ALB
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Yes, she does seem to contradict herself. The argument between the two of them seems to be about whether banks create new money "from thin air" or "out of nothing".
jondwhite wrote:Were any volunteers able to come forward for these?Don't fancy the SWP or Historical Materialism ones but can go to the ICC/CWO one on Saturday with a dozen or so copies if I can avoid the crowds on the way celebrating the First World Slaughter..
Interesting. Was this an election to the Virginia State legislature ("House of Delegates") rather than the national "House of Representatives"?
It's not as if Labour politicians don't know about this. Here's Harold Lever (later a Cabinet Minister and a Lord) over 50 years ago, though it's possible that they too have forgotten or don't know their history:
Quote:Labour's economic plans are not in any way geared to nationalisation; they are directed towards increased production on the basis of the continued existence of a large private sector. Within the terms of a profit system it is not possible, in the long run, to achieve sustained increases in output without an adequate flow of profit to promote and finance them. The Labour leadership knows as well as any businessman that an engine which runs on profit cannot be made to move faster without extra fuel. So, though profits may be squeezed temporarily by taxation and Government price policy, they must and will, over a longer period, increase significantly even if not proportionately to increased production (Observer, 3 April 1966).Eleven more have been added (from Imposs1904's MySpace blog). Click on title to read:
Quote:9 November, 2017: Added to the Edgar Hardcastle Internet Archive:The Peace Society, November 1921 Workers Under “Labour Rule”,February 1929 The Passing of Snowden, June 1937 The Coming Slump: Does the Gold Standard Matter?, October 1944 Where Do They Go From Here?, April 1946 What Comes After the Labour Government?, July 1947 War and Secret Diplomacy, September 1948 Attlee and Bevan: Much Ado About Nothing, April 1952 The Future according to Galbraith, October 1967 The Report on Trade Unions, August 1968 Marx the Revolutionary: 100 Years of Development and Distortion, March 1983jondwhite wrote:I thought jacobin was DSA whose origins at least are the same as ours, pre-Leninist socialism.Ok (but of course trots infiltrate evertwhere) but why choose so obviously an elitist name as "Jacobin"? Have they explained this somewhere?
jondwhite wrote:The big question is why a "workers hero" is pandering to the CBI.Because Labour's plans to reform capitalism involve leaving "the commanding heights of the economy" in private capitalist hands; which means that a Labour government under Corbyn will depend on the capitalist firms' willingness to go on investing which they will only do if the government does nothing to endanger their profits and their profit-making. It's so obvious that this is going to happen but there are many, including some ex-socialists who ought to know better, who don't realise this and don't want to.
Actually, it is not really surprising that a magazine calling itself Jacobin should like Lenin. After all, didn't Lenin famously/notoriously say:
Quote:The Jacobin indissolubly linked to the organisation of the proletariat now conscious of its class interests, is precisely the social democratic revolutionary. (One Step Forward, Two Steps Back)In fact , won't this why they chose the title of the magazine they did?
But it doesn't say that the grant was given to the AV Committee but simply that it was decided to spend that amount of money !
Sounds to me more like two sections of the capitalist class disputing over how to share out the surplus value already extracted from the working class, with one side playing the "class war" card to try to get the working class to support it against the other side.
Or the thin edge of the slippery slope …Another aspect of tax dodging by multinational firms here. Their national-based competitors don't like it: because it puts them at a competitive disadvantage:https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2013/no-1301-january-2013/cooking-books-who-gains-%E2%80%98tax-justice%E2%80%99
Revealing article in today's Times (of London):https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/business/channel-islands-trading-boom-hides-influence-of-eu-srx2635nlYou won't be able to read the whole article but the esssential is there and you can get the gist. Guernsey as a more important UK trading partner than China or Japan, what next? The 'trade' involved isn't really trade of course, just financial transactions dignified with the name of 'trade in financial services'. Apparently, quite a high percentage of world trade is that these days, exposing the utter irrationality of the capitalist system.
Actually I think that Lenin's last articles, of which his Notes on Sukhanov was one, show that Lenin realised that Marx had been right and that the only way forward for Russia was capitalism, albeit under the control of the Bolshevik government (which he called the "proletarian state").More evidence to suggest that Lenin admitted Marx was right in this article:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1970s/1970/no-788-april-1970/did-lenin-admit-defeat
I thought it was well-known that Marx held that capitalism paved the way for socialism, by developing the productive forces to the point where plenty for all was possible and educating and training a population able to operate them. The implication being that a socialist revolution was not possible in the absence of these conditions and that any attempt to establish socialism in their absence was doomed to failure.You seem to have overlooked that the article did go on to quote a passage from the German Ideology to back this up:
Quote:Marx and Engels pointed this out in a passage in The German Ideology which is the perfect answer to Lenin’s question (though Lenin was not aware of it since this work wasn’t published until 1932). Discussing ‘the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce’ when there is private property, they wrote:'This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, ie. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced .'
