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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/128099226-capitalism-s-endgame
A review of that book will be published in the September Socialist Standard
It’s getting better. Now he is saying that he doesn’t mind being labelled a “fiscal conservative”:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/keir-starmer-labour-government-spending-b2376121.html
He had previously declared Labour was defender of “conservative values”. Why doesn’t he come out and drop the “fiscal” bit and say outright that he’s a conservative. That would be logical for him. After all, as chief prosecutor he occupied a top post in the coercive side of capitalist state and got a knighthood for it.
But of course he might just be giving the impression that he is conservative in order to win over Tory votes and get to enjoy the fruits of office.
Whichever it is, he’s a despicable individual. Of course we know that it doesn’t matter if a pro-capitalist politicians is a saint or a sinner; even a saint couldn’t make capitalism work for the benefit of the majority. But when somebody’s record shows them to be just a cynical opportunist then that can be pointed out.
Mike Lynch of RMT is quite right when he says that “most people can’t spot the difference” Labour and the Tories but is being too soft on him when he adds “and that’s a shame for somebody who’s probably, as talented as Keir Starmer is” and naive when he calls on him “to show he’s on the side of the working people.” He can’t do that because he isn’t. He knows that, if he becomes prime minister, he will have to against workers and is wanting to assure the overseas speculators who lend the government money that he intends to be.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/mick-lynch-labour-criticism-strikes-b2376188.html
Britain has gone and done it. As from the middle of next year Britain will be part of the Pacific.
What a joke.
“the government’s technical estimates suggesting it will add just £1.8bn annually to the economy after 10 years, the equivalent of 0.08% of Britain’s gross domestic product.”
Government ministers are telling the dominant section of the capitalist class still suffering from its loss of unfettered access to the EU market to be grateful for small mercies. They are more likely to be thinking “it’s Badenough but it could be worse.”
Here’s the details of the procedure under which private corporations can sue member-states of this trading arrangement:
Dylan Riley gets a mention in this month’s Socialist Standard in this article:
According to this, it is section 114 that deals specifically with “treating”:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treating_(law)
We did think of reporting them but concluded that they would be able to talk their way out of it. Still, if we had complained the police would have been obliged to knock on their door.
Their case has something in common with this one mentioned by Wikipedia:
“An accusation of treating was seen in the 2015 United Kingdom general election where the UK Independence Party candidate for Southampton Itchen, Kim Rose was accused of treating for giving out sausage rolls at a community event; however, Hampshire Constabulary said they would take no action over the allegation.”
There’s a link given to the Guardian’s report of the incident:
I see that the person “treated” could also be charged.
The situation of banks in Britain is different from that of those in the US in that they have not had to compete so much for deposits. Depositors have stayed with them, allowing them to have a bigger “net interest” margin and so bigger profits. How long this will last is another matter.
After all, she was in the Labour Party and stood for them for the council. In saying she wants to see “a fairer, less profit driven system that works for society and for the planet”, she is echoing the Old Labour ideal of a more humane capitalism. Not possible of course. The present Labour Party openly fully supports the profit system. They want it to be more efficient rather than more humane. No wonder she left them. The next step, as you point out, would be for her to reject the whole profit-driven system in favour a non-profit system.
It will be this article:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1948/strikes.htm
It was introduced as;
“[This is the second of two articles by Anton Pannekoek. The first appeared in the November WESTERN SOCIALIST under the title “Public Ownership and Common Ownership.” As is the case of the first article we are not in agreement with the views expressed. We therefore append our comments.]”
Below is what the WESTERN SOCIALIST editors commented. Far from an endorsement and no doubt what you would have expected, DJP.
Editorial Comment
Pannekoek follows in the footsteps of a long line of people who have discarded old errors only to take up new ones. Observing the failure of labor parties and trade unions to function as agencies for socialism, he turns now, not to the growing numbers of genuine socialists, but to the groups of workers throughout the world who have lately been given vent to their discontent in “wild strikes”. “They may have no intention to be revolutionary”, he says, “but they are”. In this manner does he take his place in the ranks of the “unconscious revolutionaries”.
Revolution is a conscious act. It can no more issue from blind and sporadic revolts of workers than it can from the fulminations of labor politicians or the bread and butter activities of the trade unions. It can result only from the conscious and deliberate efforts of workers who have become socialists. The failure of laborism, which Pannekoek wrongly calls parliamentary socialism, has not been a failure to introduce socialism. That has not been its aim. Its failure has been to make capitalism fit for workers to live under.
Pannekoek speaks of state officials becoming the “directors of a planned economy, regulating production and consumption”. Does he really believe that capitalism can be planned? An elaboration on this point would be interesting. Even in Russia, where the highest possible degree of state control exists, the government has frequently been compelled by unforseen factors to modify its plans. Commodity production does not lend itself readily to plans.
He speaks also of the “capitalist mechanism of increasing prices”. If the capitalists really possess such a mechanism, why did they not put it into operation during the depression years instead of wringing their hands in agony as prices tumbled steadily? And why do they resist wage increases? Surely it would be easier for them to add these increases to prices.
Until Pannekoek pays greater attention to the real voice of socialism, he is simply exchanging one set of illusions and disappointments for another.
I thought we had reviewed that book by Nick Heath, but apparently not. But I remember now. We were going to but the reviewer said it was boring, a real trudge to get through, and had no index, and didn’t submit a review because he didn’t want to have to offend the author.
We certainly discussed it here before:
Incidentally, Brian Morris had a letter in the June Socialist Standard defending Marx as philosopher.
Yes, from her election statement, she does seem a bit wishy-washy. She seems to be ex-Labour. There must be thousands like her up and down the country who feel that the Labour Party is no longer the place for them.
“I’m Rosie, your independent candidate for Somerton and Frome, a conductor on the railway and RMT member. I moved to Frome in 2015 but grew up just a few miles down the road. I fought, like so many others against David Warburton in both 2017 and 2019, standing for council in 2019 with an amazing team. Today’s party politics have left so many of us feeling disenfranchised, politically homeless and without that hope and excitement we had in the past. That feeling seems to be across the board when I speak to people day to day about our government and politicians in general. The drive to give an independent voice to the constituency and the team around me are the reason this campaign is happening. This campaign is far less about me and far more about who we are when we unite for a common purpose. The people of our constituency deserve to have a genuine progressive choice in this by-election, and I’m honoured to have the support to provide that. The toxic culture in our politics of lies, corruption and backstabbing needs to end for us to have a brighter future. Somerton and Frome is geographically a large constituency, predominantly rural with a few larger communities. Frome itself has shown an appetite for doing things a little differently within politics and has embraced a move away from traditional and limiting “party politics”. As an independent candidate I’m not hiding where my personal values lie, but I want to be very clear that I won’t be constrained to tow any party line. Leaving me free to listen to your concerns, opinions and needs as my prospective constituents.
Policy wise we are focussing on the biggest issues of the day; the cost of living crisis and the undermining of public services. I will be working towards reform and reinvestment in our struggling NHS, fairer housing so people can live here comfortably, better transport links for our communities so people can access employment and essential services and the
environment, cleaning up our rivers as a priority. I am committed to promoting equality at every level and a fairer, less profit driven system that works for society and for the planet. We do not need to understand every nuance of each other’s identities to have respect, compassion, and kindness towards one another. Likewise, our respect for the environment, our countryside and the liveable future of this planet need to be paramount in all decisions we make going forward.”There is also this;
https://www.gofundme.com/f/independent-socialist-for-somerton-and-frome
“Many lenders this week revised down their estimates of a key measure of profitability, net interest income, which shows the difference between what banks earn on their loans and pay to attract deposits.
Executives said they expect these margins to get smaller in the second quarter because they are paying more to bring in deposits as the fight for funding gets more competitive across the industry.”With facts like these, refuting the thin air school of banking is like taking candy from a baby or maybe like kicking a person when they’re down. But why not, it’s what these confusion-mongers deserve.
The last 800 leaflets were distributed yesterday. Discarded leaflets from some of the minor and independent candidates were found but nothing from the LibDems — seems they are giving Labour here a free run to garner anti-Tory votes. Nor from Piers Corbyn or Lawrence Fox.
We met the Tory candidate, local councillor Steve Tuckwell. A Tory leaflet from local councillors in one ward had stated that they were involved “providing fruit and vegetables free to members of the public outside the Temple on Crowley High Street”. Intrigued by this unusual endorsement of free distribution from an unexpected source, as the time given was Tuesdays at 2pm, we decided to investigate.
It turned out to be an ordinary food bank but this was a special occasion. The Tory candidate was there, accompanied by an actual Tory MP (Bob Blackman for Harrow East). They forced the 20 or so destitute workers queuing for their bag of food to wait ten minutes to listen to their speeches which the workers dutifully applauded. What followed was even more obscene. The two suitably garlanded politicians were filmed, for an Asian TV channel, handing out food bags to the poor. Professional politicians are known to have no shame when it comes to vote-catching and here was a prime example.
One big issue in the election is ULEZ, the extension as from the end of August of the Ultra Low Emission Zone from central London to the whole of Greater London. This will require owners of pre-2006 petrol vehicles and pre-2016 diesel vehicles to pay £12.50 a day to use their vehicles. As all vans are diesel, “white van man” is up in arms.
One self-employed tradesman we met told us he had had to spend £10,000 of his own money to buy a new van and that all people like him who owned a pre-2016 van would have to do the same. Workers owning an old banger because they couldn’t afford anything better or a not that old diesel car will also be clobbered. There are two independent anti-ULEZ candidates and the Tories are playing it for all it’s worth (they can’t really play the anti-immigrant card here) saying “No to Labour’s £4,550 ULEZ expansion tax”.
No leaflets have been distributed in the Ruislip part of the constituency, so the workers there are going to have to work out for themselves that the problem is not the Tories or Labour but Capitalism.
More Labour, Tory, Same Old Story. Ten years ago the then prime minister David Cameron notoriously called to cut “the green crap”. Now, the would-be next prime minister, Sir Keir Scammer, has declared that he “hates tree huggers”:
If Sir Keir does become prime minister, his first meeting with the king could be embarrassing. He might even be guilty of lèse-majesté.
I think Ojeili means that we stuck rigidly to Marxian economics and the materialist conception of history, and were “intransigent” about advocating political action for socialism and nothing else (no reform programme). The Bordigists were more super-Leninists as they were “intransigent” that Lenin was right about the workers only being able to evolve a trade Union consciousness under capitalism and that therefore they needed to be led by a vanguard party. They also argued that the “communist programme” hadn’t changed since the 1848 Communist Manifesto.
The full passage has some relevance to Chris Wright. It reads:
“For many Marxian libertarian socialists, the political bankruptcy of socialist orthodoxy necessitated a theoretical break. This break took a number of forms. The Bordigists and the SPGB championed a super-Marxian intransigence in theoretical matters. Other socialists made a return ‘behind Marx’ to the anti-positivist programme of German idealism.”
The last sentence describes precisely Wright’s position.
Incidentally, Ojeili knows our position well through his contact with the World Socialist Party of New Zealand.
Thanks for this, ZJW. I think he has a valid point when he says that up till 1917 Lenin, like many others, was an anti-revisionist Social Democrat who held Kautsky in high regard, even though he felt that conditions in tsarist Russia did not permit socialists to organise in a mass, democratic party; that in fact he wanted to overthrow Tsarism in order to create the conditions for this. Some of the general theoretical stuff Lenin wrote in this period wasn’t too bad. For instance:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/granat/ch04.htm
But the rest of Wright’s article degenerates into this sort of thing:
“Marx (and Hegel) put the ontological into its proper place, as part of the process of becoming. Being and its negation (Nothing) form the ground for Becoming and are interlocked moments, although not in a general sense in capital, but in the historically and socially specific modes of existence of the value-form and the form of labour as abstract labour. Being finds itself reified, objectified, under capital, and, as such, appears to be the primary category, when in fact the negation of Being in favour of the non-being of value brought on by the specific social relations of capital dominates. A ‘positive-ontological’ reading of Marx leads us back to the objectivism of the Second and Third Internationals.”
Why not simply say that Marx did not regard value as a thing but as a manifestation of a social relation that would disappear when that social relation did? More people might understand the point you are trying to make. And did the Second International go off the rails because it got its ‘ontology’ wrong?
His conclusion seems to be that “pro-revolutionaries” should simply describe and record working-class struggles:
“I think that a discussion of the ideas of C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya’s ‘full fountain pen’ idea, that an organisation of revolutionaries provide a medium or multiple media, for the workers to say what they want in their own words, to allow them to hear each other and debate, would have been both useful and appropriate.“
The opposite mistake to Leninism — that left to themselves workers will evolve a socialist consciousness without needing any input from other workers who have already become socialists.
