[Socialist Party Head Office]

A reader has drawn our attention to an article “Marx at 193” that appeared in the London Review of Books by John Lancester on 5 April and asked for our comments. Among other things Lanchester claims that Marx never used the word “capitalism”:

Quote:

Marx doesn’t use the word ‘capitalism’. The term never occurs in the finished first part of Das Kapital. (I checked this by doing a word search and found it three times, every time an apparent mistranslation or loose use of the German plural Kapitals – in German he never talks of Kapitalismus.)

[Socialist Party Head Office]

Reply received from David Graeber:Dear editors:You may be surprised to know I have read Capital, and am familiar with the concept of primitive/original accumulation. I might suggest it is the reviewer, rather, who might wish to expand his reading list, since he is evidently unfamiliar with that strain of the Marxian tradition that has most informed my analysis of such matters: the “autonomist” or “post-workerist” strain that runs through Tronti to Cleaver to the Midnight Notes collective, Federici, Caffentzis, and de Angelis (a very different one from the more familiar Negri strain). In that tradition, “primitive accumulation”  is not treated as a one-time thing that somehow teleologically prepared the way for capitalism, but rather as part of an ongoing process of the enclosure of different sorts of commons (and the creation of various forms of capitalist commons, like, currently, the US military) that has marked capitalism’s history from beginning to – hopefully its rapidly approaching – end. I actually cite my sources here in a footnote the reviewer seems to have missed. In fact he doesn’t seem to notice that my entire analysis of post-war economic cycles is based in this tradition.What I was mainly trying to address in the section on capitalism is a question that to my knowledge no Marxist analysis has really been able to resolve: why, if capitalism is a system based on factories and free wage labor, did most of the financial institutions that we associate with it – stocks, bonds, futures trading, semi-private central banking systems, and so on – actually arise in the 17th century, long before either factories or (any significant amount of) free wage labor made an appearance. The whole idea of “merchant capitalism” which is supposed to characterize the period from roughly 1500 to 1750 (or even 1800 in most of Europe) has always been a puzzle. If capitalism is a system based on wage labor, then it wasn’t capitalism at all. But if so most bourgeois revolutions happened before capitalism had even appeared! If merchant capitalism is capitalism, then capitalism does not have to be based on wage labor, and certainly not free wage labor, at all. Claiming that merchant capitalism was capitalism because European elites were somehow trying to create a system that didn’t exist and there is no evidence they were even capable of imagining, seems absurd. The obvious answer is that capitalism is not in fact necessarily based on free wage labor contracts. Marx was, as I note in the book, effectively saying “well, let’s take a best case scenario, and imagine workers are in no sense constrained; I can show the system would still lead to impoverishment and self-destruction.” He wasn’t saying that the assumptions of the political economists were empirically true. He was just allowing them for the sake of argument. As I note many seem to have forgotten the “as if” quality of his analysis.I find it genuinely odd that I get so many reviews that accuse me of ignorance of even the basic ABCs of Marxism, while at the same time, systematically ignore everything I actually say about Marx! Granted, the book is meant for a wide audience, and therefore avoids scholarly debates of all sorts, Marxist or otherwise. But it’s all there in the footnotes. And I do talk about Marx in the text.As for the reviewer’s final claims that we are primarily wage slaves not debt peons: how does he know this? Because the secret to our 21st century situation lies in the correct interpretation of 19th century texts? That’s silly. Systems change. I mean, it might be true, but it’s a matter to be empirically established. A far larger percentage of Wall Street’s profits is now derived from the financial sector than from industry or commerce – that is, from the exploitation of wage laborers. Where does that profit really come from? It would be very interesting to know what percent of the average (say) American’s income is now directly expropriated by the FIRE [Finance, Insurance, Real Estate] sector, compared to what might be said to be extracted indirectly, through the wage. But the research simply hasn’t been done. Nor will it be if we can’t open up our minds a little and treat Marx’s legacy as a living tradition. It’s possible that the system is already starting to turn into something else. Or maybe it isn’t. Let’s figure it out rather than just shouting doctrine at one another. 

[Socialist Party Head Office]

Nothing like turning up early to be sure of being at the head of the queue. GT

[Socialist Party Head Office]

A reader has emailed this question:

Quote:

In the review of ‘Policing The Crisis’,the reviewer claims that, ” Marx once described ‘anarchy’ as the ultimate aim of the proletarian movement…” Do you have a citation for this statement?

[Socialist Party Head Office]

Here’s a report of the meeting. As can be seen, it was recorded.

[Socialist Party Head Office]

Comment received from a reader

Dear Comrade,

I have just been reading my first ever copy of your monthly magazine for May 2012
and came across the above column. I was so horrified at the lack of accuracy that the
article contained, that I feel compelled to rectify the numerous errors of factual
analysis!!!! To be frank, the author cannot have any real understanding of the basic
principles of banking!!! And as a professional accountant who has worked in finance
for many years, the errors cannot go unchallenged!

The author states that Banks ‘CANNOT CREATE CREDIT FROM NOTHING’. What utter
nonsense!!  We would be unable to operate a capitalist system at all were that the
case!!! 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 more
strictly 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, and there are
several measures of this which used to go under the names M1, M2, M3, M4 as measures of
the money-supply by the regulators. It currently stands as broadly 8.5% throughout
the banking system. This is the method by which banks issue Credit out of nothing
and it is what they do day in day out, in theory managing the risk of  over-lending
in this way!!! I fear the author is getting very muddled as to what constitutes money!!!!
Notes and coins are today completely insignificant as they are a miniscule %.

Were the banks unable to issues credit vastly in excess of bank deposits, the
capitalist system could not function due to the time it takes to administer all the
rules etc and the fact that the demand for credit vastly exceeds what is genuinely
required for the real productive economy, owing to the vast speculative activities
in currencies, property,commodities, oil etc etc that creates market distortions but
which no govt. seems willing to regulate!! Hence the credit crunch!!! In order to
keep the gravy train rolling and not to breach the basic liquidity ratio rules,
banks started to fund their lending to the non-productive economy by taking on
short-term debt from various sources, and lending it longer-term to their pals in
the City Hedge Funds, currency gamblers, all sorts of dodgy finance, and shifting
it off-Balance Sheet, but the minute that it all went pear-shape, they were left
totally exposed to short-term liabilities that were not covered by any liquid assets!
And they had to run to the Govt to bail them out of the mess they had created.

This, of course, is the exact opposite of what the theory of free-market capitalism
says should happen!!! It says that if a business fails, it goes bust!!! But that
apparently now only applies to the workers!!! If we lose our jobs and run out of
money, we go bust!!! They dont!

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!!!I fear your
colleague needs to study finance rather than economics!!!  Economics as presently
taught is 99% bullshit. Not since the end of the Gold Standard has credit been
remotely tied to what a bank holds as deposits. This is why some monetarist purists
are now calling for a new Gold Standard so that all money has to have an equivalance
to the value of the gold in existence- pure fiction of course!!!Since the USA hold
90% of the banking gold reserves, WW3 would be just round the corner!!!! Just
imagine if the USA had control of the entire world money system!!! They would have us
all bowing and scraping to their demands!!! The mind boggles to be frank! Not for nothing
did the Yanks accumulate most of the gold reserves! Its the only thing that prevents
USA from being declared insolvent by the IMF!!! But it wont be long coming. They have lost sight of the most basic laws of economics!

Incidentally, the collapse of the banking system in 2008 was due solely to the
massive explosion of the use of Derivatives by the financial gamblers in the City,
Wall St etc, who saw a way of inventing profit purely by creating artificial
contracts by the sale of so-called CDOs, MBS’s etc, with an ‘implicit’ rate of
interest, but all it was  is book-keeping entries in a bank ledger, thus creating
fictitious profits, a process of gigantic speculation that could not be sustained
once the underlying assets (housing) began to lose value due to inflated property
markets running out of steam!!! In fact the real productive economy was not at risk
until the casino collapsed around it. But to his shame, Gordon Brown knew nothing,
saw nothing and DID nothing to stop it!!! A more hubristic case of vainglorious
lunacy driven by arrogance, we are I trust unlikely to see again for a long time (???).

I am seriously thinking of joining the SPGB, given that capitalism is going to
collapse fairly soon and we shall need to prepare for its replacement. When is the
next meeting at Clapham?? I’d like to come along.

Regards, Adrian.

[Socialist Party Head Office]

Letter received on this:Dear Editors,After reading the review of the film ‘The Way Back’ in the Socialist Standard of April 2012, I realised that the plot of the film was very similar to a book I read in 1981. Then I was 15 years old and a member of the Scouts (yes, that hangover from the days of the British Empire) and the book ‘As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me’ (1957) by JM Bauer was recommended to me by the Troop leader. The book was originally published in German and recounts the true story of a German Paratroop officer captured behind enemy lines in the USSR in 1942 and his subsequent sentencing  to 25 years labour in a gulag lead mine beyond the Arctic Circle in Siberia and from where he escaped and spent three years travelling through the far eastern parts of the USSR to freedom in the West.The first half of the book relates the experiences in the gulag but it is the second half of the book which recounts the travelling across the siberian tundra that is of interest. The narrator meets aboriginal peoples of the siberian tundra who are known as the ‘Chukchi’ or the ‘Reindeer Chukchi’ who live  a variation of a hunter-gatherer existence as pastoral-nomadic tribespeoples where their entire existence is centred on the reindeer – for transport, food, clothing and housing, and they operate a religious belief system based on nature deities and shamanism. Chukchi families were banded into larger groups of people with a figurehead chief and practised a primitive communism. The ‘reindeer men’ are a remarkable example of peoples living an existence from 35,00 years ago which is described in Lewis Morgan’s book ‘Ancient Society’ (1877) and it is Marx’s notes to this book that formed the basis for Engels’ work ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State’ (1884).The USSR under Stalin even “collectivised” the Chukchi peoples in the 1930’s but it was only partially successful as the ‘reindeer men’ used the “kolchoz” (collective farm) as a type of base which became part of their pastoral-nomadic existence. The book also recounts the narrator’s time at the collective farm.I have discovered that in recent years the veracity of the account of the escape from the gulag and the years with the Chukchi peoples is in serious doubt. The book is still a very interesting account of aboriginal existence and the soviet collective farms in Siberia.Steve ClaytonSouth London Branch

[Socialist Party Head Office]

Email reply received from Anthony Hilton:

Quote:

Your comments on my cash mountains article have been forwarded to me. I don’t think your conclusion is right. Certainly it is what conventional economic wisdom dictates viz companies will not invest when they cannot see a profit. However company profits are the highest they have been for 50 years as a percentage of GDP, and interest rates and hurdle  rates are the lowest for 200 years, so in spite of the bad news out there it beggars belief that companies can’t see a profit opportunity.  My piece was looking for an additional explanation as the conventional wisdom of your conclusion does not provide it. Thanks for your interest and  thought provoking letter. Regards Anthony Hilton

[Socialist Party Head Office]

Email received from the person who wrote the letter in the March Socialist Standard:
In Laurens Otter’s text he states:

“The IWW removed the political action clause because it believed that De Leon was forcing all members to join his particular party. Incidentally the resistance came from people who were in the Left of the SPA. the anarchists – like Vincent St John – played no part in the split.”
I don’t know where Laurens Otter picked up this commentary but in the minutes
to the IWW Convention of 1905 and 1906 both of which I have copies of and in
De Leon’s collected series of letters on the issue of political and economic
actions of the working class at the time entitled As To Politics he
insistently maintained the requirement that the economic organization of the
working class must be unaffiliated with any political party; that it will
reflect its own political party. Hence, he stated in the first letter in
the pamphlet to John Sandgren, last paragraph: “As to the Socialist Labor
Party, it will never need to be appealed to ‘to break up camp’ after the
bucket of the I.W.W., having gathered sufficient solidity, will itself have
reflected its own political party. That day the S.L.P. will ‘break up camp’
with a shout of joy – if a body merging into its own ideal can be said to
‘break up camp'”. Mr. Otter will find this theme and similar replies repeated
again and again throughout that writing.

For Socialism,
Bernard Bortnick

[Socialist Party Head Office]

A comrade who actually lives in Todmorden but who is not subscribed to this forum has asked for this contribution to be posted here:With reference to Eat for Free and the Todmorden Incredible Edible, we have one of the free access food tubs in Todmorden so I thought I might make a few comments.The Incredible Edible people are fairly on the ball, much more so than Brian in the “Socialism at Your Fingertips” posting. No one here claims (or should claim) anything more than that the project can further local sustainability in food production. Certainly there have been no “amazing results” (excepting propaganda coups such as the recent visit of Bonnie Prince Bigears) and it definitely does not involve the whole community. Mostly it’s ‘middle class’ in-comers and vegetarian types, who are responsible for the project. While some of the better off locals are involved at a lower level, the substantial Asian origin minority and the white estate dwellers are largely indifferent, as indeed one might expect. Doubtless they have more important worries, such as working out how to keep head above water. So far as “community well-being” is concerned the results are nil. Todmorden demonstrates the whole gamut of modern anti-social behaviour engendered by late period capitalism, from lippy kids to pedo-pervs and nazis, and probably more than most places due to its cotton based economy being smashed long ago.Let’s be very clear: There are absolutely no implications for socialism, no “lessons” to be learnt. Providing a bit (and it is a very minor bit – try to live on it and you’ll be Musselmanned in no time) of fruit and veg free cannot lead to a free society, even incrementally with other, more half-arsed, schemes such as the LETS. It’s not the “either/or thing” of Robbo but a “something else entirely thing”. It’s irrelevant (I should know – I do it!). After all, what have these glorified allotments to do with the means of production? Sweet fuck all. They’re not even peripheral. Neither is it some sort of ‘socialism in miniature’, a guide to human behaviour under “free access”. Such an attitude is the purest utopianism.

[Socialist Party Head Office]

Comment received from a Socialist Standard reader:Dear Comrade,Please forgive an elderly anarchist, intervening1 in what you no doubt consider a private fight.Pace the SS editors, the story you relate was fairly well known before 1952; Guy Aldred certainly recounted it in a pamphlet. I am fairly certain that I had read it in something produced by the SPGB. & it was certainly in one of the more widely circulated Labour histories, (whether by GDH Cole or not I cannot now remember.) I came across it in the Socialist Leader (the then paper of the ILP) & I would think Bevan had mentioned it in Tribune, as also Gallacher in his auto-biography.Obviously you are right that the trade unions lacked a socialist consciousness, (after all even the Labour Left & the Stalinists argued from that.)  But your letter (& the SS editors) go on to make two assumptions, neither correct:(a). the IWW didn’t stress  the need for social change,& (b). the SPGB at that time did not believe in working in industrial unions.The IWW removed the political action clause because it believed that De Leon was forcing all members to join his particular party.  Incidentally the resistance came from people who were in the Left of the SPA. the anarchists – like Vincent St John – played no part in the split.SPGB members were active in the SLPGB-formed Advocates of Industrial Unionism, for a time forming the majority of its membership; in the USA, WSPUSA members were active in the IWW as late as the ’50s.  They didn’t then regard this as cutting off their legs.We do indeed have differences: but it would help if we each only talked of real differences, rather than inventing imaginary ones.fraternallyLaurens Otter 

[Socialist Party Head Office]

Thanks. We’re on to it.

[Socialist Party Head Office]

Hello,

This email message is a notification to let you know that the Minutes for the 2011 ADM have been uploaded to the Files area of the spintcom group.

File : /ADM/ADM Minutes 2011.doc
Description : Minutes of the 2011 Autumn Delegate Meeting

You can access this file at the URL:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/spintcom/files/ADM/ADM%20Minutes%202011.doc

[Socialist Party Head Office]

Comment on the fate of Occupy Brighton on the Party’s blog here.

[Socialist Party Head Office]

We have also received this email from another (better) former member (joined 1953):

Quote:

I was in the Birmingham branch some 65 years ago. Howard Grew was chairman, I think, and his wife was secretary. We had a regular speaking stand in the Bull Ring, and met in a nearby pub. I was then a cub reporter on the Smethwick Telephone weekly newspaper and recall those meetings with great pleasure.

Quote:

I am very glad to be able to keep in touch with the party through Facebook. Just listened to the talk on Rosa Luxemburg. Wonderful!

[Author]

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