberately) ignore money and so end up in effect adopting the view that the value of a commodity is the actual amount of labour needed to produce it. This is a Labour Theory of Value but not the one Marx adopted, as for him it's the amount of labour needed to reproduce it. I suppose that's why they are called Ricardians not Marxists.
