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She also stood as a candidate in Manchester Central in the general election and got the same sort of vote, both in terms of numbers and percentage, as we did in Clapham and Brixton Central:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2024/uk/constituencies/E14001352
We have had a stall there quite a few times in the past as this photo shows.
Incidentally, the gazebo must be in the possession of one of the comrades or ex-comrades in the North East, so no need to buy another one if you can track it down.
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/10048538/4909977401695655865
This from the Financial Times is relevant under the headline;
“Donald Trump will demand Russia-Ukraine peace talks, claims Viktor Orbán
Hungarian prime minister says Republican candidate will rapidly push to end the war if he wins US election.”https://www.ft.com/content/44493fa9-d8f2-4407-94ac-a072c1976ca2
Actually, in his 1920 polemic against full state capitalism and socialism, Mises conceded that monetary calculation could not measure use-value. He also conceded that a socialist society would have no problem in deciding what to produce (what use-values to produce). His criticism was that it wouldn’t be able to decide “rationally” what methods and materials to use to produce them.
Monetary calculation, he wrote in chapter 2 of that article,
“can never obtain as a measure for the calculation of those value determining elements which stand outside the domain of exchange transactions. If, for example, a man were to calculate the profitability of erecting a waterworks, he would not be able to include in his calculation the beauty of the waterfall which the scheme might impair, except that he may pay attention to the diminution of tourist traffic or similar changes, which may be valued in terms of money. Yet these considerations might well prove one of the factors in deciding whether or not the building is to go up at all.
It is customary to term such elements “extra-economic.“ This perhaps is appropriate; we are not concerned with disputes over terminology; yet the considerations themselves can scarcely be termed irrational. In any place where men regard as significant the beauty of a neighborhood or of a building, the health, happiness and contentment of mankind, the honor of individuals or nations, they are just as much motive forces of rational conduct as are economic factors in the proper sense of the word, even where they are not substitutable against each other on the market and therefore do not enter into exchange relationships.”And
“Any extension of the sphere of monetary calculation causes misunderstanding. It cannot be regarded as constituting a kind of yardstick for the valuation of goods, and cannot be so treated in historical investigations into the development of social relationships; it cannot be used as a criterion of national wealth and income, nor as a means of gauging the value of goods which stand outside the sphere of exchange, as who should seek to estimate the extent of human losses through emigrations or wars in terms of money? This is mere sciolistic tomfoolery, however much it may be indulged in by otherwise perspicacious economists.”
(I had to look up “sciolistic” too.)
Some of his followers, and others, have disagreed with this and have tried to put a price on everything.
While governments can’t control or change the way that the capitalist economy works, they can control how the armed forces (the essence of the state of which the government is the executive) are used. It is difficult to see what more help the American government could give to Israel as its proxy against Iran, but it’s possible that a Trump administration might divert military resources from Ukraine — bringing that war to an end — to Israel, risking one with Iran.
Talk about a choice between two evils. Both war-mongers but differing on which war to promote.
Actually, Dan, we have also dealt with the so-called “supply side” aspect of the question. Here is an extract from an article submitted to the Socialist Standard and which will be published in full in due course:
“In his Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth Mises claimed that the application of in-kind calculation would be feasible only on a small scale. However, it is possible to identify extant or past examples of calculation-in-kind being implemented on a fairly – or even, very large – scale. For instance, Cockshott refers us to the fascinating case of the first Pyramid at Saqqara, built under the supervision of Imhote – an enormous undertaking by any standard – involving nothing more than calculation-in-kind. Another case in point was the Inca civilisation, a large-scale and complex civilisation that effectively operated without money.
However, it was really the emergence of linear programming that has effectively delivered the coup de grâce against this particular line of argument against calculation-in-kind peddled by Mises and others. It has made this argument more or less completely irrelevant since it has removed what Mises considered to be the main objection to this form of accounting – that it could not be applied on a large scale basis.
Linear programming is an algorithmic technique developed by the Soviet mathematician Leonid Kantorovich in 1939 and, around about the same time, the Dutch-American economist, T. C. Koopman. As a technique it is widely and routinely used today to solve a variety of problems – such as the logistics of supply chains, production scheduling, and such technical issues as how to best to organise traffic flows within a highly complex public transportation network with a view to, say, reducing average waiting times.
To begin with the computational possibilities of this technique were rather limited. This changed with the development of the computer. As Cockshott notes:
‘Since the pioneering work on linear programming in the 30s, computing has been transformed from something done by human ‘computers’ to something done by electronic ones. The speed at which calculations can be done has increased many billion-fold. It is now possible to use software packages to solve huge systems of linear equations’ (Paul Cockshott, 2007, ‘Mises, Kantorovich and Economic Computation’, Munich Personal RePEc Archive, Paper No. 6063)
Computerised linear programming allows us to solve some very large scale optimisation problems involving many thousands of variables, in a matter of mere seconds. It can also help to solve small scale optimisation problems.
In short, linear programme provides us with a method for optimising the use of resources – either by maximizing a given output or by minimizing material inputs or both. The problem with any single scalar measure or unit of accounting (such as market price or labour values) is that these are unable to properly handle the complexity of real world constraints on production which, by their very nature, are multi-factorial. Calculation-in-kind in the guise of linear programming provides us with the means of doing precisely this since it is directly concerned with the way in which multiple factors interact with – and constrain – each other.
While a non-market system of production could operate well enough without linear programming, there is little doubt that the availability of such a tool has now put the matter of whether such a system is feasible or not, beyond dispute.”
Could the new Labour government be lucky and the economy grow while they happen to be in office? It’s a possibility but, if it does, they will of course claim credit for it.
From today’s Times:
“May’s 0.4 per cent monthly GDP expansion may have had little to with Labour’s policy launches on planning and public investment, announced this week, but the numbers underscore the party’s good fortune in inheriting an economy in the midst of a growth upswing.”
Why can’t those in direct charge of a productive unit in a socialist society decide how much to produce in the light of how much people take (or don’t take) from distribution centres or other outlets in much the same sort of way as managers of capitalist enterprises do today to sales? If stocks fall below average that’s a signal to produce more; if stocks built up that’s a signal to produce less. They will be responding to real demand as opposed to artificially limited, paying demand. But there is no difference in principle.
I don’t know about Dan but Dapprich creates a problem for himself because he insists on giving people in a socialist society non-circulating tokens with which to acquire consumer goods and services, at least those not provided for free. This means he has to fix a “price” for these and so gets drawn down that rabbit hole. He suggests this should be the “clearing price”, ie the price that will clear what has been produced rather than the other ways that those already down there have proposed.
The other objection to any token system as an alternative to money is the unnecessary use of resources to manage it, maybe not as much as the money system but still a considerable amount.
No, he is not an abstentionist. Here is his position as stated in the sane podcast:
“And if you’re one of those progressively minded people that’s convinced themselves, half rightly, that it doesn’t matter who you vote for, it doesn’t matter if you participate in the system, it doesn’t matter if you protest, keep in mind that it’s not that cut and dry. The system is a corporate totalitarian system in its very nature, but it can indeed get far worse. And that’s what you have to fight back through whatever in-system mechanisms you can, as we all work, of course, toward the true solution, which is total system change.”
I think that voting will be one of the “in-system mechanisms” he thinks people can use to try to stop things getting worse. I imagine he will call on people to vote against Trump, as he did last time.
In his latest Revolution Now podcast, Peter Joseph embraces democracy which he defines as
“I define democracy as the intellectual will of a citizenry expressed through some process of assessment, so societal decisions are made based on the majority consensus in the end.”
He is always a bit wordy so it’s unclear what a “majority consensus” is. Presumably he just means a majority.
This overcomes one of the criticisms we have had of his earlier vision of a society without property rights or money — that it was technocratic. So, on this, he has moved closer to what we understand by socialism — a society based on no property and democratic control of the resources society needs to survive.
On the other hand, he has now taken up this idea of what to do now and how such a society might come about, speaking of
“the Integral parallel economy project that I will introduce in my new film: Zeitgeist Requiem by which localized, smaller economic structures emerge, and then they self-organize through their own nodes as they connect to other parallel economies of the same nature, and ideally continue self-organizing to a point where their use is so widespread, it takes all of the steam out of the horrific market economy system.”
I suppose something like this might emerge in the final days of capitalism but the final overthrow of “the horrific market economy system” will have to overcome by political action based on socialist understanding.
Anyway, his podcast can be found here (but be warned he is wordy):
https://www.revolutionnow.live/episodes/episode50-k9w85-z3c2d-lfd83
Just seen the election communication of the Labour candidate (now MP) for Newport West and Islwyn. It consists entirely of a letter from Starmer in which he promises:
”a Britain rebuilt by Labour so the British economy works for working people.”
That’s physically impossible of course but, if he wants to be judged by trying to do it, fair enough.
The absurd rumour that Mark Matlock, the ReformUK candidate, did not exist but was created by AI continues to circulate on social media.
In the meantime, despite what the Green candidate was reported as saying, it seems that there was no hustings at which he didn’t turn up and to which we were not invited.
I think by “hustings” she must have meant the count. In this case, she would have been using the word hustings in its original sense, since in the days before the introduction of the secret ballot in 1872 MPs were nominated and elected at hustings.
Robbo is right. The article by Dapprich on tokens as an alternative to money is much more interesting.
In it he starts from what Marx wrote in his Critique of the Gotha Programme where Marx discusses (I would say rather than proposes) non-circulating tokens based on labour-time as the alternative to money in socialism/communism pending the development of the productive forces to the point where people can have free access according to self-determined need.
He proposes a different type non-circulating tokens and a different way of “pricing” the goods they can be used to redeem. That basically is his alternative to money.
He accepts that, as far as the production of producer goods is concerned, Marx and Engels “proposed some kind of in-kind planning. The constraints, benefits and costs of production are to be evaluated in purely physical terms.”
His concern is the distribution of consumer goods and services in a socialist/communist society and here he makes some criticism of Marx’s token system. He thinks that his own version obviates the need to go over to full free access as it would ensure that people’s needs are satisfied. In other words, that a system of non-circulating tokens should be a permanent feature of socialism/communism.
He even mentions the argument (which we have used) that “since we have seen significant increases in productive capacities since the nineteenth century, during which Marx was writing, perhaps the token system is already outdated”, even though he says he is not convinced by it.
Clearly he is somebody arguing from the same basis as us and so much more interesting to discuss with than dealing with the latest offerings of so-called “Austrian scholarship” that his article with Dan does.
I think this link will take you there:
https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/revepe/v4y2023i3d10.1007_s43253-022-00091-6.html
More on this but I can’t believe it’s true, otherwise someone has committed a serious criminal offence:
Reform UK accused of using AI generated candidates in the UK election
byu/GruffJM inmorningsomewhereInteresting but presumably not literally true story here in which the ReformUK candidate for Clapham and Brixton Hill features:
More serious is a reference by the Green Party candidate to a hustings. If there was one we were not invited but should have been.
We are investigating.
