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Someone who had returned from fighting with the Kurdish YPG in Syria called in at Head Office today.  He was doing a tour of organisations to try to get the PKK taken off the NATO list of terrorist organisations. We explained that we didn't have much influence in that area! Unfortunately I didn't have a long time to chat with him but I did ask him about whether or not Bookchin's "libertarian municipalism" which the PKK has apparently embraced was actually being practised. He said that there were local areas that were run on this basis, basically providing electricity and water, street cleaning,etc and that there was no problem with food supplies. He said that there were also Christian militias and some units of the Syrian Army fighting ISIS in the area. Interesting firsthand account anyway.He referred us to a news item about someone from Canada who have fought alongside him:http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadians-who-travelled-abroad-to-fight-isil-get-little-scrutiny-upon-return-suggesting-canada-isnt-keen-on-stopping-them

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I think our different assessments of what is the more important in the economic system today stems from the fact that you are judging it by the amount of labour involved while I'm judging it by the amount of capital involved. It is true that about 80% of production goes towards government and people's consumption and therefore only about 20% to re-investment (capital accumulation).The point I was making was that what drives the capitalist economy is capital accumulation, overwhelmingly of buildings and machinery. Ok, it might be an oversimplification to identify this entirely with manufacturing but there is virtually no non-market accumulation of buildings and machinery.  The non-market sector just does not have anything like the same economic weight as manufacturing and construction.Basically, the current economic importance of the non-market sector is being exaggerated as well as the illusion that it could spread beyond services, repairs and, yes, food grown on alotments.

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Vin wrote:

It is stereotyping, Corbyn openly rejected old 70s 'nationalisation'. And leadership.

I don't know why you keep on trying to deny that Corbyn's policies represent a return to Old Labour/Left Social Democratic reformism and its Keynesianism and more government intervention in the capitalist economy. The cornerstone of his economic policy, so-called Peoples QE, is just another name for Keynes's policy of trying to spend your way out of a slump. As if it hadn't been tried in Britain in the 70s and failed and in France in the 80s and failed.How would you suggest we characterise his policies?

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I agree with SP

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imposs1904 wrote:

The Corbyn speech bubble feeds into the narrative being pushed down people's throats in the media right now. It's lazy

This is unfair. The media may well saying he wants to go back to the 70s, but we said it first, as in the article in this month's Standard, out at the beginning of August but written in July, where we described Corbyn as "Harold Wilson warmed up", i.e. as Old Labour wanting to go back to pre-Thatcher times with nationalisation, council houses, Welfare State, etc.( I know that's more "Back to the 60s".)It may well be that so-called "Corbymania" represents a general revulsion against austerity and the Tories behaving as if their general election win has given them a mandate to pursue Thatcher's agenda of bashing the unions and those on benefits and, that, to be a credible politician, Corbyn has to convert this into realistic policy propositions. I can't see why we can't criticise these  proposals without criticising the man or the sentiments behind those who support him. In fact, that people discontented with what capitalism is doing to them should look to the future rather than the past is what Paul Mason seems to mean when he says (see separate thread)

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Forget defending random bits of the old system. Think about where society could be going in 50 years.

Proposing to revive random bits of the old system is precisely what Corbyn's policies aim to do or, if you like, abandon "nei-liberalism" for the social democratic reformism of yesterday.. In that context "Back to the 70s" is a valid socialist criticism

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robbo203 wrote:

So it seems we have been at  Mason's "choke point" for some time but capitalism is still around.

The trouble is your "non-market sector" only concerns personal services and repairs to manufactured goods. But this sector is not the one that drives the capitalist economy. It's the production of manufactured goods (from raw material to finished product). Hardly any of this is in the non-market sector.In any event we don't have to wait for the labour content and marginal cost of production of manufactured goods to reach zero before socialism, even as a world of abundance, to become possible. A non-market "postcapitalist" world is possible now if the means of production were commonly owned so that they could be geared to producing goods for free use and consumption. We don't need to way for further "spontaneous" technological developments to make this even more feasible. The technological basis for socialism already exists and has done for years.

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Come off it, if he wins on 12 September everyone will be talking about it, in fact even if he only just loses.  The editorial committee has to try to anticipate what's likely to be of interest to people in the month the issue is going to be sold.

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But he does.

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Here's a key passage from that interview

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"The state has to be rethought as a transition motor," he says – meaning it needs to be reimagined as a vehicle for change rather than a defender of the status quo. "And transition's a long period – we're not talking about two years, we're talking about 50," says Paul."Forget defending random bits of the old system. Think about where society could be going in 50 years. Both what its massive problems are, like climate, ageing, and also what the potential of the technology is. If you think that way, what you've then got to do, is do exactly what the British state did in the Waterloo era. They said, 'Look, the whole purpose of this state is to clear a path for these new things' – factories, railways, whatever. I mean literally. The state went, 'We need a railway from there to there, fuck you if you live in between.And now, the same must be done again, with the state promoting a move away from capitalism that he calls "Project Zero", because, he writes, "its aims are a zero-carbon energy system; the production of machines, products and services with zero marginal costs; and the reduction of labour time as close as possible to zero". (….)"I think the choke point for the transition to postcapitalism comes when the market sector and non-market sector become round about the same size."

So, he is clearly a "reformist" in the original sense of someone who wants political action to gradually transform capitalism into socialism (as opposed to the sense in which it has come to be used, even by us, as someone who merely wants to reform capitalism to try to make it better for people).When he says "Forget defending random bits of the old system. Think about where society could be going in 50 years", this is (well) aimed at those who are behind campaigns and go on demonstrations demanding "Save This" or "Stop That" and asking them to think in terms of a new society. In other words, "Forward to the 2070s rather than Back to the 1970s".  Good advice.

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Here's the letter our comrades of the World Socialist Party (India) in Calcutta have sent to The Statesman:

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Dear Editor, In the evening of August 23, 2015 in the Sunday Discussion Meeting of our party, the World Socialist Party (India), we read with interest the Saturday Statesman, August 22, 2015 article “Relevance of Marx” written by Professor Gargi Sengupta. It is really heartening to note that a nineteenth century communist revolutionary, Karl Marx, is being revisited by the 21st century mainstream press to find answers to the present-day woes and worries. Hopefully, this signals the beginning of Marx’s media-ride in India too. This happens because, as Marx and Engels themselves observed, “consciousness can sometimes appear further advanced than the contemporary empirical conditions, so that in the struggles of a later epoch one can refer to earlier theoreticians as authorities." – (The German Ideology) “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past,” wrote Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis BonaparteIn her defensive appreciation of Marx, Gargi Sengupta has rightly claimed that “Marxism enables us to understand the nature of the capitalist crisis,” and also that “Marx believed that human development requires a cooperative society based on common ownership of the means of production.” She has excellently pronounced, “The overall significance of religion may have declined, but the family, the schools, and the capitalist controlled mass media continue to brainwash the working class and prevent them from realizing their true destiny.”Her observation: “From a global perspective, a class-based analysis is still relevant,” holds up one of the basic principles of Marxism. She defends Marx for “making a very fundamental contribution” whereby “He placed human beings and their conscious, purposive activity – human labour – at the centre of his analysis” and also for a “unique contribution” – the role of “class struggle” in “human historical development”. She is right in pointing out that “Marx’s writings still evoke interest across the world. … Marx’s writings can throw light on the problems of our age”. Simply because, as Marx viewed, “The nature of capital remains the same in its developed as in its undeveloped form”; and “Production of surplus value is the absolute law of this mode of production.” – Capital , vol – IActually, Marx is more relevant today than ever before.This said, I would like to comment on a couple of inaccuracies in Professor Sengupta's article. She says, “Marx visualized the remedy in violent revolution followed by decades of civil and international warfare.” This is a half-truth. True, in his early years Marx held a “violent revolution” view. However, eventually and finally he arrived at the following conclusion: “proletariat – organized in a separate political party. That such organization must be pursued by all the means, which the proletariat has at its disposal, including universal suffrage, thus transformed from the instrument of trickery, which it has been up till now into an instrument of emancipation.” – Written on about May 10, 1880, Printed according to L'Égalité, No. 24, June 30, 1880, checked with the text of Le Précurseur. Secondly, in portraying capitalism as only a “private enterprise” system she has missed the yardstick of defining state capitalism – the defining characteristic of which is state ownership and control of the means of production and articles for distribution. As a result she is mistaken in recognizing the erstwhile so-called ‘communist’ dictatorial and despotic state capitalist regimes of Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. How could there be “the eclipse of Communism” when Communism (Socialism the same) has nowhere and never been attempted at all? Just what happened inthese countries was appropriately described in 1918 by Fitzgerald of the Socialist Party of Great Britain: “What justification is there, then, for terming the upheaval in Russia a Socialist Revolution? None whatever beyond the fact that the leaders in the November movement claim to be Marxian Socialists.” –Socialist Standard, Aug 1918

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jondwhite wrote:

what if there was a meme image creates about exposing the anti working class nature of prime minister Cameron or Nigel farage?

The front cover of the September Socialist Standard should fit the bill if you can wait a week.

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Looks as if the Labour leadership are going for the rigging the election option:http://www.scotsman.com/news/uk/25-000-rogue-voters-in-labour-poll-chaos-1-386604525,000 to be purged! Even after they've voted. That's bound to affect the result.

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Thanks. I notice that Saad-Filho and Pettifor are no longer on it. I wonder why. Also note the addition of Josh Ryan-Collins, one of the authors of the currency crankish Where Does Money Come from? (reviewed in the Socialist Standard in February 2012). I imagine there are others among the signatories who also think commercial banks can create money from thin air. Not sure, though, that Corbyn himself has actually said that (yet). But with friends like this….Perhaps we could send a letter saying Corbyn's economic policy is no more credible than that of everyone else who thinks that governments can control the way capitalism works.

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ALB wrote:

especially, now that 40 economists are reported to have endorsed Corbyn's economic programme

I've been trying to find out who these are and have only been able to come up with this:https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/ourkingdom/35-economists-back-corbyn's-policies-as-'sensible'The only names most people will be able to recognise are Steve Keen and Ann Pettifor. We reviewed a book by leftwing Keynesian John Weeks in the April 2004 Socialist Standard and two edited by Alfredo Saad in May and December 2004.  Saad describes himself as a Marxist and, as the reviews recognise, explains Marxian economics well. All the stranger then that he doesn't realise that Corbyn's "proposal to fund public investment by the sale of bonds to the Bank of England" (so-called People's QE) is just Keynes in a new package and cannot work to make capitalism operate in the interest of the working class or even to get it to "grow" again. Or perhaps he does and is just agreeing that Corbyn has opened an interesting discussion on economic policy.The media are reporting that Danny Blanchflower has also signed up. The former member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, that is. A bit more of a catch.

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This editorial from the September 1965 Socialist Standard might have been more appropriate:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1960s/1965/no-733-september-1965/editorial-what-runs-labour-governmentespecially, now that 40 economists are reported to have endorsed Corbyn's economic programme, this:

Quote:

It is almost a year now since the Labour party formed a government. They felt that thirteen wasted years of Tory rule would give way to an administration that could solve social problems. It has been a year of renewed failure, in which their optimism has been humiliated by their inability to control Capitalism.We do not doubt that the Labour Government really believed they could "get the economy moving". There was to be steady expansion. Out of a four per cent increase in productivity there were going to be more schools, hospitals, roads, pensions. There were going to be more wages. A "planned" incomes policy. A "planned" growth rate. None of these schemes have begun to get off the ground, nor do they show any prospect of doing so.

i.e Harold Wilson rather than Clement Attlee warmed up.

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