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I know it’s a bit like kicking an opponent when they’re down but here’s another everyday routine acceptance that banks need deposits to function.
It’s from today’s Times and is about a government plan to reduce “cash ISAs” (savings with banks, etc whose interest is tax-free) to encourage savers to instead gamble on the stock exchange by getting tax-free dividends.
According to the news item, building societies (which are banks specialising in lending money to people to buy a house), “which rely on cash ISAs as an important source of funding, have also warned restrictions could affect lending”.
If, as banks, they could lend without funding how come that this could affect their lending?
It would be nice to think that this was the beginning of a wider movement against the Starmer governments war-mongering:
The trouble is that the man behind it, Steve Hedley, the union’s assistant general secretary, is an unreconstructed Stalinist who is still pro-Russia even though it doesn’t even claim to be socialist any more. (He once publicly denounced us as “Mensheviks”. See here:
But at least the sentiment is ok if not the motivation. Which cannot be said of the Trotskyist “Workers Liberty” which openly calls for more arms for Ukraine side.
“Both a rebuilt welfare state and arms and aid for Ukraine can be won by taxing the rich. In any case, the amount spent on arms or aid for Ukraine is tiny compared to the shortfall in hospitals, schools, and the benefits system.”
(https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2025-05-26/editorial-ukraine-and-ukraines-workers)Tax the Rich to pay for arms for Ukraine, that’s a new one.
I didn’t know that the new head of MI6 is the grand-daughter of a Ukrainian Nazi. Can’t held that against her I suppose. I’m not responsible for what my grandfathers were or did. But even so, in present circumstances. A propaganda gift to the Russian rulers and a reminder that Ukrainians weren’t always the “goodies”.
Latest news: TAS break off the “unity” talks with the WW group. Not surprising really in view of the latter’s rigid Bolshevik-Leninism.
Another letter from us in this week’s Weekly Worker, on our attitude towards reforms:
Elected governments staging false flags so they can start a war to increase their chances of staying in office! It looks as if all those tendentious videos you watch are having a bad effect on you and have infected you with a dose of conspiraloonism.
More on him here:
https://jacobin.com/2025/06/mamdani-nyc-mayoral-election-win
These “socialists” who have “entered” the Democratic Party are only what — a long time ago – the Labour Party in Britain and Social Democrat parties in Europe used to be: common or garden reformists.
Here’s their website:
Still, I suppose it shows that “socialist” is no longer a dirty word to many in America.
The article doesn’t say that Trump “decides to give Ukraine Patriot missiles”. Even the headline says that he will only “look at” this.
Actually, on re-reading his manifesto I see he does touch on this problem;
“Integral functions by tracking voluntary labor contributions through time credits, which are not spent like money but act as symbolic tokens of one’s participation. These credits entitle individuals to access the outputs of other cooperatives within the network.
Labor is valued dynamically using AI-guided cybernetic feedback, which adjusts credit weighting in real time based on urgency, scarcity, and skill need—so if a task is highly demanded (like childcare), it earns more credit value. This motivates labor redistribution without money, wages, or central planning.”This raises other problems. He says here that “time credits … act as symbolic tokens of one’s participation” (in producing useful things or providing useful services). But they do more than this as they also determine how much you can access of what is produced. In his example someone working on childcare would get more credits than someone working in some less demanded line of activity and so be entitled to access more goods and services than the other person. If it didn’t there would be no particular advantage, in his blueprint, to switch to childcare.
They got plenty of money for some things:
Joseph seems to have regressed. After advancing beyond Technocracy and the Venus Project to Zeitgeist he has now regressed from educational consciousness-raising to something-now gradualism. At least he hasn’t gone reformist but he is advocating organising now on the economic field to try to gradually (“incrementally”, as he puts it) replace capitalism.
It does seem like a modernised version of the idea that was around in Marx’s day of organising cooperative workshops that would use labour notes (based on working time), both internally and externally, and which would gradually spread and replace capitalist production based on wage-labour until a complete “cooperative commonwealth” was established.
This assumes that such cooperative productive units would be able to outcompete capitalist enterprises but that was never on and is even less realistic today than it was in the 1840s and the 1860s.
In any event, they would have to operate within an overall capitalist environment from which they would be unable to escape or isolate themselves.
It sounds like a non-starter and that Marx was right — before socialism can become constructive the working class need to win political control and abolish the capitalist environment.
There are also problems with using time worked to access what you need. What about those who can’t work or for not as long as average (and those who can work more and so get more)? I am sure Joseph will have worked some way out to deal with this but it’s not in his initial manifesto.
Here’s another demonstration that, when it comes down to it, bankers themselves and financial journalists when describing things don’t really think that banks are able to create credit out of thin air.
There was an article in yesterday’s Times which, in passing, notes as a matter of established fact that:
“Usually savings provide the money for businesses to borrow, invest and grow. However, despite the increase in
savings, UK investment remains dismally low.”No suggestion that money for businesses to borrow to invest could come from anywhere else (even though the article goes on to mix up “investment” by businesses with people “investing” their savings on the stock exchange rather than holding them in interest-yielding bank accounts).
What do mean “can’t possibly”? If regime change in Iran happens they might have to accept it rather than jump to press the nuclear button as you like to assume. They might opt to not resort to conventional war either. And of course any new regime might accept this new trade route as being in its own economic interest. And there’s an alternative route that used to be talked about via Afghanistan and Pakistan.
I’m guessing your favourite song is Always Look on the Worst Side of Things.
I think you are reading more into what the blog says than is there. It is not saying that this is the aim of the current Israeli-US current aggression against Iran. It might have been during the Cold War but at that time Iran and Israel were fellow US puppets.
Until 1979 when the Shah (who Private Eye used to call the Shit of Iran) was overthrown Iran was an ally of the US and a member of the anti-Russia CENTO military alliance but even in those days the US never established rocket bases on the frontier with the USSR. But they did start Iran’s nuclear programme. According to Wikipedia:
“Iran’s nuclear program was launched as part of the Atoms for Peace program that was announced by U.S. president Eisenhower in 1953. The U.S. helped Iran create its nuclear program in 1957 by providing Iran its first nuclear reactor and nuclear fuel, and after 1967 by providing Iran with weapons grade enriched uranium.”
The overthrow of the Shah in 1979 was thus a failure of US foreign policy and strategic defeat for the US which they would no doubt like to reverse but hardly to confront Russia which is no longer their main rival for world hegemony. More to completely dominate the Middle East unchallenged.
