John MacDonnel as Shadow Chancellor

[ALB]

Corbyn has just appointed fellow long-standing Labour Leftwinger as Shadow Chancellor. This shows that he is serious about presenting an alternative economic policy to the current thinking which Labour has embraced up till now. This means that the economic debate is going to hotten up. So we are going to need a separate thread to discuss and dissect what MacDonnel will be proposing over the coming months and maybe years.

Here's what the Greasy Pole column said about him in 2007:

Greasy Pole: If John were Prime Minister

Others here can maybe confirm the impression that he is even more inclined than Corbyn to use the word "socialist". Is he going to be Labour's Yannis Varoufakis?

[ALB]

All the media are recording that

Quote:

his Who's Who entry includes his pastime as "generally fermenting the overthrow of capitalism."

[ALB]

In the end, he only wants to gradually reform capitalism out of existence:http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/politics/john-mcdonnell-i-want-to-change-capitalist-economic-model-31526147.html

Quote:

Mr McDonnell, who boasts in his Who's Who entry that his hobbies include "fermenting (sic) the overthrow of capitalism", told Channel 4 News: "The emphasis is on ferment, which was about brewing. It means ensuring people understand what capitalism is, and we talk together about how we change it because it is failing people at the moment."I think change is a gradual process … but at the end of the day, I do want to transform it."He said part of the shadow chancellor's job was to reform capitalism and "put forward an alternative to what's happening to people at the moment".

A classic Social Democrat, then.

[Anonymous]

ALB wrote:

Here's what the Greasy Pole column said about him in 2007:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2007/no-1231-march-2007/greasy-pole-if-john-were-prime-minister 

Good article and relevant today.

[Young Master Smeet]

To be fair, in his interview with Snow he said that he wants to raise consciousness and democratise the economy, so there may be an element of simply using the platform and being aware that he can't achieve his goals in office or by dictat.I did once attend a talk about Trotsky, organised by the AWL which he attended, but I can't really recall what he said, other than that trotsky was interesting.This event:https://shirazsocialist.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/21-september-trotsky-commemoration-meeting-london/ 

[ALB]

According to the Guardian, he reads and recommends reading Marx:http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/15/mcdonnells-economics-milibandism-liberated-from-new-labour-concernsIf he really did, or really understood, then he would know that Marx wasn't into proposing policies for governments to pursue under capitalism, but with replacing capitalism with a system of common ownership, democratic control, production for use not profit, and distribution on the principle of "from each their ability, to each their needs".

[rodmanlewis]

But he could use his position in the Labour Party to expound his "socialist" solution to capitalism, but somehow I don't think he will. I hope I'm wrong. The "gradualness" of bringing about socialism is not by piecemeal reforms, but by persuading the working to bring it about.

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