ALB
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The report in today's Times highlights another aspect of this study:
Quote:The researchers used the sizes of houses. Working out the economics of past civilisations, particularly prehistorical ones, is extremely difficult, but houses are something we do know about. "You look at a big mansion, it's probably someone pretty wealthy," Professor Smith said. "You look at a little shack, it's probably not."Using the ratio of the smallest homes to the largest, he and his colleagues produced estimates of inequality which they published in the journal Nature.(…) The paper converted the house size ratios into the gini coefficient, a measure used today in which "0" means no inequality and "1" means the highest possible inequality.Hunter-gatherer societies had a gini coefficient of about 0.17, an egalitarianism not now matched by any country. When people shifted to growing crops, it grew, to 0.35. When Rome was at its height it was 0.48. In Britain today, it stands an about 0.7.By coincidence this is exactly the same example that Marx famously used in Wage Labour and Capital to make the point that increasing wages did not make workers consider themselves better off if the profits of capitalists increased even more:
Quote:A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.An appreciable rise in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive capital. Rapid growth of productive capital calls forth just as rapid a growth of wealth, of luxury, of social needs and social pleasures. Therefore, although the pleasures of the labourer have increased, the social gratification which they afford has fallen in comparison with the increased pleasures of the capitalist, which are inaccessible to the worker, in comparison with the stage of development of society in general. Our wants and pleasures have their origin in society; we therefore measure them in relation to society; we do not measure them in relation to the objects which serve for their gratification. Since they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.Having said that, it appears that most people are not that worried about increased inequality as long as their own consumption increases. Could that be one reason why, contrary to Marx's expectation, capitalism has survived so long?
I didn't realise that his father was called Lynch and was of Irish origin. You live and learm:https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-10-13/ireland-celebrates-che-guevaras-irish-roots-stamp-despite-oppositionAnd I'd forgotten the irony of someone who said he wanted to see the end of money being in charge the country's central bank.
Just in case some are misled by the title of the original post, what we are talking about now is not finding a new Lay Out member of the committee (there already is one, as will have been noticed from the change in style of front covers in recent months) but someone to help out and be made familiar with the work involved with a view to perhaps taking over at some point or at least standing in as a replacement in an emergency.
ALB wrote: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..
For the record, I went to this meeting but only sold one copy of the Russia pamphlet. But I did sell 9 copies of the Martov pamphlet (which is very suitable for "Left Communists" and almost aimed at them).
alanjjohnstone wrote:BTW, will our new head office copier/printer be capable of producing pamphlets and short books?The current one can and has produced pamphlets but not of all that good quality. The new one is more a colour printer and scanner.
Of course I did. I challenged the view expressed by the CWO speaker that the overthrow of the Tsar in March had been a proletarian revolution but that it had been a bourgeois revolution. I agreed that the bourgeoisie proved unable to hold on to power and that in the chaos the Bolsheviks, as a determined well-organised group, were able to seize power in a well-planned coup and bring about some sort of order, but that in the end all they could do was develop capitalism in one form or another as anyone familiar with Marx could have predicted.Their reply was that the Bolsheviks were internationalists and had only seized power because they expected to soon be relieved by the world revolution that they had started spreading especially to Germany and that when this failed they were doomed. I didn't come back and point out that Lenin was deluding himself in thinking that a world socialist revolution was imminent and that he mistook deep discontent amongst large sections of the working class in the defeated countries (Germany and the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) about living conditions as a sign of this.The ICC said that, because the SPGB had opposed WWI and initially had not been as hostile to the new regime as we later became, we were still part of the "proletarian milieu".
I went to this. It was interesting and (unlike some ICC meetings in the past) good-humoured. About 30 people there, mainly ICC and CWO members. They defended the "proletarian character" of events in Russia in 1917 as the overthrow of, first, the Tsar and, then, the Provisional Government as the work of workers organised in "soviets" with the Bolshevik Party merely as an instrument in their hands.Of course they realised that things went wrong, especially when the expected world revolution failed to materialise, and expressed the view that it had ended in the worst possible way — the evolution of Bolshevik rule into a brutal state-capitalist dictatorship claiming to be "socialist", so besmirching and discrediting the whole idea (which is indeed how it ended and the effect this had). They didn't spell out what a "better" failure would have been, presumably either the Bolsheviks handing over power to some other political group (never on the cards) or the overthrow of the Bolshevik government by reactionary elements followed by a massacre as after the Paris Commune in 1871 (but could they really be wishing for that?).Sold some copies of our Martov pamphlet. I re-read it after the meeting and it really is hard-hitting in its criticism of the soviets as a magic formula, quoting Bolsheviks as saying that they were only useful if controlled by them. Martov also denounces the aim of "decomposing" the State into a federation of local soviets (once for a while, believe it or not, endorsed by the Bolsheviks even if this was only a ploy to win support) , as opposed to capturing, democratising and using it, as an anarchist rather than a Marxist position. Which might explain why the CWO are allowed to have a stall inside the Anarchist Bookfair..
"House of Delegates". I like it. Good new name in Socialism for the House of Commons and the House of Representatives.
You can see why people on benefits wouldn't want to vote for the Tories, but is there evidence that they vote Labou rather than adopting a "they're all the same" or a "plague on both your houses" attitude and not voting at all?. In any event, surveys suggest that Corbyn activists are mainly university-educated young people. Labour, as distinct from Corbyn, has the support of public sector workers and so-called "ethnic minorities".
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).
