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  • in reply to: Additions to MIA Hardy archive #124003
    ALB
    Keymaster

    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 1983
    in reply to: Jacobin Mag Lifetime subscription $595 #115761
    ALB
    Keymaster
    jondwhite 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?

    in reply to: Jeremy Corbyn to be elected Labour Leader? #113054
    ALB
    Keymaster
    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.

    in reply to: Jacobin Mag Lifetime subscription $595 #115758
    ALB
    Keymaster

    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?

    in reply to: November 2017 EC minutes #130396
    ALB
    Keymaster

    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 !

    in reply to: Paradise Papers #130388
    ALB
    Keymaster

    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.

    in reply to: Paradise Papers #130386
    ALB
    Keymaster

    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

    in reply to: Jacobin Mag Lifetime subscription $595 #115755
    ALB
    Keymaster

    Bollox

    in reply to: Paradise Papers #130383
    ALB
    Keymaster

    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.

    in reply to: Cuba: No ‘New Man’ #130370
    ALB
    Keymaster

    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

    in reply to: Cuba: No ‘New Man’ #130367
    ALB
    Keymaster

    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 .'
    in reply to: yet another AJJ in the WW #130316
    ALB
    Keymaster

    Yes he was a member of the Communist Party of Britain (the Morning Star mob) until 1995.

    in reply to: yet another AJJ in the WW #130315
    ALB
    Keymaster

    It is strange but I think it's a a question of reversion rather than conversion as that's what he was before he joined. But would need to check.

    in reply to: Centenary of the Russian Revolution #130230
    ALB
    Keymaster

    We can do better than that. We can send you a review copy. But don't worry. It's a proper 230-page book, fully proof-read and with an ISN and all.  It's in the post already.

    in reply to: 100% reserve banking #87039
    ALB
    Keymaster

    The stuff from Varouflakis confirms the point that the discussion amongst bourgeois economists, conventional and unconventional, is not so much about what banks can and cannot do or should or should not be allowed to do as about which policy to pursue to try prevent bank lending getting out of hand in a boom.The theories they have developed are theories tailored to back up their preferred policy. Pretty academic really as none of them are going to work as "excessive" bank lending in a boom is neither the cause of the boom nor the reason why it will eventually end. It is, rather, a reflection of the boom. Booms and slumps are not cause by monetary movements but by movements in the real, productive economy. It is true, though, that mistaken monetary policies can make things worse. For instance, what Positive Money propose: not allowing banks to lend from customers' current accounts would restrict the flow of credit to productive industry and so hold back the accumulation of capital.

Viewing 15 posts - 5,611 through 5,625 (of 10,476 total)