ALB
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J Surman wrote:I’ve just read an article by Badruddin Umar, Bangladeshi Marxist politician and historian, about a ‘Finish Capitalism’ movement within the Occupy Wall Street mvt.
Just checked who he is. Unfortunately he turns out to be a “Marxist-Leninist”, ie Maoist, nationalist and advocate of state capitalism.
alanjjohnstone wrote:We can also possibly comradely debate Graeber on democratic practice and the rights of minorities when he explains that in Occupy Wall St. “From the very beginning, too, organisers made the audacious decision to operate not only by direct democracy, without leaders, but by consensus.The first decision ensured that there would be no formal leadership structure that could be co-opted or coerced; the second, that no majority could bend a minority to its will, but that all crucial decisions had to be made by general consent”Nothing wrong with no leaders of course but this talk about a majority bending a minority to its will is the old individualist anarchist nonsense about “the tyranny of the majority”. It’s what made William Morris say that he wasn’t an anarchist and that an (individualist) anarchist society was impossible.This is what he wrote about decision-making in the chapter “How Matters Are Managed” of News from Nowhere:
Quote:Said I: “And you settle these differences, great and small, by the will of the majority, I suppose?””Certainly,” said he; “how else could we settle them? You see in matters which are merely personal which do not affect the welfare of the community – how a man shall dress, what he shall eat and drink, what he shall write and read, and so forth – there can be no difference of opinion, and everybody does as he pleases. But when the matter is of common interest to the whole community, and the doing or not doing something affects everybody, the majority must have their way; unless the minority were to take up arms and show by force that they were the effective or real majority; which, however, in a society of men who are free and equal is little likely to happen; because in such a community the apparent majority is the real majority, and the others, as I have hinted before, know that too well to obstruct from mere pigheadedness; especially as they have had plenty of opportunity of putting forward their side of the question.”No doubt consensus decision-making can be useful in small groups and in committees but it is not practicable everywhere or at all times (sometimes consensus just cannot be reached) and the decisions reached will tend to be the lowest common denominator.As it happens, the working class movement in England developed procedures for democratic decision-making, as incorporated in Citrine’s ABC of Chairmanship. Perhaps not as quaint as the hand signals involved in consensus decision-making but much more practicable and safer (avoiding the “tyranny of structurelessness”).
Good point. Question for currency cranks: do rich individuals and loan sharks also create the money they lend out of thin air? Of course not. They have to have the money to lend in the first place. Banks are no different.The Times (23 November), reporting on the situation in the northern Chinese city of Ordos, clearly explained where the money for “underground lending” had come from:
Quote:Money made from the region’s huge coal reserves or land compensation has made many residents rich, people who, instinctively, have looked for ways to invest that money as real interest rates from bank savings have slipped into negative territory. By way of loan sharks and other methods of underground financing, that money has been churned back into property investment and more building.This year the official figure for real estate development loans in Ordos was 597 million yuan (£60 million), while the true scale of property investment was closer to 40 billion yuan. More than 85 per cent of the money came from the underground lending market.SWP placard calling for a mere change of prime minister (photographed in Kingston this morning but also carried on the main march in central London and no doubt elswhere, especially in towns with universities).Headline of this morning’s London edition of Metro showing that trade union consciousness despite its weaknesses is at least a higher level than Leninist consciousness
To announce on the day before a public service general strike that the wages of public service workers are to be restricted to an increase of 1% a year for two further years when the current wage freeze ends and on top of the cut in take-home pay that increased pensions contributions represent, while prices are rising at 4-5% a year, the government must be either overconfident or stupid, if not provocative. To resist such cuts in living standards is what trade unions and strikes are for.Who said that there was no such thing as the class struggle.
Strange that someone like Ben Fine who knows enough about Marx’s views to be able to write a very good introduction to Capital seems not to realise that Marx envisaged capitalism being replaced by a society in which money would have no place. Suzanne de Brunhoff is another who wrote a whole book on “Marx on Money” without realising that there can be so such thing as a marxist monetary policy.The explanation might lie in the fact that both are former members of the old Communist Party which also produced people who were able to apply the materialist conception of history very ably to past events but not to contemporary ones.Here’s another comment on Fine from a book review in the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard:
Quote:Others, despite their reputations, are obviously mere reformists, especially two ex-members of a Communist Party, Ben Fine and Suzanne de Brunhoff. The former, who can’t have known about Chattopadhyay’s contribution, talks of “some form of wage labour persisting” in the first stage of socialist/communist society while the latter opines that “a new public regulation of markets and financial institutions is necessary”.Five of us were at St Paul’s again yesterday. There seemed to be less people around including tents. We saw one big tent being dismantled and carried away. It’s getting colder. Even so, we still gave away leaflets and got into the usual discussions, even two video interviews.Checking their websites they might not be all that useful. One of them proclaims that “scientific materialism” can’t explain the world; read on and you find “creationism” defended. The other promises to get you of of debt free. Arguing that because “banks create money out of thin air – they have no money to lend you” so there’s nothing for you to pay them back except thin air. Logical enough if banks really did create money out on thin air. Only they don’t, so following their advice is not likely to get you very far except onto a blacklist of bad borrowers.Unfortunately these type of ideas seem to have some credibility amongst some Occupiers. But we can deal with them. We’ve got our pamphlet How The Gods Were Made and, when you think of it, the only way to get out of debt free is to establish socialism where all debts will be extinguished along with the disappearance of money and banks.There was no trouble from the police, but we were asked by someone to move out of the shelter of the aracade as it was private property (he didn’t say whose). That didn’t worry us as it made our stall more prominent.
A Keynesian at Occupy Wall Street before they were cleared from Zuccotti Park.Keynesians aren’t the only people asking for capitalist governments to try to spend the way out of the crisis. The Trotskyists and other vanguardists are for this too, though they express this in pre-Keynes terms by demanding Public Works. Unfortunately they call themselves Marxists even though Marx specifically said that this wouldn’t work and in any event was not interested in devising policies to run capitalism.As an example of the tactics of such groups look at this thread on another forum and the request to push the same form of wording at other Occupy sites in accordance with the well-known vanguardist tactic of proposing “model resolutions”.
In the 1940s and right up until 1950 the Socialist Standard carried on the front page “Registered for transmission to Canada and Newfoundland”. Maybe we still are, but since the “printed paper” rate for postage within the UK was abolished a few years ago now, there is no advantage in any newspaper being registered. And the Post Office no longer delivers mail. Still, the old bye-law might still be in operation. We will see what happens today from 12 noon on.
The government has calculated that the strike will cost “the economy” £500 million. That will be the value of what would have been produced if there wasn’t a strike. Nice to see the government recognise for once that it is workers who are the real wealth producers. Not so nice but predictable that they have also chosen to play the anti “illegal immigrant” card.
The idea that banks can create money/credit out of thin air and then charge interest on it is more widespread than ever, eg Zeitgeist, the Occupiers but not just them. Here, then, are a couple of counter-quotes to theirs.The first is from Paul Samuelson whose textbook Economics has been and still is widely used all over the world:
Quote:Most people have heard that in some mysterious manner banks can create money out of thin air, but few really understand how the process works.Actually, there is nothing magical or incomprehensible about the creation of bank deposits. At every step of the way, one can follow what is happening to the banks’ accounts. The true explanation of deposit creation is simple. What is hard to grasp are the false explanations that still circulate.According to these false explanations, the managers of an ordinary bank are able, by some use of their fountain pens, to lend several dollars for each dollar deposited with them. No wonder practical bankers see red when such power is attributed to them. They only wish they could do so. As every banker knows, he cannot invest money that he does not have; and money that he invests in buying a security or making a loan soon leaves his bank. (chapter 16, 5th edition, 1961)The second is from Keynes:
Quote:The notion that the creation of credit by the banking system allows investment to take place to which ‘no genuine saving’ corresponds can only be the result of isolating one of the consequences of the increased bank-credit to the exclusion of the others.(…) it is impossible that the intention of the entrepreneur who has borrowed in order to increase investment can become effective (except in substitution for investment by other entrepreneurs which would have occurred otherwise) at a faster rate than the public decide to increase their savings. (General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Chapter 7, section V)Two members of West London branch attended the pre-strike rally in Kingston last night along with about 30 others. In view of the number of unions involved there is going to be a one-day public sector general strike next Wednesday.The official TUC position, as set out in one of the leaflets at the meeting, is:
Quote:It’s wrong to make public sector workers pay an unfair contribution to reducing a deficit they did nothing to cause. Unions want proper negotiations. We have done fair deals before. That is why the TUC has called a day of action for pensions justice on 30 November. It’s a chance to stand up for decent pensions and tell ministers to start negotiating.In other words, A Fair Pension for a Life’s Fair Work. Of course Socialists who will be affected by the brutal changes will be on strike too, even if we wouldn’t employ the language of justice and fairness, but rather that of class struggle over the division of material wealth.The mood of the meeting was rather different. Most there felt, rightly, that trade union action needed to be supplemented by political action, but saw this as reformist political action (some even defended the Labour Party) to impose an alternative economy policy. A PCSU pamphlet on this merely advocated a return to Keynesian policies (to try to spend a way out of the crisis) which have failed in the past.Even so, the strike will hopefully be a signal for a revival of the defensive class consciousness that trade union consciousness represents; which will make it easier for us to urge the next step: political class consciousness to win political control to end capitalism and bring in socialism as the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, with production for use not for the market or profit and distribution on the principle “from each their ability, to each their needs” not according to ability to pay.
ALB wrote:that New Economics Foundation video starts with a quote for Sir Reginald McKenna, dating from 1924, when he was chairman of Midland Bank (now HSBC) though it gives the impression that it dates from 1915-6 when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, which is all over the internet on Monetary Reform sites including US ones.I have now checked the quote with how the Times of the time (26 January 1924) reported what he said. The passage in question is :
Quote:I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create and destroy money. The amount of finance in existence varies only with the action of the banks in increasing or decreasing deposits and bank purchases. We know how this is effected. Every loan, overdraft, or bank purchase creates a deposit, and every repayment of a loan, overdraft, or bank sale destroys a deposit.This passage is not in the Times report (maybe it was left out, as is possible) but this is:
Quote:While banks have this power of creating money it will be found that they exercise it only within the strict limits of sound banking policy. Anyone who studies the monthly statements of the London Clearing Banks will find that these banks keep a reserve of cash fairly constant in relation to their deposits. If banks increased their loans and investments the result would be to increase the aggregrate amount of their deposits, but to add nothing to their cash resources. The proportion of cash to deposits would be reduced, and, in the judgement of those responsible for the management of the banks, would be less than sound banking principles dictated. Thus a limit is placed on a bank’s power of lending by the amount of its cash and, so long as the canons of conservative banking are conformed to, additional loans can only be made if this cash is increased. Banks lend or invest up to the full amount by their cash resources, but they do not go beyond that point.Which gives a rather different interpretation as to what he meant than has been suggested.Another dodgy quote from the currency cranks hits the dust.
A couple of posters from the colonnade at St Paul’s yesterday:One for us to adopt, I think?There really is a Wall Street in London, in Islington.There were ten of us yesterday, including two contacts. Which meant that we had more discussions, ran out of leaflets and disposed of more Socialist Standards and pamphlets.One troubling thing was a City of London policeman going around making notes about all the stalls. Apparently the police are thinking of cracking down on “hawkers”, probably as part of a plan of petty harrassment of the Occupation. Police have tried this on us in the past to try to stop us selling the Socialist Standard in the streets. There were in fact hawkers there selling souvenir posters and badges of the Occupation and there is a possibility that the Occupiers (who are pursuing the intelligent policy of strictly following the law so as not to give the authorities any excuse to intervene) might go along with banning them. Hopefully this will only be a remote possibility as for them to agree to others who have set up stalls without permission being moved on would be the height of irony (or would it be hypocrisy?).Anyway we are not hawkers. We are just there to discuss and hand out leaflets and other publications.
I don’t want to give the wrong impression. He began and ended with a call for political action to “end Thatcherism” (probably because he was speaking in Britain). In between he did say that there should be a global movement to try to stop capital accumulation and did instance movements by illegal workers in the US and by indigenous peoples in Bolivia and India as examples of this, but he didn’t outline any alternative to capitalism except to mention once the need for a “zero-growth, non-capitalist” economy without going into any more detail.I think this brings out the difference between “anti-capitalist” and “anti-capitalism”. I’m sure he is anti-capitalism but what he was advocating was resistance to the activities of capitalists within capitalism.It’s a pity you can’t see the video to judge for yourself.
