Young Master Smeet
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Stuart,when I saw some of the comments, my thought was that you haven't changed, but you've just changed club, and while some of us want to keep on trying with the same old 5-Iron, you prefer to experiment with the odd sand-wedge. That seems fair enough to me.
http://leftunity.org/left-unitys-first-national-meeting-a-report/A report of their first meeting, from an author we'd recognise (late of this parish); note the vituperative comments below from the sects at the decision not to give them a formal presence in the organisation (I'm sure they'll try and use the space for debate to get themselves embedded structurally).
The blurb from the book:
Blurb wrote:The neoliberalism that has dominated economic thinking since Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan first came to power is now seen to have serious flaws, and Progressive Capitalism seeks to replace it with a new, Progressive political economy. This is based on an analysis of why the growth rates of countries differ, and what firms have to do to achieve competitive advantage in today s global economy. The cornerstone of the political economy of Progressive Capitalism is a belief in capitalism. But it also incorporates the three defining beliefs of Progressive thinking. These are: the crucial role of institutions the need for the state to be involved in their design because conflicting interests have to be resolved and the use of social justice as an important measure of a country s economic performance. Social justice, defined as fairness, is used as a measure of performance in addition to the rate of economic growth and liberty. Progressive Capitalism shows how this new, Progressive political economy can be used by politicians and policymakers to produce a programme of economic reform for a country. It does this by analysing and proposing reforms for the UK s equity markets, its system of corporate governance, its national system of innovation and its education and training system. Finally, Progressive Capitalism describes the role the state should play in the economy, which it sees as an enabling one rather than the command-and-control stance of traditional socialism or the minimalist role of neoliberalism.http://tinyurl.com/ckso6glIt certainly enabled Sainsbury to buy a peerage and make millions of pounds
The KLF got there first:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Quid
The significant thing is that the bad debts appear to be securitised on property, so even foreclosing on the building value won't cover the losses (which means the property market must still be floundering).
Slightly worrying news about the Co-op bank:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22507937
Quote:Here is what stood out for me. At the end of 2011, the Co-op Bank had £1.45bn of corporate loans on its "watchlist". In other words, it thought that £1.45bn of lending to companies – much of it property lending – could go bad….The point is that in the subsequent year, many of the companies with loans on the Co-op's watchlist did in fact default. Corporate loans in default at the Co-op jumped from £922m to just under £2bn….And that rise in defaults was a big contributor to the colossal £674m loss that the Co-op incurred in 2012….At the end of 2012, the Co-op had £3.7bn of commercial loans, home loans and personal loans that it classified as impaired or bad. Against that, it was holding a provision for potential losses on these loans of £643m….In other words the Co-op believes it will ultimately lose just 17% of these bad loans….At the same time, the Co-op has loss-absorbing equity capital of £1.6bn…Or to put it another way, impaired loans minus provisions for losses as a percentage of loss-absorbing capital is 194%.So, things to absorb. The Co-op is a small relatively conservatively run bank, not a bunch of profiteering spivs, and a large tranche of it's loan book is going bad. So the problem isn't with the bank, it is just a symptom of flailing in the wider economy. Secondly, this just shows that co-operatives are not a genuine alternative to the capitalist system, and are certainly not immune from its economic woes. Thirdly, banks really, really, cannot just create credit a the stroke of a pen, otherwise it wouldn't be in this mess.
Going, roughly by the quotes I mined up, it wouild seem that primitive communism = pre-commodity society: so we're not looking at any specific model of organisation, but a retrospective relationship between commodity relations and non-commodity relations. So, it actually would encompass many different forms of organisation identified by later anthropologists.
I thought the reason was that it was creating inflation: when they started, it looked very like a catastrophic fall in prices would occur, so falling prices plus inflation means actual prices retaining the same denomination. And inflation certainly did run up above the 2.5% mark (up to about 3.6% IIRC), and considering that inflation remains higher than interest rates, it seems we have a slow destruction of capital going on.
I'm reminded of the story Werner Herzog tells of when he was filming Fitzcarraldo : Klaus Kinski was throwing tantrums on set (at least partially provoked by Herzog, it has to be said), and one of the Indian chiefs they were working with went up to Herzog and said: "Shall we kill him for you?" They were prepared to kill him for being annoying and ego maniacal.I'll just add, that one of the features of their society is the small size of the their groups, the pressures of complexity don't exist, and they are more likely to strike off in a new band than build a big community.
ALB wrote:4. A society without a State, i.e without any body of armed men to enforce social discipline (i.e, to stay strictly on topic, without a "police force"). In fact an alternative name amongst anthropologists for such societies is "societies without a state".Well, there would have been a body of armed men, known simply as 'The Men'. They would have enforced discipline, such as it was.And this brings us to the point, the capacity for the use of force will not disapear in socialism, the point is that no section of society can monopolise it it for their own interests. Hence why I stated, as a pretty cold reading, that whatever form of organisation society takes to defend itself, it can't be based on special powers or unique rights, much like the current English common law power of arrest.
SocialistPunk wrote:YMS supports this view in the above quote. What he fails to grasp, is that those values need be encouraged within a socialist space.I don't know how that can be said, when I haven't made any comment on that topic.As for socialism, obviously, the values of people in socialist society (and it's structures) will be different 100 years from the revolution, and again 300 years. On the eve of the revolution people will have a set of values built on and closely resembling, those they have today. What will drive the change is necessity and the inherent skills of humans to negotiate their social space. I should certainly hope their values will be fettered and shaped by socialist society.
Capitalist ideologues, in their utopian mood, offer freedom and equality for all: universal human emancipation. Individual responsibility, dignity for labour, all sorts of lovely goodies.Even in twenty years, most of the people in socialism would be the people who are around now, and they will have to change their minds (certainly) to get to socialism, but but that will be a process of adapting existing attitudes, rather than wholesale implanting entirely new ones.
I do hope the positive values in socialism won't include the use of the exclamation mark. I don't know what values will be needed for socialism, I can only say they will be those compatible with a a society freed from waged labour and based on common and democratic ownership and control of the wealth of the world.
SP,exactly, Marx reacted to and understood the world around him (and even changed his ideas from those of radical democracy to Communism in the light of his interaction with the existing workers movement). People make history, not in conditions of their own choosing (as he said) and they can conjure up and imagine any sort of society, but can only realise the possible ones before them. Capitalist ideologues espouse freedom, justice and equality before the law, noble values, but they cannot realise them. We have to start with people as they are, not how we'd like them to be, and go from there. As Alan has demonstrated, much of the time socialism does espouse the same values as capitalism, but it focuses on the practical mechanism to realise them.
Starting from values and ideas is the utopian approach (and a very dangerous one, I might add). Starting from the world as it is is the materialist approach. Yes, even now there are signs of human empathy, solidarity and the need to help one another, but for every one person, say, who gives to a beggar, there are a thousand who simply don't. For every one person who might shout at a group of kids playing silly buggers, there are many too frightened, or too busy, or determined it's not their business.Indeed, capitalism relies on bonds of human solidarity as an externality it can slough its costs off onto, and many of those acts of kindness are a necessity to simply live.Like I said, the people who live now, with their attitudes, temprements and ideas are the ones who will exist in socialism, not some abstract 'pure' new people, so if the capacity doesn't exist in the here and now it won't happen at all.But, take the example of parents. Parents who are holding down jobs all day, and come home tired don't have the same time and energy to play with their kids and give them attention as someone with a bit more free time. With the best will in the world, no no less love, the former is more likely to snap and appear to be an ogre of a parent compared with the latter.
