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The meeting did take please yesterday evening, though it took us 20 minutes to get past security. 15 people there including 5 members. Discussion more about Russian Revolution than socialist revolution, with them challenging the view that it should be judged by its results and not by what it said it was doing. Ironically, they think Russia under Stalin was a system of State slavery, i.e something worse than capitalism. Ironic because that makes its outcome even worse. We said it was still capitalism because it was based on wage-labour and that the result of the anti-feudal Russian Revolution of which the Bolshevik coup was a point had been to spread the wages system and production for profit in Russia, and that in event the Russian Revolution, as a minority-led revolution that led to minority class rule, was not a model to follow. The discussion on our (and Marx's later) position was: what was more likely and sensible — using the ballot box or civil war? A no-brainer of course. Not that they practice what they preach, i.e weapon training was not part of their University and they're all in the Labour Party.Three of us stayed on afterwards for a drink in their canteen. Discussion on Chris Knight's theory of the origin of our species. Apparently they accept it. Personally I think (and said) that Chris Harman won the argument with Knight, despite being an SWPer.
Not the AV committee in particular but more than one committee. Same applies to Socialist Standard Committee , Publications Committee, Election Committee. Best to have just one committee in charge of actually putting stuff on. That was my point.
Vin, please lay off the Internet Committee. Like yourself, they are volunteers doing work for the Party in their free time, key work actually, such as maintaining and running this site which is taking the place of the Standard as our flagship. Continually sniping at them doesn't help. The same applies to those running our Facebook page.In any event, what you are suggesting would open the door to chaos. It makes sense to have one committee in charge of the whole site, not individual committees or individual members adding stuff that might not necessarily fit into the whole. The same principle applies to the computers at Head Office: only one person can upload new programmes. That's the efficient way of doing things.
In practice the price of a commodity oscillates due to short term changes in supply and demand not around its value but around its price of production I.e its cost of production plus the average rate of profit. It corresponds to what Adam Smith called it's "natural price", its longer run equilibrium price
I don't think that he was in fact in any Trot organisation only that he toyed with Trotskyist ideas after reading Deutscher biography of him. Personally, I can't understand why anyone should be impressed with Trotsky's life. It was a complete political failure.
I see Peter Joseph seems to be suggesting that the change (to a world without money) will come through the spread of an "apolitical subculture".
Funny you should mention Marx because there is a connexion. When Marx moved in "Young Hegelian" circles in the early 1840s before he became a revolutionary socialist and was just a radical democrat and atheist one of his associates, indeed influences, was Bruno Bauer. As Marx moved to becoming a socialist they fell out and Marx wrote a couple of polemics against him, The Holy Family and The Jewish Question. Bauer went on to develop the view that Jesus was not a historical figure but a myth. According to this, he was the first to do so:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Bauer#Argument_against_the_existence_of_JesusAccording to Maximilien Rubel and Margaret Manale in Marx With Myth:
Quote:During the winter 1855-56 Marx had several visits with his estranged friend Bruno Bauer, who was spending some time in England. Marx described Bauer as a light-hearted old gentleman, a confirmed bachelor as always, and hazarded the guess that Bauer wanted to introduce 'scientific theology', now dead in Germany, in England.I suppose that shows Marx's lack of interest in Bauer's theories but at least shows he was aware of them.
It is absurd to claim that Lucian confirms the historical existence of Jesus. All he confirms is that christians existed (which nobody denies) and believed that Jesus had existed (a belief nobody denies either). If Lucian had been more acquainted with what the christians believed Jesus had done (wine into water, curing the blind, raising the dead, walking on water) he would have had the same fun, as a sceptic of such claims and religions, in taking the mickey out of them as he did in "The Death of Peregrinus" and "Alexander The Oracle Monger". He knew the type.My nexrt witness is Paul of Tarsus who certainly existed and was in fact the real founder of christianity as a doctrine. As someone who spoke Greek he would have been well acquainted with saviour religions and turned the dissident Jewish sect that christianity started as into one. He lived at the same time as Jesus was supposed to have and was in Jerusalem at the same time that Jesus was supposed to be active as a miracle-worker. Yet he never mentions him as a real person, only as someone who appeared to him in a vision. See:http://www.news24.com/MyNews24/Is-Jesus-Christ-a-myth-Part-3-20150622Why did he not mention Jesus as a person? Here's someone who could be a key witness but he says nothing. Talk about the absence of evidence !
I think you are being even more keen to use Lucian's satire as evidence for Jesus's historical existence than the christians themselves:http://lucianofsamosata.info/wiki/doku.php?id=2013:why-lucians-view-of-the-christians-and-jesus-is-indeterminateLucian (who lived in the 2nd century) only provides evidence of the existence of christians then (which no one denies) and what they were perceived to believe. At that time they would have just been one of a number of similar "saviour" cults (the name Jesus actually means saviour: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_(name).a powerful suggestion that he was just a mythical figure). Another of these, the cult of Adonis, was mentioned by Lucian in his essay "On the Syrian Goddess". Its devotees believed that Adonis died and was resurrected a couple of days later (sound familiar?).. Next you'll be arguing that Adonis was a historical person on the basis of the absence of evidence not being evidence of absence.Incidentally, despite what Redmond says, Lucian should still be read today. He was an "Epicurean". They accepted that the gods existed but said that they had no influence on human affairs. The nearest you could get to atheism in those days. Lucian's satires on the cults and cultists of his day is amusing and still relevant for today.
Since the silly season starts this week no doubt Vin will give us his permission to carry on discussing this.The issue is not whether early christians existed. Of course they did. Nobody denies that. Lucian didn't really accept that Jesus was a historical figure. He says that this is what christians believed. The satirical story in which he mentions this, The Death of Peregrine, is a amusing read. Religious conmen were common at the time and both he and Celsus suggested that the supposed founder of christianity must have been one of them.It's a pity Celsus's book didn't survive (i.e was destroyed by the christians) but, from the juicy extraxcts, it sounds a good read too. I think the Jews of the time also said Jesus was the bastard son of a Roman soldier.Christian doctrine is generally agreed to have been elaborated by Paul (who was a historical person) but even he doesn't seem to have accepted that Jesus was a historical figure; only that he was a good idea.
caz25 wrote:MMT recognizes that neither taxes nor borrowing are the financing methods of government. (…) In fact, taxes, rather than financing the government, are primarily used as a means of enforcing a currency unit of account among the population, since everyone must use the government money to settle their liabilities, aka taxes, with the government. The government is self-financing, which is mainly a function of it having the power in a society. … one of MMT's points is that government spending is not constrained by financial assets, only real production capacity. Why then would fewer tax revenues lead to less government spending? This strikes me as austerity logic and is squarely against what MMT advocates. As long as the government is the issuer of its currency, which is not the case of countries under the Euro, private sector profits are not a contraint on government spending. The government is in no way financed by taxes or borrowing.Whether or not the government needs to resort to taxation and/or borrowing to finance its activities, at the moment this is what governments do. So your last statement is a bit daring.MMT claims that all governments need to do to finance their spending is to simply print the money. Governments can print money at will and could do this to finance their spending, but what would be the consequence? The economy needs money for various things, of which paying taxes is only one. It is also needed for buying and selling transactions and settling debts. In fact if the general price level is to remain stable the amount of money in circulation must be just enough for all these to be carried out. If it's more than this, then the result will be a rise in the general price level, i.e inflation and the depreciation of the currency.So, if the government didn't resort to taxation or borrowing and simply printed the money to finance its spending, this would be extra money over and above what was needed and so there'd be inflation, roaring inflation in fact. What the government would be doing is creating more claims on wealth without any new wealth being created. It's because they don't create any wealth that governments have to get, through taxation and borrowing, the wealth they use from what is or has been produced in the productive sector of economy. MMT inflation would just be another way of doing this, by devaluing the wealth people hold just as much as if they'd been taxed.You should ask yourself why, if it's as simple as you imagine, governments haven't adopted what MMT proposes. It's a proposal to try to reform capitalism so it works for everyone's benefit. But this can't be done. The only thing to do with capitalism is to end it, not try to mend it — and with it render money and monetary theories redundant by directly mobilising resources as resources on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production, with production directly to satisfy people's need and not for sale on a market with a view to profit.
Looks as if they have already began to select possible scapegoats to take the blame off capitalism whose way of working required, in the slump that followed the crash of 2008, that governments cut back on their spending to relieve taxation on profits. Since most local government money comes from central government, this trickled down to local level, with in this case the result we've seen. How about charging capitalism with corporate manslaughter?.
