ALB
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You forgot to mention the possible demise of the Anarchist Book Circus. But, don't worry, anarchism will survive as the amorphous blob that it has always been.Personally, I've never understood why even class-struggle anarchist-communists have been prepared to accept anybody (except anarcho-capitalists) who calls themself an anarchist as part of a broader movement. In fact they have more in common with us than with most of those calling themselves anarchists.It looks as if they made a mistake when thirty years ago they dropped the word "communist" from their name as one result may have been that they attracted anarchists who weren't really communists or had other priorities.Their concentration on day-to-day struggles at the expense of popularising the idea of a classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless society won't have helped here since you don't have to have any longer term aim to take part in such struggles.
We've been over this many times here, Sympo. The Marxian Labour Theory of Value is that the value of a commodity reflects the amount of socially necessary labour time that would be taken to reproduce it, which is not necessarily the same as that taken to produce it. So it only applies to what can be reproduced by human labour. Which excludes works of art because they can't be reproduced (and whose price is determined by demand in relation to limited supply) while (virgin) land is excluded because it is not even a product of human labour. These are exceptions thst prove the rule.In fact, the price of land is not really even the monetary equivalent of an exchange value. Louis Boudin explained this in 1907 in chapter 5 on "The Labor Theory of Value and Its Critics" of his The Theoretical System of Karl Marx:
Quote:Land as well as all other objects which are not produced by human labor has no value. This may sound strange in face of the fabulous prices that we know are sometimes paid for land. But these very fabulous prices are proof that the price paid does not represent the value of the land but something else entirely. Marx proves conclusively that rent is not the value of the land, and that the price of land is admittedly merely a "capitalization" of the rent. Marx calls attention to the fact that… the price of land is a multiple of the rent by a certain number of years, the number depending on the prevailing rate of interest. In other words, it is not the value of the land that the price nominally paid for it represents but the price of the rent. The transaction which formally and nominally appears as a sale of land, is in reality merely the discount of the rent. It differs absolutely nothing in character from the purchase of an annuity, which is not an exchange of present values but a mere banking operation. This is well known to real estate operators.I agree. Hopefully the Libcom forum will continue, but what is the source of the passages quoted and where can the whole message be found?
Sort of. The price of land is the capitalisation of the rent that the land can be expected to bring in over a given period of years, which will depend on its location, e,g. nearness to something like Disneyland as you say but it could also be a population centre or railway station. This is not a particularly Marxist theory but is generally accepted. Marx only comes into it because, according to his labour theory of value, land, not being a product of labour, has no value, but only a price.
This twitter account of another Party member has 15.9k followers:https://twitter.com/rafaelstepanian?lang=en
You mean the other Official SPGB tweet that compared Corbyn to Thatcher (with a photo to fit) that got us a mention in the Sun? I didn't like that either.
Here is another attempt by a member of the "Bitcoin community" to claim that Marx would have supported bitcoins:https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-marxs-theory-history-1406321399/And here is a refutation from the same time (2014):http://www.marxist.com/bitcoin-utopian-reflection-of-capitalist-nightmare.htmAs Trotskyists their politics are crap but this article is rather good as is its conclusion
Quote:Bitcoin represents little more than an anarcho-capitalist pipe-dream and a speculator’s playgroundNot sure that calling the capitalist class "wealthy scume" is us, is it?Anyway, it wasn't Marx as this is what he wrote in the Preface to Das Kapital:
Quote:To prevent possible misunderstanding, a word. I paint the capitalist and the landlord in no sense couleur de rose. But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.I see the chief exec of the Financial Conduct Authority expresses this view:
Quote:Andrew Bailey, chief executive of the FCA, has said bitcoin is not a really currency but more like a commodity.If so, then those who designed Bitcoin will have got their wish — to have created a digital equivalent of gold (hence their "mining" analogy) — since the price of gold too is subject to speculative swings.Bitcoins and other so-called "cryptocurrencies" (Bitcoin's only one of many, there's another called "ether", which would be an appropriate name for money conjured up "out of thin air" if that's what they were) are tokens that have to be used to pay for the services offered by computer networks practising blockchain technology (see the Pathfinders column in this month's Socialist Standard). Bitcoin offers ultra-secure electronic payments but the technology can be used to offer as yet undeveloped services. So buying these tokens is a speculative investment in what might turn out to be a profitable venture. It's like the dot-com boom of the 1990s and should perhaps be called the blockchain boom.
Thanks, Robbo, for what happened to "Common Voice". This part struck me as particularly significant
robbo203 wrote:…WiC was almost entirely an internet-based phenomenon, meaning that there was a very limited and narrow range of interactions between members.I see this as a warning that we should not follow the view that has been expressed here that we too should become "an internet-based phenomenon" without physical meetings between members. That would be the way to prove the Private Frasers right.
Brian wrote:You also seem to be thinking that if the post is paid the EC does the selection. Not so under the present party rules. Nonetheless, if such a post does become our new reality it will by necessity mean quite a few changes in the rules.If a change in the Party Rulebook is going to be required nothing will be able to be done until at least the second half of 2019 when the votes on the motions discussed at 2019 Conference are counted. It's not clear what you are proposing anyway. You seem to be suggesting that it's one of the existing Party officers, presumably the General Secretary, who should be paid as someone not selected by the EC, but the General Secretary is subject to annual re-election so any employment contract would have to be temporary…One of the remits of the Ad Hoc Committee of which you are a member (not the only one) is to propose any changes of rule that may be necessary to implement their recommendations. Which are going to have to be a lot more precise than the brainstorming going on here.As to the salary, when we discussed this at our branch £1000 a month was suggested as reasonable to do the present, part-time work at Head Office. If converted into a full time post that gives a figure nearer Robbo's, which is also roughly Lenin's famous "workers average wage" which I assume is what the SWP and SPEW's full-timers get.
