robbo203
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It appears that internal dissent is hindering the growth of YP. Here´s the latest news
I suspect more people are going to gravitate towards the Greens as a result
“Greens neck and neck with Labour, new poll shows, as voters turn away from Starmer”
Extraordinary. Particularly the bit about Corbyn´s Party beating the Tories into sixth place….
“Nigel Farage – if the predictions are right – will not only be prime minister in a few years but will be one with the biggest Commons majority ever. A poll by communications firm PLMR with Electoral Calculus – and shared first with the Daily Mail – suggests Reform would get 445 MPs if an election was held right now. The threshold to win an outright parliamentary majority is 326 MPs. For context – looking back at recent landslides – in 1997 Tony Blair’s Labour won 418 seats, in 2019 Boris Johnson’s Tories won 365, and in 2024 Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour won 411.
If the PLMR poll is correct, Labour would be reduced from 411 to 73 MPs, the Lib Dems would drop from 72 to 42 MPs, and the Tories (hold your breath!) would fall from 121 to just 7 seats – beaten even by Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party into sixth place. Ouch! Now, for the caveats. This poll assumes no tactical voting. With such voting – over one-third of Labour voters could hold their noses and vote Conservative to keep Reform out – and Farage could be deprived of his majority”.
Just been scrolling Twitter. Quite extraordinary, the nationalistic messianic response, with some posts getting hundreds of thousands of likes. Quite a few with Kirk being embraced by Jesus who sheds a tear: Absolutely cringeworthy, but it’s all part of the sakes patter from the Christian nationalist movement that is making hay while the sun shines
Came across one or two rather good responses, including this one
I came across this quite useful article that looks at the different theories of banking in a historical context
Useful article on the economic problems lying ahead for Chinese capitalism on Marxist Crisis Theory FB page
https://www.facebook.com/groups/457920714226660
Overproduction in China: A Crisis of Capitalist Imbalance After the Housing Bubble
Since the collapse of the real estate bubble in 2022, Chinese capitalism has witnessed a massive redirection of investment from property development—formerly a central engine of growth—toward high-tech industry. Electric vehicles, batteries, artificial intelligence, and computing power have become the new destinations for surplus capital, supported by political incentives, public lending, and the promise of technological prestige.
But instead of initiating a new phase of expansion, this shift has triggered a classical crisis of overproduction. Competition between firms—and between local governments—has led to a proliferation of productive capacity that has outpaced both domestic and global demand. As President Xi Jinping recently asked, “When it comes to new projects, it’s always the same few things: AI, computing power, and new energy vehicles. Do all provinces need to develop these sectors?” The rush to occupy these politically favored industries has resulted in massive duplication.
Production is rising, because that is what capital does: each firm invests to gain market share. But demand—although growing—has not grown enough to absorb the surge in supply. The result is a downward spiral in prices, structural deflation in industrial sectors, and collapsing profits. In June 2025, industrial profits fell 4.3% year-on-year, following a 9.1% decline in May. Since October 2022, producer price inflation has remained in negative territory. State-owned giants like Guangzhou Automobile Group and JAC expect record losses in the second quarter.
This is the phenomenon known in China as neijuan—“involution”—where each economic actor, in order to survive, is forced to invest, innovate, and cut prices, even as this leads to the degradation of the sector as a whole. Ports are filled with unsold electric cars, AI chips lie idle in data centers, and some firms are producing at a loss just to keep operations going.
In the past, Beijing managed to contain overcapacity in traditional sectors like steel, coal, and cement thanks to its control over large state-owned enterprises. But today the landscape is more fragmented: many of the overproducing firms are private or hybrid entities, less subject to top-down administrative control.
According to Morgan Stanley, more than 70% of China’s current industrial deflation is driven by non-commodity goods, compared to just 36% during the 2015–2016 downturn. This signals a shift in overcapacity from upstream sectors (raw materials) to downstream ones (consumer goods and tech). HSBC analysts add that excessive investment in the “new three” industries—solar, batteries, and EVs—is now a key destabilizing force.
From a Marxist standpoint, the crisis is a textbook manifestation of the contradiction between the development of productive forces and the limits of the capitalist market. The issue is not that demand hasn’t grown—it has—but it hasn’t grown enough relative to the scale of supply. Capital doesn’t produce for need, but for the realization of value. And when value can’t be realized due to market saturation, crisis erupts.
Beijing’s response—curbing “disorderly” competition, regulating capacity, and strengthening the domestic market—reveals both awareness and the limits of state intervention within a capitalist framework. As Capital Economics notes, “The state can build factories, but it cannot manufacture efficiency.” In Marxist terms, it cannot override the law of value or the compulsion to compete that governs capitalist production.
The root of the problem is that China’s current model still prioritizes supply growth over demand expansion. Local governments compete by offering subsidies and protections to attract capital and boost tax revenues, which fosters local protectionism, industrial duplication, and chronic overcapacity.
Solving this dilemma requires more than administrative reform: it calls for a fundamental rebalancing of the economy toward consumption, wages, and social security. But this would mean confronting class relations, fiscal priorities, and the very logic of accumulation that powered China’s economic “miracle.”
As Marx predicted, crises don’t arise from scarcity, but from excess: too many commodities, too much capital, and too little real purchasing power. Unless China changes course structurally, it risks being trapped in a deflationary spiral generated not by policy failures, but by the inner logic of capital itself.SPEW too, via its front organisation TUSC, has decided to “enter” the new party.
…………………………………..It’s wishful thinking, I suppose, but does this mean we can we can look forward to SPEW dissolving as a political Party and thereby relinquishing its claim to be the “Socialist Party”? Can one political party exist inside the shell of another and still function as an independent party?
They don’t produce surplus value, but are necessary adjuncts to the process of surplus extraction under capitalism
Reform as “the new party of the working class” LOL
Young Master Sweet is correct in his assessment that token money is backed up by the force of the state and is correct in recognising that banks are limited in their transactions by the need to ensure that loans are capable of being settled appropriately by the borrower and by the need to make profits but also by government rules for the administration of banks and the financial sector. As Robbo203 says these rules also exist to prevent bank runs and also ensure the viability of the financial system; something essential to keep production and the economy as a whole running.
Hey Link
But those “rules” that you refer to work to ensure that banks cannot loan out more than what is deposited with them plus what they can borrow from the money market. This is the point. If they exceed this limit, they run the risk of a bank run, and that is precisely what the regulations are designed to supposedly prevent.
It is not just the creditworthiness of the potential borrower that we are concerned with, but also with the ability of the bank itself to finance a loan without jeopardising its other financial commitments, including its ability to repay other banks from which it had borrowed money
This whole idea of “fractional reserve banking” is based on an optical illusion, as this article makes clear
“We have a shared vision of change: Creating a world that is fit for generations to come. We set our mission on what is necessary: Mobilising 3.5% of the population to achieve system change – such as “momentum-driven organising” to achieve this.”
The frustrating thing about all this, and I have noticed this time and time again, is that the individuals or organisations, that utter these sorts of attractive sounding sentiments (like “Creating a world that is fit for generations to come”) hardly ever specify what they concretely mean by this.
What do they mean by “system change”, for example? How do they define the present system, and how do they define the system they want to put in its place? They don’t really say. If commodity production and wage labour still continue under their new system, it will still be capitalism, and the priorities of capitalism will still dictate the outcome, regardless of how they feel about the need to create a world fit for generations to come
I suppose, as a generalisation, one can say that banks do not (and should not) loan out more money than they have in the form of deposits and what they can borrow on the money market. Exceptions may occur now and then but any exception to the rule really only work to prove the rule.
Banks that loan out more than what they have available to loan out are in danger of succumbing to a bank run – when depositors, fearful that the bank may not have the funds to cover or return their deposits, get into a panic and try to withdraw their money which then brings about the very crisis they feared. Bank runs have occurred throughout the financial history of capitalism. A recent and prominent example is the Silicon Valley Bank in 2023, the third-largest bank failure in US history which resulted from a $42 billion bank run.
It seems to me that the phenomenon of bank runs is further proof of the soundness of the view of banks as mere intermediaries in the mobilisation of capital. For banks to loan out more than they have means they face the risk of a bank run particularly today in the turbo-charged world of so called financial capitalism. The law of capitalist jungle in the form of natural selection works to ensure these aberrant forms of economic behaviour – banks loaning out more than they can loan out – are weeded out.
To be viable banks have to be sure, not only of the creditworthiness of their clients (whether the latter can pay back the principal plus interest) but also that they have the funds to cover themselves in case things go pear shaped
what about the military bravado of Putin? what is wrong with you? Putin winning would be like ultra-nationalist hitler winning, guess you are not bothered?
BrianF
The SPGB does not support either side in this stupid, murderous war. We are fiercely anti-nationalist. Our best advice to the workers fighting in the militaries on both sides would be to lay down their arms and desert. Of course, it’s not advice that is going to be heeded, given the degree to which the sick death cult of nationalism has influenced impressionable minds.
However, I am a bit concerned about the way in which you formulate your argument. You seem to be implying that we should be concerned that Russia is winning the war and that, by extension, we should be rallying to the cause of plucky little Ukraine standing up to the invading Hitlerite hordes from Russia.
Forgive me if I misunderstand you, but what you are proposing is itself an ultra-nationalist standpoint. You seem to care that an artificial entity called “Ukraine” should continue to exist in a world alongside other artificial entities such as “Russia”. Socialists, on the other hand, have zero interest in the maintenance of nation states and national borders. These constitute the spatial expression of the organisation of political and economic power under our current system of global capitalism.
Both sides in this war have their share of ultra-nationalistic fascist elements. On the Ukrainian side, you have the Banderites and the brutal Azov brigade that has committed unspeakable atrocities (let’s not forget what happened in Odessa or that 14.000 people lost their lives in Donbas since 2014 due to the Ukrainian bombardment of the territory after it refused to accept the new regime in Kiev that ensconced itself in power after an illegal coup). The Russian “side”, too, has units operating within its ranks that are no less despicable as has been discussed some time ago on this thread.
This is what war (and behind that nationalism) does to people. It can turn them into monsters and cause them to lose their humanity. As far as I am concerned, to hell with both “Russia” and “Ukraine” and their supporters on either side! All of them are complicit in making the world an even more dangerous place to live in today.
We should be opposing the vile ideology of nationalism whenever and wherever it raises its head, not choosing a side.
I don’t think Lowe will get anywhere, if only because nobody’s heard of him outside the Westminster bubble
I noticed he does have quite a fair bit of support on X, but as you say, is very unlikely to get anywhere. Reform now has over 200K members apparently but according to this article about 2000 may leave to follow Lowe into the wilderness
https://www.gbnews.com/politics/reform-uk-opinion-poll-rupert-lowe-nigel-farage
It is looking increasingly like the Reform Party could be facing some kind of serious internal split, with moneybags Musk backing Lowe (who was booted out) against Farage It is somewhat amusingly reminiscent of the splits in various Trotskyist parties in the past. The only drawback is that the absolutely dreadful Anti-Labour Party of Starmer might benefit from the fallout, but who knows?
