ALB
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Printing more money (than the economy requires) doesn't cause devaluation (of a currency in relation to others). What it does is raise the internal price level in the country concerned making its price higher than the world level. As the article says this makes exports more expensive and imports cheaper:
Quote:Printing more money might give a temporary boost to production, but would eventually lead to a rise in prices, creating other economic problems such as making exports more expensive and so less competitive; imports would be cheaper so threatening the jobs too of workers employed by businesses producing for the home market.The traditional way out of this is to devalue the currency which, as you say, then makes exports cheaper (and imports dearer). This option was resorted to by reformist governments in Britain in the 1960s and the Mitterrand government in France in the early 80s after their attempts to spend their way out of a crisis failed, but, as you also say, is not open to the Greek government today as its currency is the euro.It's not certain, though, that devaluation would help Greek workers any more than the option chosen the option the Greek government, if only because Greece doesn't have that much to export and depends a lot on imports. Devaluation would lead to a rise in the cost of living for them which wages would be unlikely to catch up. In any event, it's a choice of two evils as far as workers are concerned. They lose out whichever the government opts for.You say devaluation "reduces the cost of labour" but how, and is that a good thing for workers? It doesn't sound like it.
Case here from an ex-member sort of supporting Corbyn's election even if not actually joining up to vote for him:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/comments/my-election-contest-jeremy-corbyn
Just read a reference in Paul Mason's new book on Postcapitalism to a 2014 OECD report "Policy Challenges for the Next 50 Years" on which he comments (the report envisages an average annual growth rate up to 2060 of 3%):
Quote:To make the OECD's central growth scenario work, Europe and the USA have to absorb 50 million migrants each between now and 2060.That's a million a year on average or 5 "millions" over 5 years. True, the OECD doesn't think that will happen but then neither will growth (which of course depends on using more more labour). On the other hand, if the capitalist economy does grow at that rate then millions of migrants will be pulled in, whatever Hammond, UKIP and the others might (not) want. Perhaps Hammond could go along with this as long as they don't come from Africa.
I like this bit from today's Times:
Quote:A group of British tabloid journalists were pelted with eggs by a French campaigner yesterday and pursued across the camp. She was joined by other French and British activists who threatened the reporters and damaged a car.They got off lightly.
Very interesting. Incidentally, it raises another problem for the band of professional politicians who currently control the Labour Party: what to do about Trotskyists who never left the Labour Party such as Heiko himself and one of those interviewed who said he sold "Socialist Appea"l? I see that Chris Knight gets a cameo appearance. I think he falls into this category or at least used to.It remains to be seen if the Labour establishment can muster enough votes from MPs and high-paid councillors running councils to outvote the sort of enthusiasm shown by Corbyn's supporters. I can't see who else, apart from aspiring MPs, would want to vote for any of the other three. We'll see.It's clearly true that if Corbyn hadn't have been standing the Labour leadership contest would have been boring and probably wouldn't have made the headlines any more than the one for the LibDem's new leader did. Who'd be interested in a contest between three non-descript non-entities, not even media hacks?Just bought the papers. The front page headline in The Times is "New Poll has Corbyn on course for victory. Hard-left candidate almost doubles lead". This is going to be interesting.
Trying to track down exactly what was Scargill's argument against cooperatives I've discovered that the remarks attributed to him were not about workers cooperatives but about "workers control". Further confirmation, I suppose, that you should never trust a Daily Torygraph journalist. He actually co-authored a pamphlet called The Myth of Workers Control which seems to have been an attack on the idea of having elected workers representatives on the board of companies. A flavour of his criticism can be found on page 6 of this document (an interview with "Marxism Today" in 1981):
Quote:I reject the argument that you can have some kind of workers' control within capitalism. What you can have is class collaboration within capitalism. Those who follow this argument in essence seek to perpetuate the existing system. It is only by politicising our membership that we will ever bring about the irreversible shift towards a socialist system in society. Therefore I don't agree that we ought to be talking about workers on the boards, irrespective of whether it is in private or nationalised industry. Once we've put workers on the boards they become bureaucrats for a start. Secondly, there is a conflict of interests. Thirdly, workers themselves distrust those people sitting on the boards. And fourthly, those who actually sit on the boards of directors, or boards of management, begin to think with a completely different outlook from when they were workers' representatives.There must, in my view, be a quite clear distinct difference between those who own and control and those who represent workers. There is a class conflict, we do live in a class society. There are two classes in our society — those who own and control the means of production, distribution and exchange and those who work by hand and by brain. There is no middle class as is suggested by those academics and intellectuals who would like to stratify society. There are only two classes in the strict political sense.This is a part of his argument that we can agree with, but it's not an argument against workers coops.
It wouldn't work but it might be a way to stop rail strikes, with workers having to be their own bosses and discipline themselves to keep costs down.Tony Benn, when Harold Wilson's Minister of Industry in the 1970s, tried this, only to fail:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/7244680/Tony-Benns-failed-experiment-with-worker-co-operatives.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph_Engineering#The_Meriden_Motorcycle_Co-operativeThe Torygraph article, besides mentioning Scargill's view, refers to the Tories trying to steal the idea:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/7244376/Tories-plan-workers-co-operatives-for-public-sector.htmlI don't think it came to anything, did it?
Got a copy of his book. Will start reading it when I've finished Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (not everyone in the US is religious, fortunately).
In that video of him speaking at the Oxford Union in 2013 he defines socialism as "from each according to their MEANS, to each according to their needs" rather than "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs". This is a very significant difference as his version implies the continued existence of money incomes which are to be redistributed from those with more to pay for services for those with less. Which brings out well the difference between Labour Party "socialism" (such as it is) and real socialism. Socialism is not about the redistribution of wealth but about the common ownership of it.
alanjjohnstone wrote:I find it strange that many who applauded Russell Brand for bringing the case for revolution into the popular political discourse are not applying the same logic to Sanders or Corbyn re-introducing "socialism" to the electoral campaigns. For sure, they share exactly Brand's faulty understanding of what is meant by socialismThere's probably something in this, just as the existence of the USSR kept the term "socialism" at the centre of political discussion — with our niche being to explain that it wasn't really socialist and which disappeared when the USSR collapsed.Some members of the Oxford Communist Corresponding Society are applying this logic to the Corbyn phenomenon. Unfortunately, they seem to have gone overboard in supporting the campaIgn to get him elected Labour leader rather than simply getting in on the act by using it to disccuss socialism. This is obviously going too far even if his election would change the terms of political discussion (moving the "Overton window" Brian G mentioned to the left) but nothing else (it won't make capitalism any more reformable in the interest of the wage and salary working class).Ironically Corbyn hasn't been using the word "socialism" all that much. It's been more the media using it to try to put people off him, though the effect is the same: the word and the concept get discussed. Anyway, here he is 2013 talking about his idea of socialism:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZvAvNJL-gE
Yes, I noticed he was backpeddling a bit but also that he favours enterprises being run by cooperatives rather than nationalised, state industries. An admission, I suppose, that nationalisation was a failure (from a working class point of view) and isn't popular but, as we know, workers coops would be even more at the mercy of market forces.
Ah, Clause Four ! It's not what it seems and never was. Here's what it was when it was abolished twenty years ago now:
Quote:To secure for the producers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry, and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible, upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry and service.And here's what we thought of it:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1990s/1994/no-1083-november-1994/rise-and-fall-clause-four
Quote:To talk of the common ownership of the means of exchange is a contradiction in terms. Where there is common ownership there can be no exchange since exchange can only take place between separate owners, i.e. where private ownership not common ownership exists. In a socialist society based on common ownership goods are simply distributed not exchanged, so there is no need for money, banks and the rest of the financial system.In other words, insofar as it committed (on paper) the Labour Party to anything it was a nationalized economy, or state capitalisam, not socialism.
Here's the review of his most well-known book The Great Terror in the February 1969 Socialist Standard:
Quote:Robert Conquest is no friend of Russia and that fact alone will probably be enough for most supporters of the Russian regime to discredit his account of Stalin's purges. The one unfortunate fact, for the tireless Russophiles, is that Conquest's stuff is carefully documented, with even its trivia with testimony. And what is perhaps the most terrifying part of the book — "casualty figures" of the purges computed in part from Russian government population statistics.It is arguable, whether most of the book was needed. There is little to be gained from yet another account of the Kirov murder,the trial of Kamenev and Zinoviev, the pitiless system of arrest, interrogation, execution or slow, living death in the labour camps. Most of it has been done, somewhere or other, before.The casualty figures are another matter. There are of course no official details to go on; it must all be done by combining the evidence of participants — some of them NKVD officers — with official statistics and matching it all up with the Census of 1959. Conquest's conclusion, which is staggering but difficult to argue against, is that, as an under-estimation, twenty million were killed — by execution, in the “collectivisation drive", in the camps — under the Stalin state capitalist regime. The Nazis could hardly have improved on this. And for some of the time this wholesale murder was going on, we were told that the Russians were our gallant allies, contented under the solicitous care of Uncle Joe. Henry Wallace, who was then the American Vice-President, visited one of the worst camps in 1944. The place was specially tarted up and Wallace duly found it "idyllic".This sort of story should make even the most obstinate Tory pause for thought. What happens to a man who fights for power over capitalism? The answer cannot be avoided and the last forty years have given evidence galore. He does the job as the system demands and on those terms everything — murder, torture, everything — is justified.In a review of a later book by Conquest Where Marx went Wrong in the February 1971 Socialist Standard, the reviewer ("H") writes in passing:
Quote:It is not that Mr. Conquest does not know of us; he has on several occasions paid tribute to the Party's freedom from the dishonesty and cant that is the hall mark of the "Leftwing" parties.I've not been able to find one of these, if only to refute the rabid "rightwing" Tory MEP Daniel Hannan who has written in his blog on Conquest's death:
Quote:No one familiar with Conquest’s corpus could maintain, as student Lefties used to do, that proper communism had never really been tried, and that the USSR operated on the basis of some kind of state capitalism. Conquest ineluctably showed that, in the Comecon states, theory had found brutal practice.
