Marx on BBC2
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Watched last night this programme where BBC Economics Editor Stephanie Flanders examined the theories of the mad marketeer Friedrich August von Hayek, CH, Mme Thatcher’s favourite economist:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01n2rpx/Masters_of_Money_Hayek/
At least he understood that governments can’t control the way the capitalist economy works and that if they try to they risk making things worse (actually, he said they always would).
Anyway, next week she is discussing Karl Marx, at 9pm on Monday 1 October on BBC2. What’s the betting she can’t avoid a visit to Moscow? Still, it shows that capitalism and anti-capitalism are back in mainstream discussions.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/24/mitt-romney-self-creation-mythMissed that show last night Adam but just read this article which I thought was pretty good. As usual the comments are mostly good value. The words Capitalism and Socialism being banded about right, left and centre. Not in any way as streamlined as the SPGB or even the Zeitgeist scene but all bubbling under the surface. You wouldn’t have read this mainstream 10 years ago. Cheers Ray
The freemarketeers have only screwed up the world, the point, for workers, is to change it! Sorry Karl for the paraphrasing. See you in heaven, or not lol.
Just watched it and its pretty obvious why no-one wants to end the government monopoly on issuing legal tender.
About to start on BBC 2 TVhttp://www.radiotimes.com/episode/scvn8/masters-of-money–series-1—3-marx
Watched the prog on Marx tonight. Same old shite I've been hearing for 31 years. All the same old same old non-socialist revolutionary supporters of state capitalism were rolled out. Where the hell did they dig up Tariq Ali from?A farce for the most part. Why we weren't approached somehow fits the BBC's lack of research on this matter, but what the hell's new?
Anyone want to make a contribution to our ideas read the letter posted on spgbmedia and answer this person. Look forward to your input comrades. The last post I made. The Sunderland echo will probably publish your responses!
steve colborn wrote:Anyone want to make a contribution to our ideas read the letter posted on spgbmedia and answer this person. Look forward to your input comrades. The last post I made. The Sunderland echo will probably publish your responses!Email comment received from a member not on this forum:It was pretty awful, probably nothing especially BBC about it as such, just a reflection of dominant mindsets generally really. I'd imagine Paul Mason would have done a better job simply because he's studied it more. What was especially poor was the claim Marx didn't really have an alternative to capitalism (it was fair enough to say he didn't have a blueprint, but that's not the same thing of course). There was also no critical examination of Marx and the so-called 'Communist' countries, the link between the two being taken pretty much for granted, with a couple of very minor caveats. Bizarrely, she also put forward the workers 'can't buy back' theory of crises at great length, though in fairness explaining Marxian economics in less than an hour for the uninitiated isn't the easiest of tasks! It got 5 out of 10 at best though. The level of scholarship wasn't great – she repeatedly claimed without any evidence that Marx thought capitalism would collapse, but I honestly don't think she understood what she meant by this claim herself (conflating collapse with the abolition of capitalism). At root, you needed a relevant academic with some presenting skills to do that job, but she's a presenter with a bit of economics knowledge. And if some of it was written for her anyway, then the writers were just as bad!
If anyone wants to write to the BBC with a comment about the programme, the web form is:https://faq.external.bbc.co.uk/templates/bbcfaqs/emailstatic/emailPageYou're limited to about 500 characters.Stephanie Flanders twitter is: @bbcstephanie (for those who wish to tweet).
I got a text from another member which said:
Quote:Who do you find the most annoying? Martin Jacques? Or the underconsumptionism?Tempting as it was to reply Jacques, the one-time editor of the CP magazine Marxism Today, who said on the programme that we had a choice only between a better capitalism and a worse capitalism, I replied "the underconsumptionism".Right from the start, she said that the "Marxist" explanation of the present crisis was that it was caused by the fact that over the last 30 or so years workers' incomes had been squeezed so much that they didn't have enough to buy what the capitalists had to sell them. The trouble is that some in the Marxist tradition do argue this, but so do leftwing Keynesians (for instance, Clinton's Secretary for Labor, Robert Reich here). They also explained, as she mentioned, the crisis of the 1970s by workers' income rising too much at the expense of profits which slowed down production as profits are what drives the system. See this popular book of the time British Capitalism, Workers and the Profit Freeze.So, I suppose we can't criticise her for this, even if it's not the explanation we think Marx would have given of today's crisis and that of the 1970s. But it remains a fact that Marx was not an "underconsumptionist" and would not have explained the present crisis by saying that workers' income had become too low to buy what they had produced. This is always the case, even in a boom with rising wages, and, besides, suggests that the way out would be to increase workers wages, as trade union leaders and leftwing reformists claim (whereas in fact this would make things worse).Still, at least she accepted a two-class theory of society and all those who were interviewed accepted that the market was uncontrollable, even if some of them thought this didn't matter since capitalism still delivered the goods.
Adam, yes, I thought the underconsumptionism the lesser evil, I think the myth that Marx didn't write about communism is a greater ill (followed by the "No one is proposing doing away with capitalism").
I just watched this; an utter load of shite. Didn't you just love how they were contrasting conditions of miners in the 19th century to a bunch of yuppies walking around the west end on their mobile phones. Basically perpetuating the myth that "we're all middle class these days". Well what about the people literally dying from poverty not just in the third world but in the UK and the US as well. Condescending crap
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