[ALB]

There's actually already a long-running thread on this here on this forum:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/100-reserve-bankingand the New Economics Foundation book you mention was reviewed in the Socialist Standard in February last year:http://www.socialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2012/no-1290-february-2012/where-money-comes-reply-new-economics-foundationYou will see that this is partly a question of the definition of money: If you include bank loans as money then of course by definition banks create money, but the question that then arises is: where does what they lend come from? Thin air (as some claim) or money they have borrowed from elsewhere, eg the public or other banks via the money market (and including, as you seem to be admitting, the Bank of England).As you say some textbooks say:

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banks are just intermediaries

Sometimes they get it right!You are right on one point. The amount banks lend depends on the state of the economy, as much on what businesses want to borrow as on what the banks have or can borrow, and that there's not much that the government or the Bank of England can do about it. But this statement of yours is ridiculous:

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I am also surprised that the Socialist Party of Great Britain is in favour of a private banking cartel creating nearly all of our money as a debt, and requiring more people and government to take on yet more debt for the economy to function as it does at the moment.

We are just trying to explain how the capitalist economic system works not with proposing how we think it ought to work (not that it does work, anyway, in the way you are suggesting).  As a matter of fact we are in favour of a society in which money and banks would be redundant. 

[ALB]

I think a project is already in existence to publish a collection of articles on Money and Banking. DJP should be able to give more information on this.Also, the Party published quite a bit on Money and Inflation in the 1970s when this was a big issue. For instance, there's this study guide on this site:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/study-guides/marxian-theory-inflationAs to other material, the Charles H Kerr & Company publishing house published a couple of pamphlets:Economics for Beginners by John Keracher:http://www.marxists.org/archive/keracher/1935/economics-for-beginners.htmMoney and Money Reforms by Christ Jelset:http://archive.org/details/MoneyAndMoneyReformsThe trouble with these two is that they written in the 1930s and 1940s and so don't take into account the modern era of "managed currencies". But their advantage is that they deal with the history of money from US examples while our material is rather UK-oriented (eg doesn't mention "Greenbacks" or "bimetallism").

[ALB]

My point was not to defend the use of oil to generate electricity but to question the accuracy of claims made by the doomsayers about oil and other materials running out. What oil there is would be more rationally used to make plastics, etc rather than being burned to raise heat to turn steam turbines. So, yes, it is possible to imagine a modern society that could exist without burning oil. I'm not sure, though, that at the moment it could exist without mainly using nuclear power instead while renewable sources of energy were developed and perfected. And of course it would have to be on the basis of socialism not capitalism. After all, look at the obstacles that have just been placed in the way of wind farms and the Severn tidal barrage, the two obvious main types of renewable alternative sources in this part of the world.

[ALB]

But these people are not on our side. Their wrong predictions are re-inforcing the myth used to justify capitalism that socialism is not possible because there will always be scarcity and that in fact it's getting worse.I don't think the doomsaying, scarce-mongering approach is the best anyway. I once heard a debate between Tony Benn and a Green Party representative (I can't remember who) who was arguing that there'd be economic and ecological collapse within 40 years (that was 20 years ago). Benn made the valid point (in my opinion) that people don't make revolutions out of fear but out of hope. We should hold out the hope of the rational use of modern technology. I shan't be around in 2050 but by then I hope there'll at least be a human on Mars.

[ALB]

Latest news from Syria:http://news.yahoo.com/teenager-15-executed-islamist-rebels-syria-154751521–abc-news-topstories.htmlMeanwhile in Lebanon, BNP Leader Nick Griffin is praising Hezbollah.

[ALB]

This is what the report says on this without trying to attribute which contributed what to the decline in the share of workers in manufacturing:

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However, over time, technological advances have allowed process lines to become more mechanised and require fewer workers to operate them. Heavy industries, producing large volumes of low-value goods, such as steelmaking, have become more efficient and so are able to produce the same amount of output from fewer manufacturing sites employing fewer people. These heavy industries have been replaced in part by smaller industrial units producing high-value goods, such as the aerospace and electronics industries.The speed at which globalisation has affected industries has increased over the last half-century. Foreign markets have become more competitive and increased globalisation offered cheaper labour and plant facilities abroad, making imported goods more affordable and adversely affecting the manufacturing industry within England and Wales. This contributed to reducing the manufacturing workforce and improvements in communication and transport links have created an increased interdependence for trading goods and services throughout the world.

[ALB]

Here's another article on this theme — again from the Daily Torygraph. It seems that even some Tories are not happy with the government's policy here. UKIP is opposed too.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10100943/Can-David-Cameron-explain-why-he-has-put-us-on-al-Qaedas-side.htmlThe analysis of what it's really about isn't bad either:

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Certainly, the liberal elite in which the Prime Minister places such hopes was involved at the beginning of the uprising. But armed elements funded and supplied by interested parties in Saudi Arabia and Qatar were also present from the start. Their fundamental aim was nothing to do with human rights and the protection of minorities. It was to destabilise and destroy President Assad, Iran’s closest ally in the region, and therefore assert Saudi dominance.

The article also mentions the statement by a disillusioned pro-democracy activist which Alan has already drawn attention to. It's well worth reading.

[ALB]

He doesn't actually say that Christian villages are amongst those to be wiped off the map, only Shiite and Alawite ones.

[ALB]

Here's the review  in the Socialist Standard of one of John Holloway's books:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2010/no-1274-october-2010/book-reviews

[ALB]

Here's the wording of the leaflet:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2013/no-1306-june-2013/socialism-only-alternative

[ALB]

Members did go to both these events. The one in Hyde Park had some 40,000 or so, mainly churchgoers and with no "political" presence apart from us. At least those there could see the contradiction between the world being capable of producing enough food for all and millions going undernourished or starving, even if they didn't attribute this to capitalism. Even Bill Gates, one of the richest men in the world, who spoke, could see this. But even if he gave all of his millions to the starving it wouldn't solve the problem.About 80 people attended the ex-SWPers meeting. The only other group leafletting the meeting were the AWL but they didn't seem too satisfied with it.

[ALB]

There's also this from the Pathfinders column in this month's Socialist Standard:

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Bones of ContentionA fuss has apparently broken out over where to rebury the newly disinterred remains of Richard III, the last Plantagenet king, who has been failing to push up daisies under a crypt and then a concrete car park in Leicester for 500 years until his recent sensational rediscovery. Plans to stick the semi-fossilised ex-sponger in Leicester Cathedral are being challenged by his avowed relatives who prefer York Minster. But what relatives would these be after 500 years, given that Richard had no children and was not famous for even liking them? A BBC Radio 4 programme on mathematics (More or Less, 10 May) has estimated that if Richard’s near kin produced 2 children each, and this output continued at a steady rate, there would be a million relatives by now. However if they had bred at the average rate for the period, at 2.3 children, this number would jump to 17 million. The programme went on to cite a respected 1970s study which suggested that everyone in the UK not from foreign extraction was probably descended from Edward III, Richard’s own ancestor. So what gives these ‘relatives’ the right to start arguing the toss over where to bury the bones, the programme wanted to know? Well quite. But then, what gives any of these royals or privileged poseurs the right to anything based on inheritance? Any given set of genes has a half-life of one generation, so genetically speaking, their connection to their distant forebears is at homeopathic levels anyway. You, dear reader, are probably just as ‘royal’ as they are. But that’s capitalism for you, fetishising utter silliness in the service of the elitist rich.

If this is true and that most of us on this island off the North West coast of the European mainland will be descendants of Richard III or at least of Edward III, then perhaps a referendum should be held to decide where his bones should be reburied: York or Leicester?

[ALB]

One witty opponent once summed up our definition of the working class as:

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"everybody's working class apart from the fat controller".

It was a caricature of course but not far off, but the idea seems to catching on that, as the Occupy Movement put it, it's the 99% against the top 1%,Someone who had been to some event left a copy at Head Office of a magazine they had picked up called The Platybus Review (you'll have to ask JohnD who they are). It contained an interview with an American academic called Jodi Dean in which the following question was put to her:

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Besides sovereignty, the other component in your reformulation of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” as “the sovereignty of the people” is “the people.” Following Hardt and Negri and Badiou, you distance yourself from the classical Marxist notion, elaborated by Lukács, of the proletariat as the “subject” of communism or history. Instead, you “offer the notion of ‘the people as the rest of us,’ the people as a divided and divisive force, as an alternative to some of the other names for the subject of communism—proletariat, multitude, part-of-no-part” (18–19). How does this amendment to the traditional concept of the “subject” of communism or history help to improve Marx’s theory, or at least bring it up to date?

To which she replies:

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One of the ways it brings Marx’s theory up to date is really pragmatic. When you’re talking to a bunch of people today, almost no one says that he’s a member of “the proletariat.” They may say they’re part of “the people.” (This, even though Marx and Lenin are very clear that “the proletariat” is not an empirical category). The term “proletarianization” is still accurate and useful, however, so I think it’s important to keep that concept and think of “the people” as “the proletarianized people.” For folks in the US, “proletariat” suggests factory labor too strongly. There are many people who don’t feel like they’re proletarians, even as they might recognize their existence as proletarianized, especially today because we’ve lost so many manufacturing jobs. There are so many precarious workers, fragile workers, so many non-workers—widespread unemployment, people who are underemployed. It’s hard for those folks to think of themselves as “the proletariat.” The sense of “the people” as a divided group better encompasses our own time. Frankly, I also think it includes more of the “reserve army” of the unemployed, the Lumpenproletariat that classical communism had mistakenly abandoned.

So it looks as if others have been thinking along our lines (not that we have ever liked or generally  used the term "proletariat": even a hundred years ago almost no-one would have said they're a member of the proletariat).She expresses some other, quite unacceptable views in the interview (after all, she's a Leninist), but the idea that the basic division in society is between the ruling oligarchy and the rest-of-us seems a sound one. Her reformulation of Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat" as meaning the same as the "sovereignity of the people" seems good too.

[ALB]

As we've done a special leaflet on the SWP affair someone will definitely cover this one.

[ALB]

Maybe if volunteers come forward and let Head Office know by email.It's organised by the churches but maybe some non-believers will also turn up. It's definitely an issue on which we have something to say, i.e that the world can produce enough food to feed every man. woman and child on the planet (and more) but that this is being prevented by the capitalist system of production for profit and its rules on "no profit, no production" and "can't pay, can't have".

[Author]

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