ALB
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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.
I am not sure that the Party has a rigid take-it-or-leave-it position on the so-called "transformation problem" nor that it really needs one. After all, no one would be barred from joining if they didn't agree with whatever position was taken on the subject !Having said this, we have suggested that it is a false problem as here:www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/z-marxism/tand here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2017/no-1353-may-2017/book-reviews-money-and-totality-dirty-secrets-how-tax
Actually, although of course humans make history (they act), there is something to be said for technological determinism. After all, it's always worked in the past, in the end in one form or another.
Yes I think that's right. No single bank can lend more than it has or can get quickly but the whole banking system can create new "money" but central to this system is the State bank which is the ultimate source in the system that can create new money (claims on wealth) "out of thin air" (and cause too much inflation if it gets it wrong, it being official policy in Britain, the US, etc to inflate the currency by about 2 percent a year). Not the same as creating more wealth of course. Only humans applying their mental and physical energies to materials that originally came from nature can do that.
Good question. Here's a possible answer:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2010/no-1274-october-2010/aliens
Quote:23 June, 2018: Added to the Gilbert McClatchie Internet Archive:Where Russia Stands. Our Attitude Supported by Latest Literature, May 1921 Where Russia Stands, June 1921 Where Russia Stands, July 1921 Where Russia Stands, October 1921This series of articles is very impressive, dating as it does from 1921. It's all there. In Russia it was the dicttorship of the vanguard party not of the proletariat, conditions weren't ripe either economically or politcally for socialism, the regime there was not like the Paris Commune, with quotes from Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin. It was in fact making the same analysis as Martov was at the same time but unbeknown to us till his became available in English in 1939. No wonder Party members liked his pamphlet.I don't understand why the Party never seems to have promoted this series, to show that we were on to what was happening in Bolshevik Russia straightaway, in the way that we promoted the original August 1918 article. The series is just as impressive.Click on title to read.
In this article, from a series he wrote in 1921 on Russia:https://www.marxists.org/archive/mcclatchie/russiastands_july.htmhe quotes a translation in Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers Dreadnought of a speech Lenin gave;
Quote:Under the heading "Elections to the Constituent Assembly" the following appeared in the Workers' Dreadnought, 21.8.20:"This is a process which the representatives of the Second International have never been able to understand, namely that the proletariat can be victorious without conquering a majority of the population. To limit or condition this victory to the acquisition of a majority of votes at an electoral contest under bourgeois domination is evidence of chronic intellectual indolence, or else, quite simply, of a device to deceive the workers. In order to bring the majority over to its side, the proletariat must first overthrow the bourgeoisie and take possession of the power of government, and then, after having destroyed the old state apparatus, introduce the Soviet system, whereby the domination and authority of the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeois democrats over the non-proletarian labouring masses is at once nullified. It must finally complete the destruction of the influence of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeois democrats over the majority of the non-proletarian labouring masses by satisfying their economic needs in a revolutionary manner, at the expense of the exploiters."Comparison with a more recent translation of what Lenin wrote shows that this was not an accurate translation.
Quote:The traitors, blockheads and pedants of the Second International could never understand such dialectics; the proletariat cannot achieve victory if it does not win the majority of the population to its side. But to limit that winning to polling a majority of votes in an election under the rule of the bourgeoisie, or to make it the condition for it, is crass stupidity, or else sheer deception of the workers. In order to win the majority of the population to its side the proletariat must, in the first place, overthrow the bourgeoisie and seize state power; secondly, it must introduce Soviet power and complete]y smash the old state apparatus, whereby it immediately undermines the rule, prestige and influence of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeois compromisers over the non-proletarian working people. Thirdly, it must entirely destroy the influence of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeois compromisers over the majority of the non-proletarian masses by satisfying their economic needs in a revolutionary way at the expense of the exploiters.This is from here :https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/dec/16.htmSo, Lenin was not saying that socialism could be established without a majority wanting and understanding it, but the lesser error of saying that no such majority can emerge as long as the capitalist class retain political power and that a socialist minority therefore has to overthrow capitalist rule and then educate a majority into wanting socialism. Of course this didn't work, and was never going to work, and led to the minority evolving into a new privileged, ruling class themselves. Others supported this mistaken view from Blanqui in the 19th century to Marcuse, Castro and Che Guevara last century.
