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Stuart will be relieved that the Cooperative Bank's current difficulties are not the result of pursuing a "ethical banking" policy. On the contrary, they would seem to have resulted from them behaving like any other capitalist enterprise. But then to stay in business so as to be able to pursue an "ethical" policy, a business has to behave like any other business, has to beat the competition, make profits and accumulate capital (grow).. Either way, "ethical" capitalism is exposed as a sham. Though I'm not quite sure what to do with my accounts with the Cooperative Bank and the Britannia Building Society. Move My Money perhaps?
As they mention there'll be stalls in and around the King's Cross area, how is our request for a stall going? It's only in a fortnight's time.
jondwhite wrote:17 May article by Kris Stewart sounds like ISN (ex-SWP) have agreed to enter into LeftUnity.orgQuote:Some will be inside – IS Network members are already, as are comrades from Socialist Resistance, the Anticapitalist Initiative, Workers Power and others. Some won't – the left within Labour for certain, with SWP and Socialist Party comrades not clearly falling one way or another at this stage.Sounds as if they've already got enough explicitly Leninist/Trotskyist groups ( including the official 4th International and even the 5th International) who have already "entered" the yet-to-be-founded party to stop it getting off the ground.
Here's another report on that meeting, this time from the "Independent Socialist Network" (not to be confused with the "International Socialist Network" of ex-SWPers).http://www.independentsocialistnetwork.org/?p=2134And here's Ken Loach's speech (which gave rise to some discussion here):http://www.independentsocialistnetwork.org/?p=2138What is interesting is that this ISN is still formally part of TUSC but seems to be in the process of switching to the new Left Unity party.Apparently the new party is to be founded in November but hasn't yet decided whether it is to be explicitly "anti-capitalist" and "socialist" or even whether or not to be a party in the sense of contesting elections.
I bought another copy of James Connolly's Socialism Made Easy yesterday (as it's not often that you see an "impossibilist" pamphlet for sale on a Trotskyist literature stand). It first appeared in 1909 but some of it had been written earlier. It dates from a period when he was still recognisably an "impossibilist" and before he became a Labourite reformist and Irish nationalist. I've just re-read it and it expresses a view that would have been typical of (Marxian) socialists of the time which we have inherited too:
Quote:As we are now aware, common ownership of land was at one time the basis of society all over the world. Our fathers not only owned the land in common, but it many ways practised a common ownership of the things produced. In short, tribal communism was at one time the universally existent order. In such a state of society there existed a degree of freedom that no succeeding order has been able to parallel, and that none will be able to, until the individualistic order of today gives way to the Indistrial Commonwealth, the Workers' Republic, of the future.There were two of us giving out leaflets at the start in Waterloo. To start with there were nothing but Trotskyist stalls and paper sellers, including surprisingly quite a few from "Socialist Appeal", the ex-Militant Tendency group that wanted to stay boring from within the Labour Party ("We stand for a Labour government on a socialist programme", said their leaflet echoing the 1980s). It also appears that the other ex-Militant sect, calling themselves SPEW, are trying to occupy the place previously held by the now discredited SWP. In any event, they were handing out "Stop the Cuts" placards with their name across the top and inviting people to join by texting "Join" to them (actually, the SWP never went that far).Eventually the trade union batallions arrived (Unite, GMB, Unison) and the demonstration took on a more serious character. In fact, it was more of a trade union demonstration than the Mayday event in London as there were actually 50 or so union members walking behind their union banner.Also present were Labour Party and Green Party branches and one leafletter from Left Unity and another from the National Health Action Party (whose leaflet said they will be contesting next year's Euroelections). LU will have to do better than that if they're not going to be swamped by the Trots. Sutton and Cheam Labour Party had a banner proclaiming "For Socialism". Probably something else left over from the 1980s but somebody needs to tell they that they are off-message and should change this to "For Responsible Capitalism".
North East branch may not meet regularly (in fact not at all) but they still have their supply of basic Party pamphlets and regular Socialist Standard order. Some more recent leaflets, including the new Introductory one and the one on Identity, have been posted to them today.
hallblithe wrote:Another academic remarks:Classes can be identified “on paper” by charting out the capital structures in a multidimensional space of capitals, and by locating the positions within this multidimensional hierarchy. Whether or not these classes also become actual classes, i.e. mobilized groups for struggles, is a different story.I don't know about Bourdieusianism but this sounds a bit like Marx's distinction between a "class in itself" and a "class for itself".
I was merely suggesting that we were not alone in not liking to describe socialism as an "economy". In fact, anyone who has understood and agrees with the point Marx was trying to make in the famous chapter in Capital on "the fetishism of commodities" must take up this position.As to Occupy, it turned out to be a big disappointment and was more important for what it was perceived to be ("anticapitalist") than for what it actually was. Many of those prominent at the St Pauls site refused to consider themselves anti-capitalist (and were instrumental in getting a banner criticising capitalism taken down) being rather monetary and banking reformers. In fact, sadly, a revival of currency crankism and funny money theories seems to have been its main legacy, at least in Britain.The divide in the discussion here seems to be between breathless enthusiasm for anything that moves (until something else moves) and alleged kneejerk rejection as reformism of anything that moves. Both of these positions are no doubt caricatures but the difference is that we don't live up to ours.
It's not just us being "sectarian" in not referring to socialism as an "economy" and in saying that socialism will in fact mean the end of "economics" (since there'll be nothing for it to study). That communism (as they prefer to call it) will mean the end both of "economics" and of "politics" is widely held in libcom circles, eg by those on the libcom forum who call themselves communists.So the dividing line is not between us and the rest but between those who see socialism/communism as necessarily a non-money, non-market (and so non-economic) society (a much wider group of people than just us) and those who see "socialism" as a planned "economy", i.e the planned production of goods for sale.
stuartw2112 wrote:I was interested, back at the height of Occupy, to see that many people were reading their Hayek. Might decentralised democratic decision making lead to the emergence of spontaneous economic (socialist) orders, something like Hayek argued happened with free markets? Might an Occupy consensus model if it took off lead spontaneously, without central planning, to a socialist economic order? Probably not, but I'm sure there's interesting debates to be had here, work to be done.Actually, this sounds a bit like Robin Cox's "Guildford Road to Socialism" which we debated in the early 90s (the exchanges are on the files section of the WSM Forum). Only Robin didn't rule out winning control of (central) political power too at some stage. So we've sort of been here before.
You're right, Stuart, that whether we refer to socialism as an "economy" is a matter of definition of the word "economy". You may well be right that most people wouldn't regard the term "socialist economy" as a contradiction, but that would probably be because they envisage "socislism" as having the familiar features of today's "economy", i.e. production for the market, monetary incomes, etc.My point was that this is not how Marx and many in the Marxist tradition (including us) would describe socialism. For instance, in her series of lectures later published as What is Economics? Rosa Luxemburg concludes that it is the study of the impersonal economic laws that come into operation as if they were natural laws when there is generalised production for sale on a market with a view to profit. The subject of "economics" is "the economy" that comes into being under these conditions.In other words, "economics" is not the study of the production and allocation of resources as such but the study of this when there is an "economy". Economics only arose with capitalism, as in previous societies, where there was production and distribution (and, in most, exploitation) for direct use, there was no need for a special branch of science to study this: it was transparent. For the same reason, there will be no role for "economics" in socialism, precisely because socialism won't be an economy.OK, this is just a definition, but it's the Marxist one. Having said this, I don't think it's a capital offence to talk of a "socialist economy" when arguing with people who have a different definition of economics (usually the conventional one that it's the study of the allocation of scare resources to competing ends — rather than this only where's there's production for sale and profit). I must have done it myself.You might mean by "planned economy" what we mean by socialism, but I doubt Ken Loach or most of the other Left Unifiers do.
It's not the Co-op Bank or having an account there that's the quackery. I've got one there myself and am also a member of the Co-operative Movement (for the divi). It's the claim of groups like Move Your Money (slogan on their homepage: "Using consumer power to build a better banking system") that consumers can somehow influence what happens under capitalism by the exercise of so-called "consumer power". That's the "quack remedy" that's hit the dust.I don't know if you meant to explain the Co-op Bank's current difficulties as being the result of pursuing an "ethical" rather than an income-maximising investment policy, did you?
Young Master Smeet wrote:http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htmCharlie wrote:If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production – what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, “possible” communism?Paresh Chattopadhyay interprets this passage above as a rejection of planning from a single centre ("central planning"):
Quote:The habitual discussion on the possibility (or otherwise) and method(s) of rational economic calculation in socialism has been carried out in terms of the opposites :’plan’ vs.’market’ where plan stands for socialism and market for capitalism. For socialists, planning is supposed to eliminate what Marx often calls ‘anarchy of the market’ reigning under capital leading to economic fluctuations and crises. But what kind of planning for socialism is in question? For a large number of people, both Right and Left, largely under the impact of the experience of planning in the post-1917 Russia, the type of planning considered in this connection has been central planning on the basis of mainly state ownership of the means of production which has been taken as the hall mark of socialism. (…) this view of planning, centralized at the highest level, is the very opposite of the type projected by the 1871 communards for the free society of the future and summarized by Marx (as given above) as decentralized planning by the associated producers.[his emphasis]Personally, I'm not convinced that Marx did envisage "planning" in socialism as being decentralised to that degree, even though he clearly did not envisage the sort of planning that was tried in state-capitalist Russia. Nor do I think he would have used the term "planned economy" since he didn't envisage socialism being an "economy".
Another Miliband and capitalism quote here:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/29/ed-miliband-labour-leadership-changeAnd that was before he was elected Labour Party leader, in fact was one of his leadership campaign promises.Another one here. They're on to him in France too.
