ALB
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There’s some stuff on this in the Education section of this website (under Publications). In particular:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/study-guides/guide-value-price-and-profitandhttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/study-guides/russian-revolution-and-bolshevik-dictatorship-and-labour-theory-valueAnd there’s John Keracher’s Economics for Beginners here.
There’s a story behind this group. They are a breakaway from Workers Power, the Trot group that stood against us in Vauxhall in the last general election in May 2010 (and got less votes than us). The Green Party candidate who stood against us, Joseph Healy, has also resigned from his party.It would be nice to think that both these were fall-outs from our election campaign but they are more likely to be reformists falling out amongst themselves.
I was going to suggest too that Adrian look at that thread to see the evidence that banks can only make loans out of funds they already have, funds that come not just from deposits but also from what they borrow wholesale from the money market.Just to correct two factual errors.1.
Quote:There is a very simple way of seeing that credit is almost entirely created out of nothing – if you add up the banks’ balance sheets Total loans outstanding at any time, you will see that it is many times the value of the entire UK economy. Were loans only created out of ‘Real’ assets, then this could not happen!This is not true. The total value of UK economy, ie all wealth in the UK, in 2010 was £7.3 trillion (£7,300,000,000,000). A measure of “total loans outstanding” can be M4 (which is actually larger than bank loans). In 2010 this was only £1564 billion (£1,564,000,000,000).2.
Quote:In the days before the ECB and various so-called technical adjustments, banks issued credit/loans using a regulatory tool called the Liquidity ratio (now morestrictly defined and called the Reserve Asset Ratio and part of the so-called Basel Accords of recent years). This ratio determines by how much the banks are allowed safely to increase their Loans as a multiple of their bank deposits.The “liquidity ratio” and the “reserve asset ratio” are two different things (and neither determine how much banks can “increase their loans as a multiple of their deposits” since banks can’t lend more than they already have).The Liquidity Ratio is the proportion of a bank’s deposits and its own borrowing that it needs to keep in a form that can be quickly converted into cash to meet any demands on it, eg withdrawals. Mostly, it is money lent for short periods, even overnight, on the money market. At one time (until 1971) there was a formal requirement to keep it at 30%. Now it is left to the discretion of those running a bank to decide what level is safe. A 30% liquidity ratio didn’t mean that banks could increase their lending three times more than their deposits (and borrowings) but only that it could lend out only 70% of these as longer term loans.The Reserve Asset Ratio is the ratio of a bank’s own capital (not at all the same thing as its deposits) to its loans. It places a limit on the maximum amount a bank can lend (provided, that is, it has the funds to lend) and is intended to ensure that a bank can absorb from its capital any losses should thse occur (banks normally make a profit). If a bank increases its capital this does not mean that it can lend more. It may be able to, but only if at the same time its deposits and/or its own borrowings (the source of what it lends) also increase.
Me too, even though I’m against religious circumcision, hate churches and would allow cartoons of mahomet. What do you have to reply to end us as something else?
alanjjohnstone wrote:A founding party member wrote a party anthem in 1910 , how the music went i have no ideaThe music does exist and will be somewhere in the archives. If anyone wants to try it, it could be dug out.
jondwhite wrote:There is even a Humanist political party.Humanist Party – United KingdomThere is a certain irony here (a lot in fact). This “party” has nothing to do with the main Humanist movement but is/was the front for a cult based on the spiritual teachings of someone who called himself “Silo” which tried to pass itself off as bona fide Humanists. I remember meeting some one of them in Ealing in the 1990s when they contested a local election. At that time they were trying to pass themselves off as the Greens. I must still have their leaflets somewhere.
This could of course equally have appeared in the joking sharing section since calling François Hollande a socialist, as all the media are doing (after describing North Korea as socialist), is a joke. But there is a serious side to this as it shows how capitalism is incompatible with democracy.A majority of voters in France, and even more in Greece, have voted to reject austerity. But you think they’ll get it? Of course not. It won’t happen in either country, despite being the expressed political will of the people, because this is impossible with capitalism under present slump conditions. What other proof is needed that capitalism is not a system geared to meeting what people want?
jondwhite wrote:Couldn’t we leaflet their conference in Cardiff National Museum from 8 – 10 June – detailed below?http://www.humanism.org.uk/meet-up/events/view/172?page=1Good idea. Maybe Robin could pester them too to admit people with religious hang-ups.
As the EC Meeting finished early, 6 of us went from Claph High St to hear the talk at the bandstand in the middle of Clapham Common. There were a dozen or so others there in the mid-teen temperature (but, thoughtfully, the organisers supplied rugs). Professor John Hutnyk of Goldsmiths spoke for nearly 2 hours but he was very good. His approach was that of the postmodernists who analyse the non-literary texts as literature and he did succeed in bringing out Marx’s analysis of money, the market and the exploitation of the worker as a drama with an underlying plot. He gives free lectures on the subject. See his website.We gave out copies of a back issue of the Socialist Standard on Marx and went for a drink with him and others at the Bread & Roses. Not sure of his political position, but he did emphasise that Marx stood not (just) for higher wages but for the abolition of the wages system. There was however a passing favourable reference to Lenin …
robbo203 wrote:My favourite is Chattopadhyay who seems to be a real scourge of the Leninist Left and has made some devastingly powerful and impressive critiques of the whole Bolshevik scene – another is Simon Pirani – and I wonder if the Party has made any contact with Chattopadhyay. He could prove a very useful ally.Here’s another good article on The Myth of Twentieth-Century Socialism and the Continuing Relevance of Karl Marx by Paresh Chattopadhyay, as can be judged from its opening pages:
Quote:First, a word on the confusion about the term “socialism.” There is a widespread idea that socialism and communism are two successive societies, that socialism is the transition to communism and hence precedes communism. Later in this essay we will say more about the origin of this thesis and the consequences of its acceptance. For Marx this distinction is non-existent. For Marx, socialism is neither the transition to communism, nor the lower phase of communism. It is communism tout court. In fact Marx calls capitalism itself the “transitional point” or “transitional phase” to communism (Marx 1953: 438; 1962a: 425–26; in Most 1989: 783). For him socialism and communism are simply equivalent and alternative terms for the same society that he envisages for the post-capitalist epoch which he calls, indifferent texts, equivalently: communism, socialism, Republic of Labour, society of free and associated producers or simply Association, Cooperative Society, (re)union of free individuals. Hence what Marxsays in one of his famous texts – Critique of the Gotha Programme (Marx 1964c; hereafter Gothacritique) – about the two stages of communism 2 could as well apply to socialism having the same two stages.He goes on to show how the “socialism” of Lenin, Stalin and Mao had nothing at all in common with what Marx and Engels understood by the word but was a form of state capitalist dictatorship over the working class. Brilliant stuff!He also digs out a couple of quotes which I didn’t know about before where Marx refers to post-capitalist society as “socialism” rather his more usual “communism”.Yes, we have been in touch with him and he knows about us.
I don’t believe it. They’ve now announced how many votes were cast in the two areas for the London-wide lists and in both we got more votes than TUSC (the list support by both Militant and the SWP) did in the list vote (whereas I’d have expected it to be the other way round).In Lambeth & Southwark they got 1891 or 1.2% and in Merton & Wandsworth 904 or 0.6%. So quite a few of those who voted for us for the constituency did not vote for TUSC for the London-wide list (1047 in the first and 439 in the second). I don’t know what this means — except that offering attractive reforms doesn’t necessarily get you more votes than standing just for socialism.
Lambeth & Southwark result just announced here. We (Danny) got 2938 or 1.9%. Which is more we got last time (1588) and more than the Left List did too (1956)
Actual result for Merton & Wandsworth is here on our election blog. 1343 or 0.9% is about we expected. This compares with 1714 or 1.0% for the Left List (as the SWP called themselves for the election) at the last GLA election there 4 years ago. Counting is complete in Lambeth & Southwark and should be announced soon.
I should have know where Robin would derail this discussion to. He does it every time he gets the chance on the WSM Forum.
