ALB
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I agree that we should keep in touch with developments in the what might be called “the anti-capitalist milieu” and while the split from Workers Power was a step in the right direction as a step away from building the vanguard party this report is very disappointing as it shows the usual suspects jumping on the bandwagon: the Internationalist Bolshevik Tendency, Permanent Revolution, Workers Power, etc. These are the smaller Trotskyist grouplets looking for a wider audience to recruit from. Unless Leninist/Trotskyism dies out these pests will ruin any attempt to get something going. The Occupy Movement, on the other hand, is more interesting, precisely because it doesn’t carry this vanguardist baggage.
He was in the old RCP (who used to publish Living Marxism aka Dead Leninism). He stood for the RCP in the 1989 by-election in Vauxhall (which we gave a miss) and got 177 votes. He has now abandoned Leninism and wrote a piece about what life was like for the members of the RCP and the illusions they held. It can be found here. A contributor to spintcom has said he is sympathetic towards us.
Yes, he does understand that Marx was not anti-elections and say that Marx’s political position is closer to ours than to the Leninists’, and he does delight (and delight us) in using Marx and us against them. Pity he’s got a bee-in-his-bonnet or a mental block or whatever it is about Proudhon who was a “free market anarchist” and virulent critic of communism.His claim that Marx pinched the concept of surplus value from Proudhon is absurd. Marx himself pointed out that Proudhon himself had been preceded in this by various English writers who employed Ricardo’s labour theory of value to show that workers were exploited (easy enough to do if you start from the premise that only labour is the source of value as where else could profits come from?).
We did manage to blag a stall in the courtyard of UCL last year. We can try again this year but if not there’s always Gower Street, not that that pseud Toni Negri will be worth listening to (or be comprehensible). Trouble is it clashes with our summer school in Birmingham, but not everybody goes there. Up to North London branch.
jondwhite wrote:Are his ideas original?I’m not quite sure what you mean by “original”. He was the first titled professor of philosophy to embrace Marxism (relatively late in his life) and was highly regarded in the pre-WWI Social Democratic movement because of this (that’s why more than one copy of his books are in the Party library). His interpretation of the materialist conception of history was less economic determinist and more philosophical than some other interpretations. You don’t necessarily have to agree with him but he has a prominent place in the history of “Marxism” and ought to be read by anyone who wants to know about this along with Kautsky, Plekhanov and the others. You can dip into his writings on the Marxists Internet Archive here.
Doesn’t Marx say somewhere in the Grundrisse that if capitalism went on long enough the unit price of many goods would become virtually zero (because the level of productivity reached would mean they would contain very little labour-time) and that capitalism would not be able to continue in these circumstances? I don’t think this is really a theory of capitalist collapse since he would have expected capitalism to have been overthrown long before this point was reached (and we’re still a long way from it even today 150 years later).
Further confirmation, for the record, that banks can only lend funds they already have (either from depositors or from what they themselves borrow) and can’t create loans out of thin air. From yesterday’s Times:
Quote:The Bank of England has warned of an extended squeeze on household incomes, saying that the worsening eurozone crisis had made it more expensive for banks to raise money and that UK borrowers could suffer from higher interest rates as a result.And from today’s, reporting of the situation in China:
Quote:Some analysts regard the sharp fall in household deposits last month as the most troubling of the data. The 638 billion yuan (£64 billion) month-on-month drop denotes a clear attack of nerves, and contributed to an 8 per cent fall in new loans. (…) “There are major problems,” said Miranda Carr, head of research at China Policy Research. “Money is leaving the country and that is going to affect the ability to stimulate. If the banks don’t have the deposits there to lend out, then that means stimulus is not as effective as it might be.”Incidentally, today’s Times also reports that HSBC’s “British retail division makes a return on equity of 17 per cent.”
Yes, it is. He’s quite good on the materialist conception of history. But don’t mix him up with the syndicalist/reformist Arturo Labriola. Translations of his writings, published by Charles H. Kerr in Chicago, are in the Party library if you want to borrow them.
I agree. Marx’s Labour Theory of Value is not a theory of price but of value (and which explains why prices and values are rarely the same) whereas Smith’s and Ricardo’s was an attempt to explain prices (which both failed).
Yes, I would have thought that the Labour Theory of Value was the cornerstone of Marxian economics even if Adam Smith and Ricardo had different versions to Marx. After all, it is obvious that only work can produce wealth and so it’s not such a great step to argue that only work can produce “value” and exchange value — even if it isn’t to those Marx called the “vulgar economists” who dominate academic teaching of economics these days and only take a businessman’s view of economic phenomena.
There’s some stuff on this in the Education section of this website (under Publications). In particular:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/study-guides/guide-value-price-and-profitandhttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/study-guides/russian-revolution-and-bolshevik-dictatorship-and-labour-theory-valueAnd there’s John Keracher’s Economics for Beginners here.
There’s a story behind this group. They are a breakaway from Workers Power, the Trot group that stood against us in Vauxhall in the last general election in May 2010 (and got less votes than us). The Green Party candidate who stood against us, Joseph Healy, has also resigned from his party.It would be nice to think that both these were fall-outs from our election campaign but they are more likely to be reformists falling out amongst themselves.
I was going to suggest too that Adrian look at that thread to see the evidence that banks can only make loans out of funds they already have, funds that come not just from deposits but also from what they borrow wholesale from the money market.Just to correct two factual errors.1.
Quote:There is a very simple way of seeing that credit is almost entirely created out of nothing – if you add up the banks’ balance sheets Total loans outstanding at any time, you will see that it is many times the value of the entire UK economy. Were loans only created out of ‘Real’ assets, then this could not happen!This is not true. The total value of UK economy, ie all wealth in the UK, in 2010 was £7.3 trillion (£7,300,000,000,000). A measure of “total loans outstanding” can be M4 (which is actually larger than bank loans). In 2010 this was only £1564 billion (£1,564,000,000,000).2.
Quote:In the days before the ECB and various so-called technical adjustments, banks issued credit/loans using a regulatory tool called the Liquidity ratio (now morestrictly defined and called the Reserve Asset Ratio and part of the so-called Basel Accords of recent years). This ratio determines by how much the banks are allowed safely to increase their Loans as a multiple of their bank deposits.The “liquidity ratio” and the “reserve asset ratio” are two different things (and neither determine how much banks can “increase their loans as a multiple of their deposits” since banks can’t lend more than they already have).The Liquidity Ratio is the proportion of a bank’s deposits and its own borrowing that it needs to keep in a form that can be quickly converted into cash to meet any demands on it, eg withdrawals. Mostly, it is money lent for short periods, even overnight, on the money market. At one time (until 1971) there was a formal requirement to keep it at 30%. Now it is left to the discretion of those running a bank to decide what level is safe. A 30% liquidity ratio didn’t mean that banks could increase their lending three times more than their deposits (and borrowings) but only that it could lend out only 70% of these as longer term loans.The Reserve Asset Ratio is the ratio of a bank’s own capital (not at all the same thing as its deposits) to its loans. It places a limit on the maximum amount a bank can lend (provided, that is, it has the funds to lend) and is intended to ensure that a bank can absorb from its capital any losses should thse occur (banks normally make a profit). If a bank increases its capital this does not mean that it can lend more. It may be able to, but only if at the same time its deposits and/or its own borrowings (the source of what it lends) also increase.
