ALB
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And line up with those US Occupiers who say re-elect Obama against whatever nutter the Republicans finally come up with?
stuartw2112 wrote:And in reply to ALB, the Occupy the London Stock Exchange camp is over. The Occupy movement as a whole, here too but especially in the States, is as lively as ever: so lively it’s impossible to keep up with everything that’s going on.That the camp at St Paul’s is over is all I meant. Of course the Occupiers are still around and still discussing. Good.I agree with you about the US. It is difficult to follow what’s going on. There, some have gone reformist, such as these but they have been repudiated by others. Some groups have been taken over by re-elect Obama people or by vanguardists. It’s all very confusing but, hopefully, there are some who are still seeking a way out of capitalism.
I didn’t know there was such a thing as an anarchist theory of economics. I thought they all accepted Marxian economics, like Bakunin did.
It’s all over then. At least they had the sense to go peacefully and not try to battle with the police.
I suppose this is meant only as a publicity exercise to get people thinking about a moneyless society. If it’s anything more it will be a flop.In any event, as we’ve always said “if people won’t vote to end capitalism, they’re even less likely to strike to end it”. There are plenty of elections coming up to test how many people want a moneyless society. In France there’s a presidential election. Why not call for people there to Vote for a Moneyless Society?There’s regional elections in London here in Britain in May. We will be standing a couple of candidates, standing for a moneyless world (or rather for a world society, without frontiers, based on common ownership and democratic control of productive resources, in which money would become redundant), also basically as a publicity exercise. If there really was a moment building up for a World Strike on Friday 27 July 2012 to establish a Moneyless World then we would know by 3 May when the London elections take place — and there’d be 2 Socialist councillors in the Greater London Assembly. A nice thought but, unfortunately, not very realistic at the moment.
A comrade from outside Britain has emailed Head Office saying he wants to be in touch with any other comrades using this. If there are any who do and want to hear the comrade’s tweets, email Head Office at spgb@worldsocialism.org and you can be put in touch with him.
Ozymandias wrote:Let’s face it folks we are all doomed. This species is on it’s way out…fast!Come on, comrade Fraser, it’s not that bad.
Just heard Robert Peston commenting on the BBC on Lloyds Bank’s annual report. Here’s the matter-of-fact way he takes it for granted that banks are financial intermediaries that borrow at one rate and lend at a higher one, and how they can only lend what they have got the funds for, and how their profits are squeezed if they find these harder to get:
Quote:Perhaps the most striking trend is that what’s called the interest margin – the difference between the interest Lloyds charges for loans and what it pays out in interest – has shrunk and will shrink again this year. The interest margin fell from 2.21% to 2.07% and is expected to fall by a similar amount in 2012.One of the main reasons for this income squeeze is the rising cost for banks of borrowing money on wholesale markets, or from other financial institutions, at a time when what banks can charge for loans to customers remains under pressure – partly because central banks, and in its case the Bank of England, are keeping official rates at record lows, and partly because the demand for credit is subdued.Lloyds is becoming less dependent on these less reliable wholesale sources of funding – as part of a strategic effort to make itself safer. And there has been considerable progress in that regard: its more dependable retail deposits represent 62% of all its funding today, compared with 56% a year ago.But the price of wholesale funds is still a big influence on Lloyds’ profits.So much for those who think that banks can create money to lend out of thin air.
Mcnair does raise one interesting possibility: that the present crisis in the West is not just an ordinary economic crisis but also maybe a reflection of a shift of world capitalism’s centre of gravity away from North America and Europe. In which case there might never be a proper recovery here, but it would take place in other parts of the world. But, as Macnair says, this is merely a “speculative hypothesis”.
That’s good news. Email spgb@worldsocialism.org and someone will send you a Form A (that’s it). A Form C is a branch financial return !
Our use of the slogan “Abolition of the Wages System” has nothing to do with wanting to attract Occupiers but is something we inherited from Marx who, as I’m sure you know, ended his talk to English trade unionists in 1865 as follows:
Quote:At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!” [his emphasis]Quote:Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system.In addition, in 1881 Engels wrote a series of artocles for the English trade union paper the Labour Standard. Here’s how he ended one of them:
Quote:The working class remains what it was, and what our Chartist forefathers were not afraid to call it, a class of wages slaves. Is this to be the final result of all this labour, self-sacrifice, and suffering? Is this to remain for ever the highest aim of British workmen? Or is the working class of this country at last to attempt breaking through this vicious circle, and to find an issue out of it in a movement for the ABOLITION OF THE WAGES SYSTEM ALTOGETHER? [his emphasis]So, don’t worry, Comrade, we haven’t departed from our principles. We are still what we were when you a member.
This is nit-picking! Somebody could equally argue that to call for the abolition of capitalism is not necessarily to call for socialism as there have been non-capitalist societies in the past some of which (in fact most of which) were very oppressive. OK, socialism (the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by the whole community) is our aim, but give us a break and allow us to present this in different ways.
It certainly will be a difficult thing to win the battle of democracy on the basis of the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky. I can’t see how the non-democratic and state-capitalist ideas of Lenin and Trotsky can be squared with the democratic and socialist ideas of Rosa Luxemburg. I would have thought that the two of them were both dead dogs as far as any future anti-capitalist movement is concerned. No mass anti-capitalist movement is going to want to make the same mistake made in the 20th century of seeing the revolution as being led by a vanguard party which then establishes its dictatorship and employs violence and terror against all and any opponents of its rule.
Well, you could if “the wages system” is seen as a synomym for capitalist or profit system. After all, wage-labour and capital go together and you can’t have one without the other. In that case “abolition of the wages system” and “abolition of the profit system” mean the same thing, expressed differently.But if you mean (just) wanting to “abolish wages” the same objection can be raised against this as saying we (just) want to abolish money. Obviously, to just abolish wages or money and leave everything else about capitalist society unchanged would lead to chaos and in fact to the eventual re-emergence of both.To be absolutely precise, what we want is to establish a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by the whole community, a state of affairs in which wages and money would not exist. This could be said to be our only aim.Having said this, slogans like “Abolish the Wages System” and “Abolish Money” could have a use to intrigue people to investigate more what we mean.
I’d not heard of Frederic Jameson before but perhaps I should have since, apparently, he invented “postmodernism”. Since this is a load of old rubbish this suggests you should hold off buying the book until you get a further opinion from someone who knows more about him. If you want a literary approach to Capital there’s always Francis Wheen’s Das Kapital: A Biography (reviewed in the Socialist Standard, on this site at http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2007/no-1239-november-2007/book-reviews ).Judging by the interview (and of course it’s a good thing that Marx’s ideas should be being discussed), Jameson seems to be a bit of an “underconsumptionist” (see the thread on Andrew Kliman, who criticises this approach). Capital is not really “a book about unemployment” in the sense that it argues that capitalism’s tendency to replace living labour in the production process will eventually lead to its collapse because if fewer and fewer workers are being paid wages there’ll be fewer and fewer consumers to buy the products. This, incidentally, is an analysis of capitalism that is shared by Peter Joseph and the Zeitgeist movement.What it overlooks is that what drives capitalism is not consumer demand, but investment demand, ie investment with a view to profit and the re-investment of profit as more capital. If the “underconsumptionist” theory was right — and people were putting it forward in Marx’s day — capitalism should have collapsed a long time ago. The fact that it hasn’t shows there must be something wrong with the theory.
