ALB
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ALB wrote:I’m due to speak at a Zeitgeist event in Cardiff on Sunday where one of the other speakers is from the Eat for Free Project which seems to be into this sort of thing. I’ll report back on what he says.
The speaker from Eat for Free Project didn’t turn up, but growing your own food was one of the recommendations made by a ZM lecturer, Vivak Shori, for surviving in the coming period of severe deflation with falling prices, massive unemployment and shortages that he predicted would be coming within the next 2-5 years due to oil supplies running out with no effective substitute in sight and to the debt bubble bursting. A rather more alarming reason for growing your own food. I challenged him to a bet that his predicted deflation wouldn’t happen (to be called in in 2017).
I’m due to speak at a Zeitgeist event in Cardiff on Sunday where one of the other speakers is from the Eat for Free Project which seems to be into this sort of thing. I’ll report back on what he says. Apart from putting the case for world socialism I’ll be concentrating my criticism of course on the currency crank from Positive Money.
Laurens’s “memories” must be failing him once again. All the sources I’ve been able to track down (admittedly only on the internet) give Bevan’s 1952 book as the source of Smillie’s account. If somebody can find an earlier source we’ll print a correction.All the other statements in Laurens’s letter are wrong, except what he says about the IWW not being an anarchist or anti-political organisation.
I know Graeber is against the wages system. We said so in the February Socialist Standard here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2012/no-1290-february-2012/cooking-books-after-revolutionI’m not sure this is enough to say he’s also a sort of Marxist. After all, isn’t he putting forward a quite different theory of the origin and nature on money (as debt) to that of Marx (as a commodity)?
Apparently the link I gave doesn’t work. So here it is:http://www.weebly.com/uploads/6/7/3/6/6736569/chattopadhyay_marx_vs_lenin_countdown.doc
Interesting I agree, but Fred Harrison is a prominent follower of Henry George and his land tax proposal. I heard him speak at a meeting organised by Occupy at the Bank of Ideas a month or so ago. He lost the sympathy of the audience by refusing to condemn “capitalism” (on the grounds that you can’t have production without capital!).Michael Hudson is a radical, non-Marxist economist who in this article “From Marx to Goldman Sachs” makes out Marx to be some sort of crank who sees banks lending imaginary money.I’ve only read some articles by Graeber (not his book, though Hudson probably has) but he seems to be lending credence (or perhaps reflecting) the widespread view today that the problem is not production for profit but lending at interest. And that, therefore, as Hudson concludes, all that is required is action against finance capital rather than capitalism as such (as Graeber is some sort of anarchist I don’t suppose this is his position even if his arguments lend credence to it).
Every week brings refutation of the view that banks can create money out of thin air and confirmation that they can only lend money they have got (whether from savers or what they have themselves borrowed). We may as well record them here as anywhere. So, here’s a BBC report on Halifax’s decision to raise the rate of interest on their loans to housebuyers:
Quote:The UK’s biggest mortgage lender, the Halifax, has confirmed it is raising its standard variable mortgage rate (SVR) from 1 May.The Halifax said the rise – from 3.5% to 3.99% – was due to the higher cost of raising funds for mortgages from both savers and the financial markets.(…)It argued that its hand had been forced by market conditions.”The change acknowledges that the cost of funding a mortgage in today’s market remains significantly higher than the longer term average,” the Halifax said.”The increase to the rate reflects the fact that raising money through retail savings and in the wholesale markets is currently very expensive by historical standards.”The report said other banks were doing the same and for the same reason:
Quote:On Friday, RBS raised the rate on two of its mortgages from 3.75% to 4%. (…) An RBS spokesman said the rises were down to the higher costs they were incurring borrowing money, which they had absorbed for some time before opting to pass it on to some of their customers.Banks are essentially financial intermediaries whose main income comes from borrowing money at one rate of interest and lending it at a higher rate. They can’t simply conjure money up out of thin air and then charge interest on it, as numerous currency cranks claim.
Personally I’ve always been against putting branch Minutes on the internet for precisely the reasons you give. I’m sure there must be quite a few members who, for various reasons, don’t want their names and political opinions splashed all over the internet, and for ever. Maybe this should be the subject for a future Conference discussion and decision. You could also raise it in your branch and get the practice dropped unless all branch members agree to it. Most branches don’t do it.
Jesting apart, I think Stuart is making the philosophical point that if there is a choice only of two evils it’s logical to choose the lesser. But the real question is whether or not there is just a choice of two evils.Here’s an extract from wikipedia on the term:
Quote:An early example of the lesser of two evils principle in politics was the slogan “Better the turban than the mitre”, used by Orthodox Christians in the Balkans during the rise of the Ottoman Empire. Conquest by Western Roman Catholic powers would likely mean forcible conversion to the Catholic faith, while conquest by the Muslim Ottoman Empire would mean second-class citizenship but would at least allow Orthodox Christians to retain their current religion. In a similar manner, the Protestant Dutch resistance against Spanish rule in the 16th century used the slogan Liever Turks dan Paaps (better a Turk than a Papist).The reference at the end of the wikipedia article to the 2002 French presidential election which opposed the conservative Jacques Chirac to Le Pen of the National Front reminds me that I actually saw a Trotskyist march in Lille at the time with the banner: “Cholera or the Plague: Vote for Cholera”. Unfortunately I didn’t have a camera with me.Incidentally, which is the lesser evil: the Roman Catholic Church or the Greek Orthodox Church?
And line up with those US Occupiers who say re-elect Obama against whatever nutter the Republicans finally come up with?
stuartw2112 wrote:And in reply to ALB, the Occupy the London Stock Exchange camp is over. The Occupy movement as a whole, here too but especially in the States, is as lively as ever: so lively it’s impossible to keep up with everything that’s going on.That the camp at St Paul’s is over is all I meant. Of course the Occupiers are still around and still discussing. Good.I agree with you about the US. It is difficult to follow what’s going on. There, some have gone reformist, such as these but they have been repudiated by others. Some groups have been taken over by re-elect Obama people or by vanguardists. It’s all very confusing but, hopefully, there are some who are still seeking a way out of capitalism.
I didn’t know there was such a thing as an anarchist theory of economics. I thought they all accepted Marxian economics, like Bakunin did.
It’s all over then. At least they had the sense to go peacefully and not try to battle with the police.
I suppose this is meant only as a publicity exercise to get people thinking about a moneyless society. If it’s anything more it will be a flop.In any event, as we’ve always said “if people won’t vote to end capitalism, they’re even less likely to strike to end it”. There are plenty of elections coming up to test how many people want a moneyless society. In France there’s a presidential election. Why not call for people there to Vote for a Moneyless Society?There’s regional elections in London here in Britain in May. We will be standing a couple of candidates, standing for a moneyless world (or rather for a world society, without frontiers, based on common ownership and democratic control of productive resources, in which money would become redundant), also basically as a publicity exercise. If there really was a moment building up for a World Strike on Friday 27 July 2012 to establish a Moneyless World then we would know by 3 May when the London elections take place — and there’d be 2 Socialist councillors in the Greater London Assembly. A nice thought but, unfortunately, not very realistic at the moment.
