ALB
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Paul Dyson, of Positive Money, has just replied agreeing to a debate some time in September. Watch this space for details.
There’s another whole thread on this lot’s mistaken ideas here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/100-reserve-bankingIt’s being used to record news items which refute the basic view of groups like Positive Money about banks creating money to loan out of thin air. No doubt they’ll be using the current LIBOR fixing scandal to bash the banks, without realising that if banks really could just create money out of thin air why would they need to borrow money from each other? There wouldn’t be a need for LIBOR.”Positive Money” of course falls into the same category as Square Circle and Military Intelligence as a good example of a contradiction in terms.After Paul Dyson, the head of Positive Money, was seen lurking around Occupy St Pauls in January, we did write to him challenging him to debate the issue. He replied:
Quote:At the moment we’re tied up with other things but we could consider a debate at some point in the future, say April onwards.A reminder email to him will go off later today proposing a date in September.
The Trotskyists of the SWP will be pleased as they said Vote Muslim Brotherhood:http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=28611As “the lesser evil” and “without illusions”, of course.
jondwhite wrote:I think this is the same day as Durham Miners Gala.It’s on the Saturday, the 14th, but we won’t have a stand there this year. Anyway, it’s at the other end of the country. Maybe some local members will turn up with some leaflets and Standards anyway.As to Tolpuddle, the EC will be discussing arrangements this Saturday and South West Regional Branch the following Saturday.
The theme of July Standard, out tomorrow or Friday, is irrational ideas, conspiracy theories and the paranormal rather than religion. I think, these days in times of stress and uncertainty, more people tend to turn to these (conspiracy theories, astrology, gambling, etc) rather than to religion.
Quote:I am a scientist, not a theologian. As a university student in Poland from 1949 to 1957, I was an aggressive atheist and subsequently became a member of the communist party. I am now a theist, believing in God and attending a synagogue.Ok, but what about the endless feuds that go on between theologians? How, for instance, can they settle this one: Was Jesus (if he existed) (a) the son of a god, (b) merely a prophet or (c) the son of a Roman centurion? There’s no way. These are, however, rival hypotheses that can be tested using the scientific method.
The comrade selling the Standard is Steve Ross (who actually came from Ross-shire in Scotland). The Irishman heckling the bearded faith-healer is a Party sympathiser, at least he once signed our candidate’s nomination paper to stand for election.
Just finished reading Debt, The First 5000 Years by David Graeber which Stuart said we should all read. An interesting read. Although he seems to share the delusion that, with so-called “fractional reserve banking”, banks can create credit and money out of nothing, he does expose one of the quotes used to back this up as a fabrication.Banking and currency cranks are always quoting “Sir Josiah Stamp”, a director of the Bank of England in the 1930s, as saying:
Quote:The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin. Bankers own the earth; take it away from them, but leave them with the power to create credit, and with the stroke of a pen they will create enough money to buy it back again … If you wish to remain slaves of Bankers, and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits.Graeber comments (p. 344):
Quote:It seems extremely unlikely that Lord Stamp ever really said this, but the passage has been cited endlessly—in fact, it’s probably the single most often-quoted passage by critics of the modern banking system.In a footnote (pp. 448-9) he goes into more detail:
Quote:Said to have been given at a talk at the University of Texas in 1927, but in fact, while the passage is endlessly cited in recent books and especially on the internet, it cannot be attested to before roughly 1975. The first two lines appear to actually derive from a British investment advisor named L.L.B. Angas in 1937: “The modern Banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banks can in fact inflate, mint and unmint the modern ledger-entry currency” (Angas, Slump Ahead in Bonds, New York, 1937: 20-21) . The other parts of the quote are probably later inventions—and Lord Stamp never suggested anything like this in his published writings. A similar line, “the bank hath benefit of all interest which it creates out of nothing” attributed to William Patterson, the first director of the Bank of England, is likewise first attested to only in the 1930s, and is also almost certainly apocryphal.In other words, some banking/currency crank made up these quotes and others just reproduce them as genuine. This probably applies to many of their other quotes too.
I see the class struggle is raging in Spain, as it should be. I’m not a Guardian-reader myself but a comrade has told me there was a letter about this there earlier this week.
Among the articles from the 1950s just added to the Socialist Standard archives section on this site (go to Publications/Socialist Standard/Archive) are three on the subject of capitalist crises:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1950s/1957/no-631-march-1957/crises-catastrophe-and-mr-stracheyhttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1950s/1957/no-632-april-1957/further-reflections-criseshttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1950s/1959/no-656-april-1959/affluent-society-pt2-marx-and-underconsumptionThey set out the theory of crises developed by the Party and criticise alternative theories and are still relevant and insightful today.
TheOldGreyWhistle wrote:We are on the side of unions but we don’t tell them when to strike or what action to take.That’s true, but surely the second part of this isn’t:
TheOldGreyWhistle wrote:We offer our case for socialism to them NOT how to run their organisations.Don’t we “tell” workers in unions that ideally they should organise democratically, recognise the class struggle, oppose links with political parties, ie how to run their organisations even if not what do in specific circumstances (that’s what we leave up to them to decide for themselves, in fact insist that this should happen and is not the job of any political party or group)? As it happened, we didn’t need to say to Occupy to organise democratically. They’d worked that out for themselves. But we did need to tell them about socialism (and capitalism).
alanjjohnstone wrote:The issue some raised was that we should … not offer prescriptive adviceThis was one of the silliest arguments put forward in the debate. No other group with a definite point of view adopted this position. If we’d have adopted this approach we’d have been the only group to have done so, so allowing all the others a freer range than they had — not so much the vanguardists who didn’t try their usual take-over tactics over here (as opposed to in the US) as the currency cranks and funny money merchants who had a real field day and a successful one to this day if you read Occupy websites and literature.Of course we had to put our own particular view across. That’s why we exist.
There’s an interview here from last year with Paul Mattick Jnr who puts an opposite view : that the present crisis has been caused by a fall in the rate of profit caused by capital-intensive technical development or rather by the failure to overcome this by personal and government borrowing and spending. Not too sure that this is entirely convincing, but the conclusion he draws from it that the only capitalist way-out of the crisis is austerity seems sound enough.The trouble is he spoils it by suggesting that workers ignore or take on the state by helping themselves to food, housing, etc whereas the obvious lesson is to organise politically to win control of the state and abolish capitalism that way (while of course fighting a rearguard action to try to slow down austerity). As we’ve always said, if workers are not prepared to vote for something they’re even less likely to take so-called “direct action” to get it.
A Labour politician (ex-MP and ex-Minister) who knows something about us. I thought that breed had died out. In a sense it’s comforting to know they haven’t.
