Young Master Smeet
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I came across this interesting article:https://theconversation.com/land-reform-is-a-zimbabwe-success-story-it-will-be-the-basis-for-economic-recovery-under-mnangagwa-88205Mnangagwa has been driving the government for somewhile.It describes both that the land reform situation has stabilised, nad how much mugabe had to adapt to the veterans movement's own actions. This is an interesting paragraph:
Quote:Mnangagwa has been part of the government since independence, so this is only a change of leadership. Corruption dogged Zimbabwe under Mugabe, but nevertheless, Mnangagwa was already moving to curb it. Participation in the Command Agriculture programme was voluntary, but Mnangagwa used the army to check that the agreed number of hectares had been ploughed and planted. Some senior figures from the ruling ZANU-PF party were arrested for fraud for selling fertiliser and diesel that was meant for other farmers.So, Mnangagwa, a veteran, has worked closely with the army as his tool for somewhile.
Was Mugabe a dictator? AFAICS Zimbabwe had an indpendent judicieary, rule (ish) of law and open (ish) elections: Mugabe had to opt for coalition with MDC at one point. ZANU certainly do not play fair: but elections were not of the Syrian or East German variety.Whilst the comparison can't be exact, look at how long De Valera dominated politics in Ireland, and I'm sure we could scout around otehr post-National Liberation situations.Or, much like early 20th century southern US states.Current, certainly, a mass murderer, indeed: but I think dictator is too strong, he never had personal rule.
Two options. the first, is to reassess what it is we do, and see if we can cut back on some work.I'd agree that rather than abolish branches etc. the focus should be on cutting out centralised departments, and put the onus back onto branch activity, perhaps supplemented by more regular Delegate Meetings (Quarterly).The ermgency option is we should look to the 1st International's system of having a designated branch covering what used to be the EC's functions: I'd suggest that the incoming skeleton EC should dedicate its first meeting to calling an emergency conference.
Ah, here is Engels
Capital III wrote:The little that such a family had to obtain by barter or buy from outside, even up to the beginning of the 19th century in Germany, consisted principally of the objects of handicraft production — that is, such things the nature of whose manufacture was by no means unknown to the peasant, and which he did not produce himself only because he lacked the raw material or because the purchased article was much better or very much cheaper. Hence, the peasant of the Middle Ages knew fairly accurately the labor-time required for the manufacture of the articles obtained by him in barter. The smith and the cartwright of the village worked under his eyes; likewise, the tailor and shoemaker — who in my youth still paid their visits to our Rhine peasants, one after another, turning home-made materials into shoes and clothing. The peasants, as well as the people from whom they bought, were themselves workers; the exchanged articles were each one's own products. What had they expended in making these products? Labor and labor alone: to replace tools, to produce raw material, and to process it, they spent nothing but their own labor-power; how then could they exchange these products of theirs for those of other laboring producers otherwise than in the ratio of labor expended on them? Not only was the labor-time spent on these products the only suitable measure for the quantitative determination of the values to be exchanged: no other way was at all possible. Or is it believed that the peasant and the artisan were so stupid as to give up the product of 10 hours' labor of one person for that of a single hours' labor of another? No other exchange is possible in the whole period of peasant natural economy than that in which the exchanged quantities of commodities tend to be measured more and more according to the amounts of labor embodied in them. […]The same holds good for exchange between peasant products and those of the urban artisans. At the beginning, this barter takes places directly, without the medium of the merchant, on the cities' market days, when the peasant sells and makes his purchases. Here, too, not only does the peasant know the artisan's working conditions, but the latter knows those of the peasant as well. For the artisan is himself still a bit of a peasant — he not only has a vegetable and fruit garden, but very often also has a small piece of land, one or two cows, pigs, poultry, etc. People in the Middle Ages were thus able to check up with considerable accuracy on each other's production costs for raw material, auxiliary material, and labor-time — at least in respect of articles of daily general use.But how, in this barter on the basis of the quantity of labor, was the latter to be calculated, even if only indirectly and relatively, for products requiring a longer labor, interrupted at regular intervals, and uncertain in yield — grain or cattle, for example? And among people, to boot, who could not calculate? Obviously, only by means of a lengthy process of zigzag approximation, often feeling the way here and there in the dark, and, as is usual, learning only through mistakes. But each one's necessity for covering his own outlay on the whole always helped to return to the right direction; and the small number of kinds of articles in circulation, as well as the often century-long stable nature of their production, facilitated the attaining of this goal. And that it by no means took so long for the relative amount of value of these products to be fixed fairly closely is already proved by the fact that cattle, the commodity for which this appears to be most difficult because of the long time of production of the individual head, became the first rather generally accepted money commodity. To accomplish this, the value of cattle, its exchange ratio to a large number of other commodities, must already have attained a relatively unusual stabilization, acknowledged without contradiction in the territories of many tribes. And the people of that time were certainly clever enough — both the cattlebreeders and their customers — not to give away the labor-time expended by them without an equivalent in barter. On the contrary, the closer people are to the primitive state of commodity production — the Russians and Orientals, for example — the more time do they still waste today, in order to squeeze out, through long tenacious bargaining, the full compensation for their labor-time expended on a product.Forgive the long quote, but it is very useful.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/supp.htm#intro
It doesn't matter entirely how many hours it takes A-D to make the product. How many of the proudct does each make, and what does that represent as a percent of market share? What is the raw demand for the product, how many are needed?A-D will each make their product, and bring it to the market, only those that are sold will contriubte to deciding the "Necessary" part of the formula.Maybe it helps to go back to a basic model: imagine a village: everyone share a set of skills, so anyone can do any job in the village. To simplify matters, we assume that all commodities contain products of nature and labour (wicker baskets, deer haunches, fish, fire wood, etc.) i.e. there is no capital. People have different preferences for the type of work they do, and it is efficient for A to make baskets, B to hunt deer, C to fish, etc. They each can exchange their products, because they know roughly how long it takes to catach 10 fish, 3 deers, a kilo of fire wood, etc. If A started trying to overcharge in exchange for their baskets, people would simply stop exchanging and start using their time to make their own.Lets assume that there is an A1…An : i.e. that many people are supplying baskets, they might work at different rates, but since everyone in the village knows roughly how long it takes to make a basket, they would only exchange with Lazy A at the expected rate, and likewise with the Industrious A. They wouldn't have to start making baskets themselves, they could just switch to a different A if they were unhappy with the work or exchange rate.I believe Engels notes somewhere that in early market societies, they had the time to haggle and fix the rate carefully.
Quote:costs plus profits he's willing to sell X amounts of biscuitsAnd that is your interlocutor accepting the key point, the price is the cost of production plus a prevailing rate of profit. he value is a long way removed from that. The point is that when we take two different products, say biscuits and jet airplanes, when the supply curve hjits the demand curve, i.e. where supply hits demand, their prices aren't the same, so there must be some otehr factor influencing the percieved worth of the goods.So if there are 6 biscuits and 6 biscuits are wanted, then why is the price different from when 6 jet aiplanes are wanted and 6 are available?Answer, cost of production. That being so, the value cannot be entirely subjective.
We have a real world example:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42063274
Quote:Prescription medicines that are still under patent can be expensive, but the government caps profits from any that are sold to the NHS to keep costs low.But this system does not cover so-called "generic medicines", where a drug's patent has run out.The loophole means the price of older, established drugs coming off patent can rocket.In theory, without a patent to protect the drug, anyone could enter the market, and produce these drugs, in practice, it takes time and effort to set up the production line, and the volumes are small: so the existing manufacturer can ramp up the cost, even though they don't have the state backed monopoly of a patent.It's useful to think 'hegemonic' rather than 'average' (in reality it's closer to mode than mean): if by custom, practice or for some other reason a particular method of production predominates in the market for a given commodity it governs what the dominant/hegemonic price is (and also the generally necessary labour time): othr more or less efficient methods may operate around that.
From:https://u.osu.edu/stulz.1/files/2016/05/Determinants_cash-holdings-1w4ptsv.pdf
Abstract wrote:The determinants and implications of corporate cash holdingsq Tim Opler!, Lee Pinkowitz!, ReneH Stulz!,*, Rohan Williamson": We examine the determinants and implications of holdings of cash and marketable securities by publicly traded U.S. firms in the 1971-1994 period. In time-series and crosssection tests, we "nd evidence supportive of a static tradeo! model of cash holdings. In particular, "rms with strong growth opportunities and riskier cash #ows hold relatively high ratios of cash to total non-cash assets. Firms that have the greatest access to the capital markets, such as large "rms and those with high credit ratings, tend to hold lower ratios of cash to total non-cash assets. At the same time, however, we "nd evidence that "rms that do well tend to accumulate more cash than predicted by the static tradeo! model where managers maximize shareholder wealth. There is little evidence that excess cash has a large short-run impact on capital expenditures, acquisition spending, and payouts to shareholders. The main reason that "rms experience large changes in excess cash is the occurrence of operating losses. (1999 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.I don't think even that holds, at the abstract level, capitalism could exist wthout rent and interest: they are just arbitrary sub-divisions of surplus value.
jondwhite wrote:Rent and interest are essential for business.Not really, some businesses are basde on rent, but industrial/productive businesses see rentiers as a leech upon them, or a barrier to their growth: the classical industrial capital orientation of labour sees the state taking these revenues and decreasing the costs of rent/interest to promote growth. Corbyn is promoting the old microeconomic efficiency arguments put forward by social democrats in the 1930s. Nothing Ramsay McDonald couldn't embrace.
One relatively asy way to publish is through lulu.com : just a matter of creating an account and uploading the files…
ALB is right, it's not about empirical study, but perception. The claim that the banks whistle the money out of thin air can be countered that the capitalist who borrows the money is in fact the one doing the magic, since they are effectively handing the bank an IOU (which will be legally enforceable, and thus constitutes an asset to the bank). The bank is then just validating and guaranteeing the IOU (so that not everyone who does business with the firm has to do due dilligence, the banks have done that for them). This would agree with our perspective that the key economic indicator is not interest rates, but rate of profit.For Marx, interest rates have no natural rate, they are simply a subdivision of profit, and the only limit is the rate of profit itself (since if the banks take all the profit as interest, the capitalist has no incentive to play). Obviously, banks also want to make the typical rate of profit on the capital they invest, so they need to turn it over frequently, and attract depositors to help them achieve those profit rates. No matter how you shake it, their business depends on the difference between the interest rate they can charge borrowers and the interest they pay their lenders.Also of note is Marx' contention that Money Capital acquires a use value. If, say, the rate of profit is 10% then £100 has a useful value of producing an income of £10 (and vice versa, say, the copyright income on a book can be sold as representing a capital sum imagined from its real income value).So, the IOU from a capitalist can be seen as a capitalisation of the repayment schedule (itself the subset of the whole income stream of the firm), the gross sum need never exist, likewise the bank doesn't have to cover the whole gross, just cover the actual payments made out by the capitalist to other firms, etc. The bank must, though, notionally be able to cover the whole of the loan, hence its need to balance its books.TL;DR : controlling interest rats doesn't control the economy, interest is a dependent variable, like employment, of profitability, and that in turn depends upon the succesful turn-over and expansion of capital. Banks don't create wealth, they simply charge for a service in co-ordinating transactions.
OK, Varoufakis' new book is very much a primer, he steers clear of theoretical detail:[Varoufakis]Let us recall how this magical power of bankers to create money and the overall demands of a market society generate an urgent need for public debt […] that provides bankers with their 'most liquid of assetts'[/quote] He then argues that tax rates, public debt and private debt are dependent variables based on this money supply. The public debt is there to hold things together when the bankers get carried away.As he notes, though
Varoufakis wrote:In bad times, when bankers pick up the phone to the government and demand that thestate's central bank bail them out, it does so not just by creating new money […] but also by issuing more bonds and using them to borrow more money from otehr bankers, often froeign ones, to pass on to the local bankers.Much of his new book is about keynsian animal spirits, very little Marxism. Ultimately, beneath his astonishment that banks 'magic money out of thin air' is the fact that the central bank exists and regulates the whole process: the state creates money.
