ALB
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You're right. There is some good stuff in the first document on "Thinking About Revolution" and we should try and make contact with them again.I say again because some of us met David Stratman when he was in England in 1996 (I think) to promote his book We Can Strange the World. The Real Meaning of Everyday Life. Steve Coleman was so impressed by him that he agreed that the Party should take copies of his book. Stan Parker and me who had actually read the book knew that the Party would not be able to endorse it (because it was critical of Marx arguing that Marx did lead to Lenin and that there "the Soviet Union and other Communist societies represent not a betrayal of Marxism but its fulfillment"). It was a bit embarrassing as the (free) books arrived but we couldn't distribute them (they may still be in a box somewhere in Head Office).Stan wrote a review of the book that appeared in the September 1996 Socialist Standard. One of the points he made was:
Quote:Stratman talks about a "revolutionary party", yet he is very vague about what a revolutionary democratic world will actually be like, other than that it won't be capitalism. Will it be a world in which the means of wealth production and distribution will be commonly owned and democratically controlled? Will it be a world in which there are no nation states, no armies and police forces, no buying and selling, no money?It looks as if in the meantime Stratman has come round to answering "yes". See the "Summary of Proposals for a New Society" on page 2 of the document :
Quote:We propose a democratic revolution to sweep away the elite power and class domination that so distort our present world. We propose a new society in which:• All who contribute to society, or who are not obligated to do so because they are children, elderly or otherwise unable to work, have free and equal access to its goods and services, which are shared according to need, not bought and sold. Money is not used. There are no rich and no poor people.• All the things that people use to produce goods, such as factories and mines and large tracts of land, belong to all the people. These things are like the air we breathe and the sunshine that warms us—a common treasure for all of society, not the property of a few.Interesting extract from an article in today's Times headed "Don't expect robots to do it all for you — or steal your jobs":
Quote:The demonstration [of some robots at work] was part of a debate at the Work Foundation about robots and enhanced humans, asking the question will they steal our jobs? The answer, it seems, is "not quite". Geoff Mulgan, the chief executive of Nesta, a charity set up to promote innovation, points out that predictions about armies of robots in the workplace have yet to come to pass. Rather, globalisation has left companies chasing cheap labour overseas instead of replacing human beings with automatons. "The public," he says, "is still astounded to discover how little robots do and how feeble they still are."It seems the public have been misled by talk of a coming "exponential" growth of robotisation. Meanwhile capitalism itself impedes robotisation because firms won't introduce it if getting the work done by humans is cheaper.
simondav wrote:The system has to collapse eventually anyway, because the real economy cannot service the increased interest and debt repayment.This is a bit of a wild claim which I don't think is endorsed by Positive Money, is it? It certainly isn't by your star witnesses Sir Mervyn King, Paul Tucker and the others.But don't worry, the system is not going to collapse because not all interest can be repaid. Interest comes and can be paid from past or future production. It's only a subdivision of profit, and profit comes out the surplus value workers produce when they work in the real economy.
It looks as if Cameron may not be able to get his plan to send arms to fuel the Syrian Civil War through Parliament, with Putin hammering home:
Quote:I believe you will not deny the fact that one should hardly back those who kill their enemies and eat their organs – all that is filmed. Do you want to support these people? Do you want to supply arms to these people?and Boris Johnson saying don't arm these maniacs. See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10124089/Boris-Johnson-Dont-arm-the-Syria-maniacs.htmlIf Labour, Liberal and enough Tory and other MPs vote No then it won't happen, though as this would only be a consultative vote it could if Cameron decided to go ahead anyway. But he seems a weaker, and less opinionated man, than Blair and probably doesn't want to go down in history as a war-monger like him.Ironic (for some) if it turned out that a vote (or threatened vote) in parliament proved more effective in stopping an escalation of violence than a mass street demonstration.
This talk is good, concluding that UKIP are not "the BNP in blazers" but an external fraction of the Tory party. And it's audible, unlike the questions. Should we not consider when this is the case (as fairly frequently, unfortunately) we should publish the recording just of the talk but without the question period?
Who would have thought that events would gift us with so striking a confirmation of our analysis that cooperative enterprises are forced, by the economic laws of capitalism which they are powerless to overcome, to behave in the same way as avowedly capitalist enterprises?
jondwhite wrote:And presumably that addressing crowds as "men and women" wasn't controversial because it was considered too cisnormative. Ah well, maybe one day this will be the party objection.Cisnormative? Never heard of it till now. What is it? What do you have to do to be one? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Or should it be spelt "sisnormative"?
OK, I'll email him. At the time he was representing the "Karl Menger Society" named after the founder of the so-called Austrian School of Economics whose more well-known theorist was the ineffable Ludwig von Mises and his "economic calculation argument", but this doesn't seem to exist any more. Now he's some sort of Tory Party official.
The comparison used here shows that they do see themselves as trying to do on the political field what unions try to do on the economic field — protect workers' living standards under and within the capitalist system. Fair enough to a certain extent, cxertainly as far as trade union action is concerned, but this is not some indirect route to socialism. In fact, it's not a route to socialism at all but like going round and round the Circle Line in London.Those attending the Assembly are supposed to have a wider understanding and a wider aim than merely stopping things getting worse than capitalism. Maybe they have, but in proposing "People's Budgets" and the like are assuming that capitalism can be reformed so as to benefit wage and salary workers and their dependents. The point we are making is that it can't and therefore we should be concentrating on campaigning to replace capitalism by socialism as a system of common ownership, democratic control, production for use not profit, and distribution on the principle of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs".We seem to be the only people making this point.
Actually, "Comrades and fellow workers" used to be the standard way that Party speakers opened their indoor talks (or lectures as they were in those days). "Fellow Workers" was how you opened an outdoor meeting. It was also how our election manifestos began. When in the 1950s some outdoor speakers began addressing outdoor audiences as "Men and Women" a big theoretical controversy broke out …
Robert Fisk says it all:http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e85_1371257368Pity we can't use it as an editorial in next month's Socialist Standard
Latest silly story on this theme:http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/06/14/dna-tests-estimate-that-prince-william-is-0-3-to-0-8-percent-indian/
simondav wrote:as does my father Bill Davies on his web site http://www.legalforgery.comThis site illustrates the confusion that arises if you define bank loans as money and then assume that it is the same as money issued by a central bank. You end up proposing that "bank money" should be replaced by "government money"; which would mean, on the one hand, restricting the supply of funds to industry and, on the other, causing raging inflation. If implemented it would make things werse not better. Which is why it never will be. Those in charge of running capitalism may not understand completely how capitalism works, but they are not that stupid.
Our main concern re banking is to refute the view that a single bank can create money/credit (purchasing power which didn't exist before) by a mere stroke of a pen or, these days, a keyboard stroke. You don't think that either so what we are arguing about is the best way to describe how the banking system works.You say that the theory that the whole banking system (as opposed to a single bank on its own) can lend many times more than an amount initially deposited with one bank in the system is out of date. Maybe but we never thought much of this theory anyway, but at least it didn't accept the view that a single bank can create money to lend out of thin air and in any event assumed repeated deposits as well as repeated loans and so didn't refute the view that "deposits create loans".You say that a better description now is one which says that the banks together with the central bank can create purchasing power that didn't exist before. This is true, but only because the central bank does have the power to create new purchasing power by a keyboard stroke. We have never denied this, but of course this isn't an increase in actual wealth (which can only happen through work) and, if it does not correspond to an increase in wealth, will lead to a depreciation of the currency and so a rise in the general price level, aka inflation. I think that inflation (which has gone on continuously since 1940 and which it is current government policy should be about 2% a year) will be a big part of the reason why the "money supply" has increased 100 times since 1960. Another reason will be the expansion of production and trade in the period but, as you yourself note, this and bank lending with it sometimes goes down as well as up.
simondav wrote:The money supply reduces when loans are repaid faster than new ones are created, which is where we are now, and why the Bank of England is doing Quantitative Easing, so there is not a "money shortage", and a severe recession.This is not what QE is really about (see the discussion on the thread about this) and in any event has not led to an increase in the "money supply" in your sense, i.e an increase in actual bank lending. What it has led to is an increase in the commercial banks reserves with the Bank of England which may be included in your definition of the money supply (but is not the same as bank lending or an increase in currency in circulation). Its affect and aim has been to sustain the shares market (and disrupt the bond market).
simondav wrote:Only banks which are members of what used to becalled APACS have the privilege of money creation, because they have accounts at the Bank of England which they use to settle up with each other each day. A Credit Union or Savings and Loan institution does not have the same privilege.Actually all banks have access to this clearing facility (those that don't have accounts with the Bank of England have to have accounts with a bank which does; it's a condition for getting a licence to be a bank). And, as just pointed out, it's the Bank of England that's doing the actual "money creation". Incidentally, the New Economics Foundation booklet Where Does Money Come From? that you mentioned earlier does try to argue that credit unions too can create some money.
simondav wrote:Your view is different from people at the Bank of England like Mervyn King and Paul Tucker, and the ex head of the FSA Adair Turner, who do say that banks create money when they make loans. It is unfortunate that many economic text books are out of date, or wrongly regard banks as just intermediaries.Yes, these people do include bank loans as part of the "money supply" (which we say is confusing but can live with as long as it is always made clear than "bank money" is not the same as money issued by the central bank). I'm not sure, though, that they would deny that banks are financial intermediaries. Certainly Sir John Vickers who chaired the recent Independent Commission on Banking doesn't; in fact he takes this for granted. See: http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2011/no-1286-october-2011/banking-reform-it-relevant
simondav wrote:There are many things wrong with Capitalism, and I like it less as time goes on. Unfortunately we have a warped version of capitalism, where mega corporations and large banks rule the world, to the detriment of everyone else. I am in favour of re-nationalising many parts of our economy like power supply, water and public transport, and building much more public housing. The main political parties are in thrall to big business and banks and do not serve the interests of ordinary people.We are not in favour of trying to reform capitalism to make it work better. We don't think it can be. That's why we want to replace it with socialism as a society based on common ownership, democratic control, production directly for use not profit, and distribution in accordance with the principle of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs".
simondav wrote:Because to create money, they have to have someone to lend to.As an attempt to explain the Coop Banks's current difficulties, this is upside down and back-to-front. As if the function of banks was to "create money" rather than make loans. Also, of course, because you define bank loans as money all you saying here is that to make a loan banks have to have someone to lend to. Which is rather obvious.
simondav wrote:Also by the act of lending, their account at the Bank of England would be reduced (assuming the borrower spent the money with someone at another bank), unless they can rely on getting back a corresponding increase in new deposits and / or loan repayments.I don't know why you make this assumption, but for this explanation of the Coop Bank's difficulty to be true it would require the additional assumption that this wasn't balanced by loans made by other banks not ending up with the Coop. In any event you are conceding that a bank can only lend what it has got or at least can get very quickly (literally by the end of the day, when banks clear their debts to each other via the Bank of England and the money market).It looks as if the Coop Bank's difficulty has arisen from "loan repayments" being less than expected, i.e some of their loans not being repaid in full or on time. I would think that there are many businesses and people who would love to have a loan from the Coop Bank. The trouble seems to be that it is having to use the funds it has to increase its capital rather than to make loans.
