ALB
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The Trotskyists of the SWP will be pleased as they said Vote Muslim Brotherhood:http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=28611As “the lesser evil” and “without illusions”, of course.
jondwhite wrote:I think this is the same day as Durham Miners Gala.It’s on the Saturday, the 14th, but we won’t have a stand there this year. Anyway, it’s at the other end of the country. Maybe some local members will turn up with some leaflets and Standards anyway.As to Tolpuddle, the EC will be discussing arrangements this Saturday and South West Regional Branch the following Saturday.
The theme of July Standard, out tomorrow or Friday, is irrational ideas, conspiracy theories and the paranormal rather than religion. I think, these days in times of stress and uncertainty, more people tend to turn to these (conspiracy theories, astrology, gambling, etc) rather than to religion.
Quote:I am a scientist, not a theologian. As a university student in Poland from 1949 to 1957, I was an aggressive atheist and subsequently became a member of the communist party. I am now a theist, believing in God and attending a synagogue.Ok, but what about the endless feuds that go on between theologians? How, for instance, can they settle this one: Was Jesus (if he existed) (a) the son of a god, (b) merely a prophet or (c) the son of a Roman centurion? There’s no way. These are, however, rival hypotheses that can be tested using the scientific method.
The comrade selling the Standard is Steve Ross (who actually came from Ross-shire in Scotland). The Irishman heckling the bearded faith-healer is a Party sympathiser, at least he once signed our candidate’s nomination paper to stand for election.
Just finished reading Debt, The First 5000 Years by David Graeber which Stuart said we should all read. An interesting read. Although he seems to share the delusion that, with so-called “fractional reserve banking”, banks can create credit and money out of nothing, he does expose one of the quotes used to back this up as a fabrication.Banking and currency cranks are always quoting “Sir Josiah Stamp”, a director of the Bank of England in the 1930s, as saying:
Quote:The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin. Bankers own the earth; take it away from them, but leave them with the power to create credit, and with the stroke of a pen they will create enough money to buy it back again … If you wish to remain slaves of Bankers, and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits.Graeber comments (p. 344):
Quote:It seems extremely unlikely that Lord Stamp ever really said this, but the passage has been cited endlessly—in fact, it’s probably the single most often-quoted passage by critics of the modern banking system.In a footnote (pp. 448-9) he goes into more detail:
Quote:Said to have been given at a talk at the University of Texas in 1927, but in fact, while the passage is endlessly cited in recent books and especially on the internet, it cannot be attested to before roughly 1975. The first two lines appear to actually derive from a British investment advisor named L.L.B. Angas in 1937: “The modern Banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banks can in fact inflate, mint and unmint the modern ledger-entry currency” (Angas, Slump Ahead in Bonds, New York, 1937: 20-21) . The other parts of the quote are probably later inventions—and Lord Stamp never suggested anything like this in his published writings. A similar line, “the bank hath benefit of all interest which it creates out of nothing” attributed to William Patterson, the first director of the Bank of England, is likewise first attested to only in the 1930s, and is also almost certainly apocryphal.In other words, some banking/currency crank made up these quotes and others just reproduce them as genuine. This probably applies to many of their other quotes too.
I see the class struggle is raging in Spain, as it should be. I’m not a Guardian-reader myself but a comrade has told me there was a letter about this there earlier this week.
Among the articles from the 1950s just added to the Socialist Standard archives section on this site (go to Publications/Socialist Standard/Archive) are three on the subject of capitalist crises:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1950s/1957/no-631-march-1957/crises-catastrophe-and-mr-stracheyhttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1950s/1957/no-632-april-1957/further-reflections-criseshttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1950s/1959/no-656-april-1959/affluent-society-pt2-marx-and-underconsumptionThey set out the theory of crises developed by the Party and criticise alternative theories and are still relevant and insightful today.
TheOldGreyWhistle wrote:We are on the side of unions but we don’t tell them when to strike or what action to take.That’s true, but surely the second part of this isn’t:
TheOldGreyWhistle wrote:We offer our case for socialism to them NOT how to run their organisations.Don’t we “tell” workers in unions that ideally they should organise democratically, recognise the class struggle, oppose links with political parties, ie how to run their organisations even if not what do in specific circumstances (that’s what we leave up to them to decide for themselves, in fact insist that this should happen and is not the job of any political party or group)? As it happened, we didn’t need to say to Occupy to organise democratically. They’d worked that out for themselves. But we did need to tell them about socialism (and capitalism).
alanjjohnstone wrote:The issue some raised was that we should … not offer prescriptive adviceThis was one of the silliest arguments put forward in the debate. No other group with a definite point of view adopted this position. If we’d have adopted this approach we’d have been the only group to have done so, so allowing all the others a freer range than they had — not so much the vanguardists who didn’t try their usual take-over tactics over here (as opposed to in the US) as the currency cranks and funny money merchants who had a real field day and a successful one to this day if you read Occupy websites and literature.Of course we had to put our own particular view across. That’s why we exist.
There’s an interview here from last year with Paul Mattick Jnr who puts an opposite view : that the present crisis has been caused by a fall in the rate of profit caused by capital-intensive technical development or rather by the failure to overcome this by personal and government borrowing and spending. Not too sure that this is entirely convincing, but the conclusion he draws from it that the only capitalist way-out of the crisis is austerity seems sound enough.The trouble is he spoils it by suggesting that workers ignore or take on the state by helping themselves to food, housing, etc whereas the obvious lesson is to organise politically to win control of the state and abolish capitalism that way (while of course fighting a rearguard action to try to slow down austerity). As we’ve always said, if workers are not prepared to vote for something they’re even less likely to take so-called “direct action” to get it.
A Labour politician (ex-MP and ex-Minister) who knows something about us. I thought that breed had died out. In a sense it’s comforting to know they haven’t.
Quote:the CPGB leadership clique have embarked on a tactically inept attemptThis sort of criticism is par for the course in vanguard organisations and why some feel compelled to leave and form another one, as Keith Scholey explained in his talk on Trotskyism the other weekend.
On Saturday a young Maoist , from the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist Leninist), came into Head Office. We paid for copies of their paper Proletarian and Lalkar (published by Harpal Brar of the Stalin Society) with 5 volumes of the writings of Kim Il Sung which someone had donated to us. The point of this is that in the January/February issue of Lalkar there’s an article which puts the case for the present crisis being a crisis of underconsumption (even though it calls it a crisis of “overproduction”). The article can be found here. It’s paragraphs 2 and 3 in the subsection “The crisis in Europe” that offer their explanation of the crisis:
Quote:This crisis has been building up over at least the last 30 years. It is at heart a classic crisis of overproduction, this being the design fault built into the capitalist system. As the masses of workers – who at the same time make up the bulk of consumers – are, in the interests of profit, paid as little as possible and reduced in number as much as possible, they are increasingly unable to buy all the increasing mass of commodities that the capitalist enterprises bring to market. This in turn bankrupts the least “efficient” of the capitalist enterprises, causing further job losses and downward pressure on wages caused by an excess of the supply of labour power over the demand for the same. Bankruptcies start to escalate, while economic activity stagnates. However, this process can be, and is, retarded by the simple expedient of the capitalists, who would otherwise find it difficult in the circumstances to invest profitably, lending money to workers to enable them to continue as consumers despite their relative poverty. (…) But then comes the day of reckoning – literally speaking – the day the borrowing must be repaid. So much has been borrowed, however, that repayment is no longer possible.This is quite a common explanation of the current crisis, put forward even by people who consider themselves Marxists, but it’s not true as it ignores the fact that what the workers can’t buy (out of their wages) the capitalists can (out of their profits). In fact, from one point of view, a crisis is caused by capitalists choosing not to buy (not invest profits because they judge they won’t make any profits or not enough). Crises are not caused by workers not being able to buy back all they’ve produced. If this was the case, what would need explaining would not be crises but why there could ever be a boom.And Marx himself noticed:
Quote:It is sheer tautology to say that crises are caused by the scarcity of effective consumption, or of effective consumers. The capitalist system does not know any other modes of consumption than effective ones, except that of sub forma pauperis or of the swindler. That commodities are unsaleable means only that no effective purchasers have been found for them, i.e., consumers (since commodities are bought in the final analysis for productive or individual consumption). But if one were to attempt to give this tautology the semblance of a profounder justification by saying that the working-class receives too small a portion of its own product and the evil would be remedied as soon as it receives a larger share of it and its wages increase in consequence, one could only remark that crises are always prepared by precisely a period in which wages rise generally and the working-class actually gets a larger share of that part of the annual product which is intended for consumption. From the point of view of these advocates of sound and “simple” (!) common sense, such a period should rather remove the crisis. It appears, then, that capitalist production comprises conditions independent of good or bad will, conditions which permit the working-class to enjoy that relative prosperity only momentarily, and at that always only as the harbinger of a coming crisis.Two of us braved the patriotic crowds and the weather yesterday to leaflet this. The police had restricted access to the announced meeting place but 200 or so gathered outside the barriers and marched down the street chanting “Monarchy Out, Republic In”. The patriotic crowds were indifferent, presumably regarding it as part of the spectacle. Everybody there must have received either the Queen Capital’s Jubilee and/or the Identity leaflet. They weren’t the usual suspects and seemed a thoughtful lot and I can’t believe that they really think that merely “replacing the monarch with a directly elected, largely ceremonial head of state” (as the leaflet distributed by Republic, the organisers, put it) would make any difference at all, ie they must have other ideas of change too. Anyway our leaflets were well received. We’ll see if they get a response.
