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The Socialist Standard did quote frequently from Pankurst’s paper the Workers’ Dreadnaught in 1921 and 1922 to show the confusion and mistakes of the “Communist” Party. She seems to have been mentioned by name only once when the October 1921 issue mentioned in passing that “Miss Sylvia Pankhurst has been expelled for not handing the paper … over to the control of the Communist Party” (actually a valid reason for being expelled — we wouldn’t have allowed a rich individual to publish their own paper either as this was one of the reasons the original members left the SDF).Anyway, here’s an extract from another article, from 1923, in which she gives a good definition of socialism:

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Under Socialism the land, the means of production and transport are no longer privately owned: they belong to all the people. The title to be one of the joint owners of the earth and its products and the inheritance of collective human labour does not rest on any question of inheritance or purchase; the only title required is that one is alive on this planet. Under Socialism no one can be disinherited; no one can lose the right to a share or the common possession.The share is not so many feet of land, so much food, so many manufactured goods, so much money with which to buy, sell, and carry on trade. The share of a member of the Socialist Commonwealth is the right and the possibility of the abundant satisfaction of the needs from the common store-house, the right to be served by the common service, the right to assist as an equal in the common production.Under Socialism production will be for use, not profit. The community will ascertain what are the requirements of the people in food, clothing, housing, transport, educational facilities, books, pictures, music, theatres, flowers, statuary, wireless telegraphy — anything and everything that the people desire. Food, clothing, housing, transport, sanitation — these come first; all effort will be bent first to supply these; everyone will feel it a duty to take some part in supplying these. Then will follow the adornments and amusements, a comfortable, cultured and leisured people will produce artistic and scientific work for pleasure, and with spontaneity. Large numbers of people will have the ability and the desire to paint, to carve, to embroider, to play, and to compose music.They will adorn their dwellings with their artistic productions, and will give them freely to whoever admires them.When a book is written the fact will be made known, and whoever desires a copy of it, either to read or to keep, will make that known to the printers in order that enough copies may be printed to supply all who desire the book. So with a musical composition, so with a piece of statuary.So, too, with the necessaries of life. Each person, each household, will notify the necessary agency the requirements in milk, in bread, and all the various foods, in footwear, in clothing. Very soon the average consumption in all continuous staples will be ascertained. Consumption will be much higher than at present, but production will be vastly increased: all those who are to-day unemployed or employed in the useless toil involved in the private property and commercial system, will be taking part in actual productive work; all effort will be concentrated on supplying the popular needs.How will production be organised?Each branch of production will be organised by those actually engaged in it. The various branches of production will be co-ordinated for the convenient supply of raw material and the distribution of the finished product.Since production will be for use, not profit, the people will be freely supplied on application. There will be no buying and selling, no money, no barter or exchange of commodities.

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ciro wrote:

And it is clear that we we are for democracy. My questions are: 1)how much democracy is in Marx texts? 2)can it be that this party takes its democracy from Anglo-Saxon democratic tradition, so this is a kind of Anglo-Saxon democratic tradition Marxism/Socialism?

Before he became a socialist (communist) Marx had been a political democrat (which was a radical enough position in the 1840s because universal suffrage didn’t exist anywhere then). After he became a socialist he continued to favour political democracy even under capitalism (in exile in England he supported the Chartists demand for universal suffrage and the later Reform League which campaigned for the extension of the vote to more workers).Although he no doubt appreciated living in a country like England where certain political freedoms existed (though not universal suffrage) his conception of what a fully democratic system would be like seems to have been more influenced by events in France.  Here’s how he described the Paris Commune of 1871 (in The Civil War in France) which he held up as an example of how the working class should exercise political power once they had won control of it:

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The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time.

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In a rough sketch of national organization, which the Commune had no time to develop, it states clearly that the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet, and that in the rural districts the standing army was to be replaced by a national militia, with an extremely short term of service. The rural communities of every district were to administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies were again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the mandat imperatif (formal instructions) of his constituents.

The Italian version of this pamphlet can be found here.You’re right that it was Lenin who dishonestly claimed that Marx stood for the sort of dictatorship that he and the Bolsheviks established in Russia (one-party rule by a vanguard), whereas in fact Marx stood for the sort of delegate democracy described above.

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More news from St Paul’s. We were there yesterday for a couple of hours or so to leaflet and discuss with occupiers and passers-by. One discussion was with someone who had apparently flown over specially from Oakland in the US to be there. She was a member of the “Freedom Socialist Party” which seems to be a trotskyist organisation. For the record, one of the leaflets she was handing out criticised the Occupy Wall Street people for being opposed to leaders (a position we can commend them for), saying

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… a ‘leaderless’ movement with no clear programme will be easily diverted by Democrats … A movement that doesn’t have leadership directly opposed to the system will be co-opted by it.

Par for the course from a would-be vanguard of course. And the “clear programme” was (again of course) a list of reforms such as “Nationalize the banks under workers control”, “Cancel the debts on student loans”, “Establish a national public works job program at union wages”, “Tax the rich and corporations to restore social services for those hardest hit by the economic crisis”.The Occupiers have their own list of reforms but not these tired old trotskyist “transitional demands” which pretend to presume that capitalism can be reformed to benefit the “99 percent”. But, to be fair to the “Freedom Socialist Party”, they weren’t the only trotskyist group there putting them forward. Also doing so was the SWP and another US group which I can’t remember whether it was called the “Workers League” or the “Communist League”. Perhaps some leftwing trainspotter here can identify them, though I’m not sure it’s really worth the bother.The leaflets we were handing out said (among other things) that we want “a world of equality without leaders or followers”.

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I think it would be more accurate to say that the SPGB “did not support” rather than “opposed” extending the franchise, on the grounds given, especially as it also said that the introduction of universal suffrage would be one of the first things a socialist working class would have to do on winning control of political power. What the SPGB was opposed to was the main Suffragette demand of votes for women on the same terms as then obtained for men. This would have had the effect of increasing the proportion of capitalists in the electorate while still leaving the vast majority of women and one-third of men without the vote. Sylvia Pankhurst opposed this too (unlike her mother and sister, she favoured universal suffrage).Were the SPGB and Sylvia Pankhurst know of each other? Yes, it’s impossible they didn’t. Both, in fact, had the same conception of socialism as the following article by her reproduced in the Canadian One Big Union Bulletin on 2 August 1923 clearly shows:

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The words Socialism and Communism have the same meaning. They indicate a condition of society in which the wealth of the community: the land and the means of production, distribution and transport are held in common, production being for use and not for profit.Socialism being an ideal towards which we are working, it is natural that there should be some differences of opinion in that future society. Since we are living under Capitalism it is natural that many people’s ideas of Socialism should be coloured by their experiences of life under the present system. We must not be surprised that some who recognise the present system is bad should yet lack the imagination to realise the possibility of abolishing all the institutions of Capitalist society. Nevertheless there can be no real advantage in setting up a half-way-house to socialism. A combination of Socialism and Capitalism would produce all sorts of injustice, difficulty and waste. Those who happen to suffer under the anomalies would continually struggle for a return to the old system.Full and complete Socialism entails the total abolition of money, buying and selling, and the wages system.It means the community must set itself the task of providing rather more than the people can use of all the things that the people need and desire, and of supplying these when and as the people require them.Any system by which the buying and selling system is retained means the employment of vast sections of the population in unproductive work. It leaves the productive work to be done by one portion of the people whilst the other portion is spending its energies in keeping shop, banking, making advertisements and all the various developments of commerce which, in fact, employ more than two-thirds of the people today.Given the money system, the wage system is inevitable. If things needed and desired are obtainable only by payment those who do the work must be paid in order that they may obtain the means of life. The wages system entails such institutions as the old-age pension, sick and unemployment insurance and widow’s pensions, or the Poor Law, and probably plus the Poor Law. These involve large numbers of people drawn from productive work to do purely administrative work. Thus useless toil is manufactured, and the burden of non-producers maintained by the productive workers is increased.Moreover social conditions are preserved which are quite out of harmony with Communist fraternity. The wage system makes the worker’s life precarious. The payment of wages entails the power to dismiss the worker by an official or officials.So long as the money system remains, each productive enterprise must be run on a paying basis. Therefore it will tend to aim at employing as few workers as possible, in order to spend less on wages. It will also tend to dismiss the less efficient worker who, becoming unemployed, becomes less efficient. Thus an unemployable class tends to grow up.The existence of a wage system almost inevitably leads to unequal wages; overtime, bonuses, higher pay for work requiring special qualifications. Class distinctions are purely differences of education, material comfort and environment.Buying and selling by the Government opens the door to official corruption. To check that, high salaried positions are created in order that those occupying them have too much to lose to make pilfering and jobbery worth while.

This was the basis of her saying that by this time Russia had adopted state capitalism, another view she shared with the SPGB (although the SPGB said Russia had never ceased to be capitalist while she said it went off the rails when the Bolsheviks adopted the New Economic Policy in 1921.

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Not surprising that the relationship was fraught seeing that Malatesta was one of the anarchist members of the Socialist League whose advocacy (and practice) of bomb-throwing finally led Morris to leave and to declare that he wasn’t an anarchist and that a society without majority decision-making as advocated by his anarchist opponents in the League was impossible.Anyway, it sounds an interesting meeting.The SPGB didn’t think much of Malatesta either, as in this item from the July 1912 Socialist Standard:

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NOT TAKING ANY, THANKS !The following, we think, sufficiently explains itself.MALATESTA RELEASE COMMITTEE.London, W., June 14, 1912.Dear Comrade,—At a meeting of the above on the 13th inst., it was unanimously agreed that your party should be asked to send a delegate to join and co-operate with us, in order that this committee should be as representative as possible of all those who are in sympathy with the objects of this committee.We are resolved to carry on this agitation on a wider scale and are assured of the support of prominent men, including M.P.’s and other influential people.Awaiting your favourable reply,Yours fraternally, (Signed) J. F. TANNER, Hon. Sec.Mr. J. F. Tanner.  MALATESTA RELEASE COMMITTEE.Sir, –Your letter inviting the Socialist Party of Great Britain to send a Delegate to co-operate with your committee was duly placed before my Executive, who instructed me to inform you that The Socialist Party declines to join with working-class enemies for any purpose whatever, and that therefore your invitation is declined.Your Mr. Malatesta, if a victim at all, is but a victim of the system both he and you do your best to maintain by the spreading of confusion in the minds of the working class. Your whining for mercy, therefore, savours even more of the hypocrite than of the coward, while your “Demand” for release is grotesque.That your committee should have entertained the idea (even for a moment) that the Socialist Party could be seduced from its allegiance to the working-class by the glamour of temporarily associating with “prominent men including M.P.’s and other influential people” shows not only how woefully you have miscalculated the moral strength and integrity of the Socialist Party, but also the cant, humbug, and mental debasement of the ultra-revolutionists—the Anarchists—the anti-political giants who yet can be got to glory in the prospect of associating with “M.P.’s and other influential people.”In the interests of the working class we decline your invitation and say “Down with Anarchy ! Long live Socialism !”On behalf of the Executive ofThe Socialist Party of Great Britain,C. L. Cox, Gen. See. pro. tern.

Having said this, I don’t think that Malatesta was the worst of the anarchists. 

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Interesting bit in this news item about Occupy Cardiff:

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Earlier, a leaflet was handed out to shoppers calling for a new type of economy.It read: “This historic and unprecedented uprising and resistance to the inequality of our social system is nothing less than a lifeline for humanity.”We must convert this dissent into a satisfying result.”The monetary market system itself must be replaced with a resource-based economic model where everyone’s needs are provided for free.”

It wasn’t us, but it could have been.

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alanjjohnstone wrote:

http://occupywallst.org/forum/a-question-about-fractional-reserve-lending/A useful link on fractional reserve and money creation myth for those who are suspicious if we as a  political party explains it

Yes, Dalton’s the man there who knows how banks work. But shouldn’t this be on the thread on “reserve banking”?

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admin wrote:

Good to know data is still available. This series is the one that stopped in 2006, there is a slight difference in that the old series includes ‘banks operational deposits’. What theoretical problems this posses I’m not yet quite sure.

Actually the weekly returns do include these as “reserve balances”, ie interest-bearing deposits by commercial banks and building societies with the Bank of England. So, M0 could be reconstituted if it was wanted, but breaking it into its two components is more useful as “reserve balances” are not part of the currency that is actually in circulation, which is the more relevant statistic.

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admin wrote:

Good to know data is still available. This series is the one that stopped in 2006, there is a slight difference in that the old series includes ‘banks operational deposits’. What theoretical problems this posses I’m not yet quite sure.

Actually the weekly returns do include these as “reserve balances”, ie interest-bearing deposits by commercial banks and building societies with the Bank of England. So, M0 could be reconstituted if it was wanted, but breaking it into its two components is more useful as “reserve balances” are not part of the currency that is actually in circulation, which is the more relevant statistic.

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Pity you couldn’t make it since it seems to have been a bit of  currency cranks convention, with only one person saying anything sensible:

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Question: Banks’ money is balanced because each deposit is balanced by a debt?

Confirmation of why we need to be there to take part in these discussions.

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The Bank of England still publishes a weekly return showing, amongst other things, the total value of notes and coins in circulation. It’s here. This week the figure is £50,007,649,295.But you’re right. It is partly a question of definition, with the definition of money changing over the years. In the past it used to be “can the banks create credit?”. Now it’s become “can the banks create money?” The answer is the same but the issue was less confusing when the claim was just about credit not money.Obviously banks can supply credit (even if not out of nothing), but they can’t create money unless this is defined as including bank loans (in which case they do so by definition). Money, in its original sense of coins and notes, can only be created by the government via the central bank. These days out of nothing.

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alanjjohnstone wrote:

referring to 1931 and the MacMillan report tends to make me seem very old and it is bit UK parochial to be easily accepted by Americans.

Maybe but that New Economics Foundation video starts with a quote for Sir Reginald McKenna, dating from 1924, when he was chairman of Midland Bank (now HSBC) though it gives the impression that it dates from 1915-6 when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, which is all over the internet on Monetary Reform sites including US ones. And he was a member of the 1931 Macmillan Committee.Type “I am afraid” + “Reginald McKenna” into a search engine and 93,000 results come up. A measure of how widespread currency crank and funny money ideas are.On the other hand, the quote from another banker of the time, Walter Leaf, chairman of Westminister Bank (now the NatWest, part of RBS) that:

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The banks can lend no more than they can borrow – in fact not nearly so much. If anyone in the deposit banking system can be called a ‘creator of credit’ it is the depositors; for the banks are strictly limited in their lending operations by the amount which the depositors think fit to leave with them. (Banking, Home University Library edition, 1926, p. 102)

can virtually only be found on our and related sites (only 95 come up).Of course, exchanging quotes settles nothing but those who support McKenna’s position ought at least to be aware of his contemporary Walter Leaf’s opposing view.

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I know it’s boring but I think we do have to deal with the various arguments and misunderstandings about banking and money as they are so widespread these days amongst critics of society.The first point to be clear on is the definition of “money”.  Up to WW2 there was more or less agreement that money was “currency” (notes and coins). Since then “bank loans” have been regarded as money. This is ok as long as the same definition is kept to throughout the analysis. But it should be noted that, even today, conventional economics has felt the need to distinguish between M0 (mostly currency) and M1 (which is M0 + bank loans) (M2, M3 and M4 are M1 plus various other types of loan).So, when as in the New Economics Foundation video and in all economics textbooks, people say “banks create money” this is true (by definition) if money is defined as M1. But it wouldn’t mean that banks create all money, as M0 is created by governments and/or central banks. Having said this, it is true that only 3% of M1 is currency and 97% bank loans.The case against regarding both bank loans and currency as money is that they come into being and behave differently. Currency circulates. Bank loans don’t.  In fact, although M0 is only only about 3% of M1 it can be used to make payments, etc (including bank deposits and bank loans) of many times its face value.But even accepting that bank loans are money, banks do not create it out of thin air (as is often claimed, though not in economics textbooks). No bank can lend more than it has, either as deposits or what it has itself borrowed. In fact, because they have to keep some of what they have as cash, they can only lend less than they have. In the past, in Britain, they had to keep about 8% of their assets as cash. Now it’s down to about 3%. This is the “fraction” of assets they have to keep as a “reserve” against withdrawals. Hence the “fractional reserve banking” that currency cranks make such a fuss about. But all lending institutions do this (building societies, savings clubs and credit unions too). If they didn’t, all they would be would safe deposits. It’s what lending other people’s money involves.The first mistake that currency cranks make about this is that they assume that, with a fractional reserve of 10%, if someone deposits £100 in a bank this means that the bank can then lend out a sum of which this is 10% (less a £100), ie £900. In fact, it means only that the bank can lend out £90 as it has to keep 10% (£10) as cash.It is true that economics textbooks do teach that the banking system as a whole (but not a single bank on its own) can, with an initial deposit of £100, eventually make loans totalling £900. The assumption is that the first bank makes a loan of £90, which is then deposited in a second bank which can then lend 90% of this (£81), which is then deposited in a third bank which can then lend out 90% of £81, until eventually total loans of £900 will have been made.There is nothing wrong with this theoretical model as such, only with the claims that are made about it. Even the textbooks claim that the £900 has been created by the banks together, but in fact it depends on the money from loans being repeatedly re-deposited in the system. So, it could just as logically be claimed that it was the depositors that created the loans as they provided the banks with the money to lend. In fact this refutes the second mistake that currency cranks make: saying that all money (bank loans) comes into being as “debt”. They don’t. They come into being as previous deposits. What is happening is that money is circulating throughout the banking system, but there’s nothing mysterious about that as circulating is what money does.The currency cranks mistake what the economics textbooks say about the whole banking system as applying to an individual bank. Hence their mistaken conclusion that, if someone deposits £100 in a bank, that bank can then immediately lend out £900.There is one bank that can create money out of thin air and that is the government-owned or controlled central bank. It does so by mere decision, by creating more “fiat” (“let it be”) money and introduces it into circulation by using it to buy government bonds off commercial banks (“quantitative easing” is a variety of this).Ironically, one of the solutions proposed in the New Economics Foundation video, that the government itself should issue money, already happens, even if indirectly. It could do it directly of course as the video says it did during WW1 and as the US government did during the Civil War (as “greenbacks”) … or as the government of Zimbabwe has been doing.What we need to ask is why people today tend to blame banks rather than capitalism as a whole. In his 1935 pamphlet Economics for Beginners (which has an interesting section on the currency crank theories of his day, some of which have been revived today) John Keracher attributes funny money theories to indebted small farmers, shopkeepers and businessmen who want to monkey about with the currency to reduce the value of their debts. I don’t think this applies today. It seems to be rather that because money so dominates people’s lives and that they associate money with banks that people’s resentment at their money problems is aimed at banks.Of course no banking or monetary reform is going to stop money dominating people’s lives. This is where we come in.

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And here’s eccentric Tory MP Douglas Carswell trying to explain how to abolish “fractional reserve banking”, ie to turn banks into safe deposits. Well, actually, he’s just proposing allowing people who deposit money in a bank to choose not to receive interest on it (coming out of the bank lending it) but to instead pay the bank for storing it for them. As if many would.

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Brian wrote:

the “Mission Statement” issued by Peter Joseph without any consultation with the chapters. 

Peter Joseph may have issued this statement but it is difficult to believe that he actually wrote since he is normally more articulate than that while the statement is very badly written.In one part it states:

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The Movement also recognizes the need for transitional Reform techniques, along with direct Community Support. For instance, while “Monetary Reform” itself is not an end solution proposed by The Movement, the merit of such legislative approaches are still considered valid in the context of transition and temporal integrity.

So they support some kind of “Monetary Reform” (without specifying which) but does anybody know what “temporal integrity” means?

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