ALB
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Another news item for the file (from today’s Times):
Quote:Mr Osborne will begin next week the Government’s so-called credit-easing programme under which the Treasury will underwrite £20 billion of bank borrowing to fund cheaper lending to small businesses.If banks can create money out of thin air why would they need to borrow money to fund loans to small businesses ? I can see why, in this case, they’d like their loans to be underwritten by the government but not why they would need to borrow the money to make the loans. Answer: banks can’t create money to lend out of thin air.
robbo203 wrote:I vaguely recall an old issue of the Socialist Standard (from the bad old says of 70s?) severely attacking forms of direct action such as the squatters movement in the most trenchant terms. In retrospect, such attitudes have no place in a revolutionary socialist party. None at all. I hope and trust things are different todayActually, Robin, your memory (or rather folk myths about the Party in the past) has got it the wrong way round. The article you are referring to appeared in the April 1969 Socialist Standard entitled “Squatters and the Housing Problem” actually said:
Quote:The Socialist Party supports the efforts of workers to improve their housing conditions under capitalism — even by squatting. But socialists also point out that there is no solution`to the housing problem inside capitalism, and even if the agitation of those who support the squatters suceeds for the families they are now trying to help, future generations will still face the same misery and hardship of homelessness. Only in a society in which production is carried on solely to satisfy human wants, without anyone having to worry about where next week’s rent or next month’s mortgage repayment is coming from, will the housing problem find a solution.(my italics)You are right to the extent that some EC and Party members complained about this, but the statement stood.So, it was not a case of the Party saying that socialists did not support squatting and those members who weren’t against it complaining, but of the Party saying it did and those members who were against it (or at least against saying that the Party did) complaining.On the anectodal level, I remember one party member and his partner who were squatting, but not for any revolutionary end, just to save up money to pay for a mortgage. Later on, there were actually a couple of Party squats (well, squats composed of Party members) in London. I wasn’t one of them but the current Party Treasurer was. The mid-60s to the mid-70s were in fact the good old days !
Never come across them myself but are they based in the UK or outside, eg in America or Australia? There must be some leftwing trainspotter on this forum who can place them.
I see they’ve followed Comrade Andy Cox’s example and launched a spoof official petition themselves which the government is obliged to publish on its website. At least I think it’s not to be taken seriously as I don’t think they believe than a “resource-based economy” could be established just in Britain any more than we think socialism could or that HM Government is going to try to do either. Don’t think much of their claim, though, that “the continuing decay and eventual demise of the market/monetary Socio-economic system under which the world operates is a mathematical certainty”. Mathematical certainty !?
stuartw2112 wrote:Relatedly, what do you make of this, specifically the claim that money did not exist in the Soviet Union? http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004736Ah (or should that be aagh) Hillel Ticktin! All his arguments start from the basic premise (shared by Trotsky) that capitalism is essentially private enterprise capitalism and that state intervention is a negation of “capitalism”. This means that for him (as for Trotsky, if not for all trotskyists) “state capitalism” is a contradiction in terms. So, for him, the USSR couldn’t have been capitalist and the notes and coins that circulated there were not money in the sense analysed by Marx. In fact, he seems to be saying that money in Britain, etc isn’t really money either because it is now managed by the state.Apart from that, most of what he claims in the latter part of his article (presumably the transcript of a talk) are facts as wrong. For instance, Marx did not call money lent at interest “fictitious capital”. For him, this was a notional capital sum arrived at by notionally converting a future regular income stream into a sum that if invested would produce the income in question as interest; what accountants and actuaries called “capitalization”. Such sums of money can be bought and sold. Of course such fictitious capital (and a variation of it called “securitization”) did play a part in the financial bubble that collapsed in 2007-8 — when the stream of future income on which they were based didn’t happen the capital sum calculated on the basis of it was reduced to zero. putting some financial institutions in serious trouble.Basically, I don’t think Ticktin needs to be taken seriously here (though he does seem to be the permanent flavour of the month with the Weekly Worker people).
ALB wrote:I’m due to speak at a Zeitgeist event in Cardiff on Sunday where one of the other speakers is from the Eat for Free Project which seems to be into this sort of thing. I’ll report back on what he says.The speaker from Eat for Free Project didn’t turn up, but growing your own food was one of the recommendations made by a ZM lecturer, Vivak Shori, for surviving in the coming period of severe deflation with falling prices, massive unemployment and shortages that he predicted would be coming within the next 2-5 years due to oil supplies running out with no effective substitute in sight and to the debt bubble bursting. A rather more alarming reason for growing your own food. I challenged him to a bet that his predicted deflation wouldn’t happen (to be called in in 2017).
I’m due to speak at a Zeitgeist event in Cardiff on Sunday where one of the other speakers is from the Eat for Free Project which seems to be into this sort of thing. I’ll report back on what he says. Apart from putting the case for world socialism I’ll be concentrating my criticism of course on the currency crank from Positive Money.
Laurens’s “memories” must be failing him once again. All the sources I’ve been able to track down (admittedly only on the internet) give Bevan’s 1952 book as the source of Smillie’s account. If somebody can find an earlier source we’ll print a correction.All the other statements in Laurens’s letter are wrong, except what he says about the IWW not being an anarchist or anti-political organisation.
I know Graeber is against the wages system. We said so in the February Socialist Standard here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2012/no-1290-february-2012/cooking-books-after-revolutionI’m not sure this is enough to say he’s also a sort of Marxist. After all, isn’t he putting forward a quite different theory of the origin and nature on money (as debt) to that of Marx (as a commodity)?
Apparently the link I gave doesn’t work. So here it is:http://www.weebly.com/uploads/6/7/3/6/6736569/chattopadhyay_marx_vs_lenin_countdown.doc
Interesting I agree, but Fred Harrison is a prominent follower of Henry George and his land tax proposal. I heard him speak at a meeting organised by Occupy at the Bank of Ideas a month or so ago. He lost the sympathy of the audience by refusing to condemn “capitalism” (on the grounds that you can’t have production without capital!).Michael Hudson is a radical, non-Marxist economist who in this article “From Marx to Goldman Sachs” makes out Marx to be some sort of crank who sees banks lending imaginary money.I’ve only read some articles by Graeber (not his book, though Hudson probably has) but he seems to be lending credence (or perhaps reflecting) the widespread view today that the problem is not production for profit but lending at interest. And that, therefore, as Hudson concludes, all that is required is action against finance capital rather than capitalism as such (as Graeber is some sort of anarchist I don’t suppose this is his position even if his arguments lend credence to it).
Every week brings refutation of the view that banks can create money out of thin air and confirmation that they can only lend money they have got (whether from savers or what they have themselves borrowed). We may as well record them here as anywhere. So, here’s a BBC report on Halifax’s decision to raise the rate of interest on their loans to housebuyers:
Quote:The UK’s biggest mortgage lender, the Halifax, has confirmed it is raising its standard variable mortgage rate (SVR) from 1 May.The Halifax said the rise – from 3.5% to 3.99% – was due to the higher cost of raising funds for mortgages from both savers and the financial markets.(…)It argued that its hand had been forced by market conditions.”The change acknowledges that the cost of funding a mortgage in today’s market remains significantly higher than the longer term average,” the Halifax said.”The increase to the rate reflects the fact that raising money through retail savings and in the wholesale markets is currently very expensive by historical standards.”The report said other banks were doing the same and for the same reason:
Quote:On Friday, RBS raised the rate on two of its mortgages from 3.75% to 4%. (…) An RBS spokesman said the rises were down to the higher costs they were incurring borrowing money, which they had absorbed for some time before opting to pass it on to some of their customers.Banks are essentially financial intermediaries whose main income comes from borrowing money at one rate of interest and lending it at a higher rate. They can’t simply conjure money up out of thin air and then charge interest on it, as numerous currency cranks claim.
Personally I’ve always been against putting branch Minutes on the internet for precisely the reasons you give. I’m sure there must be quite a few members who, for various reasons, don’t want their names and political opinions splashed all over the internet, and for ever. Maybe this should be the subject for a future Conference discussion and decision. You could also raise it in your branch and get the practice dropped unless all branch members agree to it. Most branches don’t do it.
Jesting apart, I think Stuart is making the philosophical point that if there is a choice only of two evils it’s logical to choose the lesser. But the real question is whether or not there is just a choice of two evils.Here’s an extract from wikipedia on the term:
Quote:An early example of the lesser of two evils principle in politics was the slogan “Better the turban than the mitre”, used by Orthodox Christians in the Balkans during the rise of the Ottoman Empire. Conquest by Western Roman Catholic powers would likely mean forcible conversion to the Catholic faith, while conquest by the Muslim Ottoman Empire would mean second-class citizenship but would at least allow Orthodox Christians to retain their current religion. In a similar manner, the Protestant Dutch resistance against Spanish rule in the 16th century used the slogan Liever Turks dan Paaps (better a Turk than a Papist).The reference at the end of the wikipedia article to the 2002 French presidential election which opposed the conservative Jacques Chirac to Le Pen of the National Front reminds me that I actually saw a Trotskyist march in Lille at the time with the banner: “Cholera or the Plague: Vote for Cholera”. Unfortunately I didn’t have a camera with me.Incidentally, which is the lesser evil: the Roman Catholic Church or the Greek Orthodox Church?
