ALB
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Actually, you are on the right track. The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.
Just got round to the reading the ex-Militant Tendency’s paper called “The Socialist” (though more appropriately “The State Capitalist”) that we exchanged for ours.
I see that they have reverted to their pre-Corbyn position of calling for a “new workers party”, ie, essentially a new Labour Party. It seems they want to repeat in the 21st century this failure of the 20th (in fact both failures of that century as they are also Bolsheviks).
Even though they are now against Labour, they still campaign like Labourites talking about “Tory austerity” and “Tory crises” blaming these on the Tory government rather than on the unavoidable workings of the capitalist system.
As we say in one of the leaflets we were handing out “The problem is not the Tories (or Labour). It’s capitalism”
No, only the “Communist Party of Britain”. (The Mourning Star brigade). No SWP (though ex-member John Rees chaired one of the sessions) or Militant Tendency (though a couple of people thought we were their current incarnation). A trot-free zone, then.
The leaders of the G7 (US, Germany, Japan, France, Britain, Italy, and Canada) when they met at Hiroshima last week pledged to support Ukraine until complete victory, including by supplying arms.
They must know that this will result in ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. The population of Crimea, for instance, is over 2 million of whom 68% identify as Russian. In the event of a Ukrainian victory and conquest of the peninsula they are unlikely to stay and be “de-Russified” as elsewhere in Ukraine. Over a million will be driven out.
According to Wikipedia, ethnic cleansing
“constitutes a crime against humanity and may also fall under the Genocide Convention, even as ethnic cleansing has no legal definition under international criminal law.”
But there are no reports of the International Court of Cronies at The Hague preparing to indict these “world leaders” with aiding and abetting a “crime against humanity”. Of course not, as they are funded by 6 of the G7 (the 7th being the US which refuses to have its actions judged by such an outside body).
Of course it is not just the ICC that is a joke. So is “international criminal law”, it’s just “victors’ justice”.
1984 is here. Hungary is blocking money from the “European Peace Facility” to supply Ukraine with arms.
Revealing article a few days ago, in of all places the pro-Ukraine regime Guardian newspaper, that shows that they realise that ethnic cleaning on a massive scale will be one of the consequences of the reconquest, with NATO arms, by the Ukraine regime of the territories in the Donbass and Crimea that it claims:
“About 120,000 of Mariupol’s original inhabitants survived and still live in the city. Of those, about 20% supported Ukraine’s armed forces and were waiting for liberation, a resident said. “I think it’s necessary to hang on,” the person explained. The other 80% were divided equally between people who were indifferent to politics, and those who supported Russia and the city’s new administration.
This last group are now the majority,” a resident said. “They are very afraid of the counteroffensive.” They continued: “The mood in Mariupol has changed dramatically. A year ago everybody thought that Russia would win. There was no other scenario. Now even those who back Putin realise something is going on, and that Russia might actually lose.
“They are afraid there will be a battle. They understood that when the territory becomes Ukrainian again they are finished. They will have to leave their homes and go to Russia forever.”Interesting and something we can use to justify our position of doing this sort of thing when there’s no socialist party candidate standing.
But I am not sure why Labourites are adopting it. Reformists there seem to have plenty of other parties to choose from.
Arthur Bough’s letter can be found here:
https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1443/letters/
He is right that, due to increasing productivity, prices should be falling rather than rising. So why are they continually rising?
The government itself (in fact the G7 and those who slogans with them) openly says that it aims for prices to rise at around 2 percent a year. The only way thus can be engineered is through inflating the money supply. What other way could there be?
What people are complaining about at the moment is not that prices are riding but that the rate at which they are has increased so much. But since much of this is due to supply factors there is not much that governments and central banks can do about it; just wait till this sorts itself out.
Britain is facing the same dilemma — a tough anti-immigrant policy and a shortage of workers in certain sectors.
“Bloomberg) — Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the UK government will allow an extra 10,000 seasonal agricultural workers to enter the country next year in response to demands from farmers.
The premier on Tuesday told the UK Farm to Fork Summit that ministers had rolled over to next year a seasonal workers program that allows for 45,000 temporary laborers to enter the country for horticulture and poultry, his office said in a statement. There will be the capacity for an extra 10,000 visas if needed, he told attendees.”Another example of how corrupt the Ukraine regime is. Even the chief justice has been taking bribes.
If anyone wants to go into more detail of the point Marx and Engels were making in that chapter there is this article from 1983. It also explains the controversy in the 19th century between the Currency School (based on Ricardo) and its opponents, the Banking School (who Marx thought got the better of the argument). It all very much an academic question now of course.
Yes , I noticed too that Engels had cobbled together that chapter and added quite a bit himself. He and Marx were criticising the Quantity Theory of Money as put forward by Ricardo that says that the level of prices depends on the amount of money put into circulation. Which does seem to contradict what Marx says elsewhere.
But there is no contradiction. Ricardo was arguing that this applies when there is a currency composed of gold and paper notes convertible on demand into a fixed amount of gold. Marx (and others) challenged this theory arguing that, with a convertible paper currency circulating alongside gold, it’s the other way round — that the amount of money in circulation depends on the number of prices to be realised; if too many convertible bank notes were issued this would not cause inflation as the notes would simply return to the bank that issued them.
With an inconvertible paper currency (as now), on the other hand, the quantity theory does apply, as Marx explained in the passage quoted by Lizzie.
According to this article in this weekend’s i paper, Starmer is now all but saying he is a Tory:
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/labour-real-conservatives-keir-starmer-protect-way-life-2337576
He may well not be but is only pretending to be so as to catch votes.
Apparently the local elections weren’t quite good enough to ensure Labour gets an overall majority in next year’s general election. He won back Brexit voters but not by convincing them they were wrong but by pandering to their prejudices. If he says he agrees with sending refugees to Rwanda (the only card the Tories have left to play) he might just get over the line and avoid having to govern with the support of the Liberals who might restrain him on this sort of thing.
And of course he hasn’t got any values. As a lawyer he has been trained to argue any case whether or not he believes it.
In any case, the next election is going to be more than ever a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
Biden as a “plastic Paddy” again:
That Wikipedia entry says that
“the ‘bullion controversy’ gave him fame in the economic community for his theory on inflation in 19th-century England. This theory became known as monetarism, the theory that excess currency leads to inflation.”
I thought that entries in Wikipedia were checked and double checked. Apparently not in this case. Ricardo had nothing to say about inflation in 19th century England. First, he died in 1823. Second, there was no inflation in 19th century Britain:
“From the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 until the start of World War II in 1914, there was no inflation in most countries, and in many cases, prices were lower in 1914 than they had been in 1815. Prices fluctuated up and down from one decade to the next, but overall, prices remained stable.”
(https://globalfinancialdata.com/the-century-of-inflation#:~:text=The%20Nineteenth%20Century,they%20had%20been%20in%201815.)The reason was that during this period Britain had a paper currency that was convertible on demand into a fixed quantity of gold. This convertibility had been suspended during the Napoleonic wars and Ricardo was one of those in favour of its reintroduction (which happened in 1821) as a way of avoiding the inflation that had occurred during the Napoleonic Wars when there was no such convertibility.
