ALB
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The first Contact has just emailed to say that he did vote for us in the end, joking that he was guided to do so by God.
Here is a video interview the on-line London magazine, the Big Smoke, did with Daniel Lambert, our candidate in Lambeth & Southwark. Technical difficulties prevented them putting it up earlier, but better late than never.http://www.bigsmoke.org.uk/?p=77382
hannieB wrote:I think the letter needs to be revised.Not sure which letter you are referring to, but there’s another exchange with Bernard Bortnick in the May Socialist Standard here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2012/no-1293-may-2012/letters
alanjjohnstone wrote:Comments by Lyonwiss describes what you say.”When you wrote banks can create money from nothing, the more technical statement is commercial banks can create deposits from nothing if there is no reserve requirement.”This depends on what you mean by “deposits” ! There are two types: (1) real deposits, as when someone deposits money in their account and (2) notional “deposits”, as when a bank opens a credit line for someone they are lending money to. Obviously, banks can do (2). That’s their main line of activity, but the question is can they create these (ie make loans) “from nothing”?There seem to be three points of view on this:(1) That they can’t: they have to have the funds available before they can make a loan (the position of Paul Krugman and us).(2) That they can, but they then have to find the funds, either by borrowing from the money market or by expected new deposits resulting from the loan (the position of those Krugman is arguing with).(3) That they can, and that’s that (the position of Paul Grignon and other currency cranks).
We can make good use of this quote from a UKIP councillor suggesting that the unemployed shouldn’t be allowed to vote at the hustings in Putney this evening where our candidate for Merton & Wandsworth in the London Assembly elections, Bill Martin, will be speaking. The organisers have told us that the event will be filmed by the BBC for a programme they are making about the Putney Debates.The big question at these debates, between Cromwell and the soldiers in the Parliamentary army which had just defeated the Royalists, was precisely who should be entitled to vote. One contributor to the debate, called appropriately Colonel Rich, put the case against giving the vote to everyone as follows:
Quote:You have five to one in this kingdom that have no permanent interest. Some men have ten, some twenty servants — some more, some less. If the master and servant shall be equal electors, then clearly those that have no interest in the kingdom will make it their interest to choose those that have no interest. It may happen that the majority may, by law — not in a confusion — destroy property; there may be a law enacted that there shall be an equality of goods and estate.It looks as if some in UKIP want to go back to this. It will be interesting to see if their candidate turns up to explain.The trouble is, the majority could realise Colonel Rich’s nightmare but haven’t — yet.
robbo203 wrote:Rather than give them legitimacy like the SWP does with its craven idiotic “vote labour but without illusions” (Ha!)Here’s another example from another Trotskyoid group putting a tortuous argument for voting Labour:http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2012/03/07/vote-livingstone-very-criticallyI’m not quite sure how you register a critical vote. I’ve not noticed this possibility whenever I’ve gone to vote. If you vote for a candidate any reservations are not taken into account. I’m sure Livingstone and the Labour Party will gratefully accept any and every vote however “critical”..
Isn’t this dealt with, for instance, in Raya Dunaveskaya’s 1946 article on The Nature of the Russian Economy, based on how it actually functioned not how it was supposed to function in theory?It’s also dealt with in the chapter on “The Capitalist Dynamic of State Capitalist Economies”, written by John Crump, in State Capitalism: The Wages system under New Management
I’ve read only 7 of them (Bellamy, Anatole France, Ursula LeGuin, Jack London, William Morris, Marge Piercy, Oscar Wilde). Does this score of 14% mean I’m a philistine?
We have now received an invitation (belatedly, it seems) to a hustings in Putney (in the constituency of Merton & Wandsworth, so for Bill) on Thursday 19 April at 7.30 in The Brewer Building, St Mary’s Church, Putney Bridge, Putney High St, SW15 1SN.Details on the website of the Putney Society here.
Krugman seems to be on the ball here, but even his opponents accept that if a bank made a loan without already having the money to lend then it would immediately have to borrow that money (a point crankier currency cranks miss)This quote from Krugman which you cite (from the New York Times of 30 March) is worth adding to the collection (I like his title too “Banking Mysticism”):
Quote:As I read various stuff on banking — comments here, but also various writings here and there — I often see the view that banks can create credit out of thin air. There are vehement denials of the proposition that banks’ lending is limited by their deposits, or that the monetary base plays any important role; banks, we’re told, hold hardly any reserves (which is true), so the Fed’s creation or destruction of reserves has no effect.This is all wrong, and if you think about how the people in your story are assumed to behave — as opposed to getting bogged down in abstract algebra — it should be obvious that it’s all wrong.First of all, any individual bank does, in fact, have to lend out the money it receives in deposits. Bank loan officers can’t just issue checks out of thin air; like employees of any financial intermediary, they must buy assets with funds they have on hand. I hope this isn’t controversial, although given what usually happens when we discuss banks, I assume that even this proposition will spur outrage.Of course we talking about “overproduction” of commodities as articles produced for sale in relation to the market for them, not of products in relation to people’s needs. As Marx pointed out (in Volume 2 of Theories of Surplus Value:
Quote:The word over-production in itself leads to error. So long as the most urgent needs of a large part of society are not satisfied, or only the most immediate needs are satisfied, there can of course be absolutely no talk of an over-production of products— in the sense that the amount of products is excessive in relation to the need for them. On the contrary, it must be said that on the basis of capitalist production, there is constant under-production in this sense. The limits to production are set by the profit of the capitalist and in no way by the needs of the producers. But over-production of products and over-production of commodities are two entirely different things.Comrade Browne, introducing the item on behalf of Lancaster Branch, argued that the present crisis, as previous ones, had been caused by overproduction and that the only way out would be the destruction of the overproduced surplus through a war as had happened with the crisis of the 1930s. He suggested that this war would be between China and the rest of the world over the resources of the Middle East.Other delegates expressed scepticism about this, arguing that a more likely way out of the crisis would be when wages had fallen enough and assets had devalued (not necessarily physically destroyed) enough to restore the rate of profit, however long this might take.
I’m still not convinced. They were obviously asked to sign up to the idea of a “participatory society” (a vague enough term that could even embrace what we mean by socialism), perhaps without realising that Michael Albert would use it to publicise his detailed blueprint for an ideal economic system — which I don’t think those I mentioned would go along with.
