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Post by Admin on Aug 18, 2020 8:15:10 GMT
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Post by Admin on Aug 18, 2020 8:25:23 GMT
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Post by Admin on Aug 18, 2020 8:29:51 GMT
Interest-Free Money - A Book-List The following is a collection that examines the history and effects of charging interest on lent money. I’d be glad to receive suggested additions that explain, not the ills of the present economic system, but which cover specific discussions of usury and descriptions for its replacement. Networking for The Campaign for Interest-Free Money *********************************************************** Margrit Kennedy ‘'Interest and Inflation-Free Money’ New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, USA, 1995 (USA ISBN 0-86571-319-7) A good - almost unique book - explaining the effects of interest on daily life and the way it stops civilised life developing. ********************************************************** James Buchan ‘Frozen Desire: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money’ Picador, London, 1997 ISBN 0-330-36931-8 (paperback) A lyrical book, written by a novelist and journalist, that examines the history of money and our relationship with it. Widely available. ********************************************************** Dorothy Rowe ‘The Real Meaning of Money’ Harper Collins, London, 1997 ISBN 0-025-5329-5 (Also now available in paperback) An extensive examination of the interaction of individuals and money, written by a well-known and widely-published psychologist. ********************************************************** Peter Selby ‘Grace and Mortgage: The Language of Faith and the Debt of the World’ Darton, Longman and Todd, London, 1997 ISBN 0-232-521700 (Paperback) Written by the Anglican Bishop of Worcester, this marks an important step in the Established Church’s rediscovery of "ancient wisdoms." ********************************************************** Sir Harry Page ‘In Restraint of Usury: The Lending of Money at Interest’ Chartered Institute for Public Finances and Accounts (CIPFA), London, 1985. ISBN 0-85299-2858 Written by a former President of CIPFA and past Treasurer of the City of Manchester, this small book tells what most other historians leave out - the first legalisation of usury by Henry VIII in 1545. Sadly now out of print, this points out the disastrous effect that usury has on providing quality public services and the resulting misery caused. ********************************************************** Christopher Hill ‘Reformation To Industrial Revolution’ Pelican Economic History, Volume 2: 1530-1780 Penguin, London, 1969. Although this misses Henry’s Act of 1545, it is a first-rate account of the struggles between Westminster and the City of London: particularly valuable is Chapter 6 ‘The Financial Revolution.’ ********************************************************** Bertrand Russell ‘A History of Western Philosophy’ Allen and Unwin, London, 1946 Passes the ‘U-test’ - contains an excellent and concise examination of usury (via the index.) ***********************************************************Chris Harman ‘Economics of The Madhouse: Capitalism and the Market Today’ Bookmarks, London, 1995 ISBN 1-898876-03-7 (Paperback) Good, short, readable account of Marx’ insights into the way usury-driven economics (capitalism!) works - easily recognisable to any who have been in business.) *********************************************************** Gary Allen ‘None Dare Call It Conspiracy’ Concord Books, Seal Beach, California, 1971 (Also Britons Publishing Co, 1973) Some-times hair-raising account of the relationships between the banking communities across the globe: the material here has been examined by G William Dommen ‘Who Runs America Now’ Touchstone Books. *********************************************************** Peter Lang ‘LETS Work: Rebuilding The Local Economy’ Grover Books, Bristol, England BS6 5QA ISBN 1 899233 00 8 Fine account of locally-created interest-free money. Wonderful quote from Alan Watts (Chapter 1: Money: what it is and how it lets us down) "The Absurdity of It: . . . To say that people cannot exchange value with one another because there is no money is like saying you cannot build a house because you have no feet and inches." (To which I might add, that paying interest on lent money is as ludicrous as the builder paying the feet and inches a wage, once the house is built!) *********************************************************** Also Michael Rowbotham's 'The Grip of Death' and 'Goodbye America' both published by Jon Carpenter, 1999 and 2000, are good on Fractional Reserve Banking ************************************************************ www.interestfreemoney.org/books.htm
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Post by Admin on Aug 18, 2020 9:06:55 GMT
sustainability not capitalism The world needs a new, nonviolent, non-trashing, economic and social system: wholosophy is a term I use (web-search for more). Here's a Blog that suggests what that Better New World could look like - a co-operative, fair-world, not-hierarchical possibility - based on an ethic and practice of peace, nonviolence minimized harm and maximized well-being. And by Tuesday! For more - please ask for a Reader - from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives sustainabilitynotcapitalism.blogspot.com/
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Post by Admin on Sept 1, 2020 16:08:02 GMT
"Greed is human nature" is a flawed argument. The survival of the "fittest" does not imply the "strongest" or most physically fit. What Darwin actually said was that whoever is most suited to the environment will survive. And in our case? It's survival of the friendliest. Humans aren’t inherently selfish – we’re actually hardwired to work together August 20, 2020 1.52pm BST theconversation.com/humans-arent-inherently-selfish-were-actually-hardwired-to-work-together-144145There has long been a general assumption that human beings are essentially selfish. We’re apparently ruthless, with strong impulses to compete against each other for resources and to accumulate power and possessions. If we are kind to one another, it’s usually because we have ulterior motives. If we are good, it’s only because we have managed to control and transcend our innate selfishness and brutality. This bleak view of human nature is closely associated with the science writer Richard Dawkins, whose book The Selfish Gene became popular because it fitted so well with (and helped to justify) the competitive and individualistic ethos of late 20th-century societies. Like many others, Dawkins justifies his views with reference to the field of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology theorises that present-day human traits developed in prehistoric times, during what is termed the “environment of evolutionary adaptedness”. This is usually seen as a period of intense competition, when life was a kind of Roman gladiatorial battle in which only the traits that gave people a survival advantage were selected and all others fell by the wayside. And because people’s survival depended on access to resources – think rivers, forests and animals – there was bound to be competition and conflict between rival groups, which led to the development of traits like racism and warfare. This seems logical. But in fact the assumption it’s based on — that prehistoric life was a desperate struggle for survival — is false. Prehistoric abundance It’s important to remember that in the prehistoric era, the world was very sparsely populated. So it’s likely there was an abundance of resources for hunter-gatherer groups. According to some estimates, around 15,000 years ago, the population of Europe was only 29,000, and the population of the whole world was less than half a million. With such small population densities, it seems unlikely that prehistoric hunter-gatherer groups had to compete against each other or had any need to develop ruthlessness and competitiveness, or to go to war. Indeed, many anthropologists now agree that war is a late development in human history, arising with the first agricultural settlements. Contemporary evidence There’s also significant evidence from contemporary hunter-gatherer groups who live in the same way as prehistoric humans. One of the striking things about such groups is their egalitarianism. As the anthropologist Bruce Knauft has remarked, hunter-gatherers are characterised by “extreme political and sexual egalitarianism”. Individuals in such groups don’t accumulate their own property and possessions. They have a moral obligation to share everything. They also have methods of preserving egalitarianism by ensuring that status differences don’t arise. The !Kung of southern Africa, for example, swap arrows before going hunting and when an animal is killed, the credit does not go to the person who fired the arrow, but to the person who the arrow belongs to. And if a person becomes too domineering or arrogant, the other members of the group ostracise them.
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Post by Admin on Sept 2, 2020 20:17:20 GMT
“Social regeneration” within ecosystems: diversity and multiplicity of conversations stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/social-regeneration-within-ecosystems-diversity-and-multiplicity-of-conversations-c2e8d953f152Setting the scene In this article we want to explore the relation between social innovation and platform thinking, aiming to merge the common goals towards a systemic approach that can make social innovation more relationship-centered, and platform strategies more (socially) regenerative. Writing about social innovation we will start from the definition given by Robin Murray, Julie Caulier-Grice and Geoff Mulgan in The Open Book of Social Innovation: “social innovations as new ideas (products, services and models) that simultaneously meet social needs and create new social relationships or collaborations. In other words, they are innovations that are both good for society and enhance society’s capacity to act” When it comes to platform thinking, we will leverage on the multiple conversations we’re having within our own community and wider ecosystem — whether through the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast, the Whitepaper research community or our certified facilitators' community. Some of the main insights we found out while exploring this relationships are: an ecosystem with a high quantity and diversity of interactions is more anti-fragile to a fast-changing world, enhancing both social impact scaling and platform opportunities; on the opposite side, draining quantity and diversity within an ecosystem can raise boundaries, with few actors gaining from crises — the rest suffer; regenerating social capital is not a cheap fix, but a long-term investment that society (platform shapers included) should take responsibility for; one important role is played by many social impact funding institutions today: they are linking funds focusing exclusively on measuring the final impact generated. Our exploration suggests linking funds with new relationships created within a positive narrative, activating a relationship-centered systemic change. by Guglielmo Apolloni, Stina Heikkilä and all the team at Boundaryless, the creators of Platform Design Toolkit. The value is within diversity and conversations Looking at platforms from the point of view of “relationships as transactions”, we couldn’t avoid going back to Putnam’s theory of social capital, which posits that a mix between bonding and bridging types of social capital, between weak and strong ties, is what makes the social capital positively charged. No actors’ interests should completely dominate the scene, nor should the ecosystem rely on only a few people’s passion and commitment. Diversity is key. Even if a platform strategy is designed to facilitate existing relationships within an ecosystem, it can happen that it serves to create exclusively bonding social capital (strengthening homogeneous groups’ ties) instead of bridging (intuitively more outward-looking), hence potentially loading it with negative energy, making it less inclusive and inhibiting learning from taking place. While some amount of bonding social capital can help to shape the ecosystem by creating trust between members, too much of it risks lowering the potential number and the diversity of its relationships. By doing this, it affects the capacity of the ecosystem to generate new value, ending up with communities that are vulnerable to the changes and risks. We can indeed see how some platforms strategies leverage on bonding social capital at the very beginning of the growth hacking phase — like Facebook with Harvard students, moving as soon as possible towards a bridging-social-capital approach where everyone is welcome. When the ecosystem interacting on the platform is big enough, the strategy switches again to a bonding-social-capital approach, enabling the platform to extract the maximum value in the short term, since some groups and communities fully rely on it. This U-turn creates some sense-crashes like the one between Facebook’s mission and its recent history, and definitely unlikely consequences on society (we’ll be back on this point later on). Following Ezio Manzini, bridging social capital creates healthy communities that are defined by “the quantity and quality of the conversations active within them”, creating space for opportunity. Lisa Gansky put the point on the importance of diversity well in our recent podcast interview: “Diversity is kind of what’s necessary to learn. The more shocking to my social reality, the more likely I am to have to lean in and say: ‘what do you mean by that? Or how does that work?’ ”.
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Post by Admin on Sept 3, 2020 11:22:16 GMT
Socialism has again come to signify for large numbers the possibility of a real alternative to the status quo – Laura Smith 25th August 2020 labouroutlook.org/2020/08/25/socialism-has-again-come-to-signify-for-large-numbers-the-possibility-of-a-real-alternative-to-the-status-quo-laura-smith/We are pleased to publish below Laura Smith’s speech script from our recent event on In Attacking Corbyn, the Establishment is Waging War on Socialism In 2017 I won the seat for Crewe and Nantwich-a seat that they say is key for whether or not you can form a government. Back then it felt amazing, and we could see on the doors the positive response towards our policies, and more than anything people were sick and tired of the status quo. Fast forward 2 ½ years and the truth was the whole thing was a total mess up here and Labour had lost trust on the doorstep. This was mainly because of Brexit, without a shadow of a doubt. People had hooked on to what they saw as the offer of change and anti-establishment unbelievably from the tories. But guess what. If you throw mud at something for long enough that mud will stick. That’s what had happened with Jeremy Corbyn. 2 years of constant briefing the press, and character assassination had worked. My answer to people on the door who were hateful towards Jeremy was always to try and get them back on to the policies, and explain what was presented about him was not the person that I knew. But it didn’t matter. I also know full well that some MPs were quite happy canvassing and criticising Jeremy. It was constant throughout my time in Parliament. How can you expect others to vote Labour if that is the way we portray ourselves? Now we need justice with regards to the labour leaks and accountability not hypocrisy. Of course, this whole thing has been incredibly personal towards Jeremy and I have no idea how he or his family have coped. The reality is it will happen to anyone who sets out to change things in favour of the many and this is why it is so key that solidarity and collective building is fundamental. And do you know what? It hasn’t been, and we have to learn from this and do better. We all have to accept our failure in this as well – socialism always had to be more than about parliament and more than just getting a leader. It has to be about a united and focused grassroots. For us as socialists, the establishment’s fear is the fact that large numbers of people across the west are looking for something better than the neoliberal consensus that has dominated politics for so long. But the rising popularity of socialism demands more than just cheerleading and if we do not bring people along with us we will just end up preaching to the converted. The fact is the public are on the side of keyworkers, decent education, access to jobs and housing. People are ambitious but they are deprived opportunity. There is a myth of modern democracy that it was handed down from on-high. In fact, the ruling class resisted extending the franchise at every turn – and it was socialists who fought them for the right to vote. We should reject faux-radical pronouncements that dismiss voting as inconsequential and, instead, merge the fight for universal suffrage with the fight for socialism and radical democracy. We need to sort out local democracy and empower our communities. Mass disenfranchisement is still deeply rooted in the country’s political system. Unless people start to feel and see a reason to engage they won’t. Politics has to be about people and not about big business, Parliamentary shenanigans and protecting something that hasn’t worked for the vast majority of people. In the decade since the 2008 global financial crisis, and in the context of a rapidly escalating climate emergency, millions of people have begun to challenge the legitimacy of a capitalist system that has singularly failed to offer them a secure future. And socialism, once considered a relic of history, has once again come to signify for large numbers the possibility of a real alternative to the status quo. But we can’t just throw people into the fight without first getting to see that the left has a genuine interest in better for them. People feel that they are just a political football. Get them to see that politics is everything and everything is politics first and foremost. The Tories’ long campaign of depoliticising has worked. Now more than ever we have to be loud about the reasons why we are being plunged into this huge economic crisis, that we were seeing before the pandemic. We can’t let socialism fail again. The planet can’t afford it, and neither can the people on it. We also can’t see the 2019 election defeat as the end. There are a lot of things that go into making sure we move forward, but one of them is looking at the socialisms of the past and learning the lessons. It is important to understand it will take time. It won’t be a quick fix. It is undoing a whole history of oppression. This is why political education is so key and why it was wrong that we did not focus on it as a movement before. That starts by transforming our meetings. By investing in new ideas and to stop hoping for a fair hearing from a media owned by the very people who benefit from what is there now. Groups are already doing this across the country and they are right to do so. I am part of a great example in Manchester and that model should be rolled out. We cannot rely on the mainstream newspapers in anyway shape or form currently. The research shows that, since 2015, Labour’s Ed Miliband and Corbyn have been “subjected to sustained, personal attacks from most of the highest-selling titles”. Examining 2019 coverage revealed a “large proportion of newspaper items” featuring “Labour sources had a clearly negative slant”. To give an example, ex-Labour MP and Tory Lord Austin got “three times more coverage than Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson during the 2019 election. Why? Because it was more damaging to Labour. We need to be clear that capitalism will enable wealthy individuals and organisations to amass vast political and economic power and distort the media landscape to suit their interests. Jeremy Corbyn was smeared by swaths of the mainstream press because he wanted to dismantle media monopolies and redistribute wealth. We all will be called all the names under the sun because we want the same. We have to grow strength and fightback. We rolled over like kittens far too many times. So what do we do? There is life outside Twitter and if we don’t stop looking in and start looking out instead then nothing will change. Many new buds are appearing over the scorched earth and we need to invest our energy in them, creating new and exciting ways forward. I am involved in No Holding Back alongside Ian Lavery and Jon Trickett and that is incredibly exciting, and we have already undertaken a huge nationwide listening campaign talking to CLPs, trade unionists, and members of the public. Give us a follow if you are not already on @noholdingback as it is projects like this that can lead the way. Sign up and support organisations and publications like Tribune and Labour Outlook, groups like the People’s Assembly Against Austerity and the Stop the War Coalition, and become active in a trade union. When Labour membership increased we failed to get members into a union and this is a fundamental mistake if we are to build strength. Organising has to happen in a relevant way. Campaigns need to run constantly and engagement with the public is vital. We all donate to the foodbank, and many people help out, but who is campaigning actively against the policies that mean that huge sways of the population are having to rely on them? We also have to make links with one another – Covid-19 has meant we are isolated physically but we have organised on line. That cannot stop. Finally I would say we cannot keep reacting to what the right wing want. We need to get clear our messaging and stick to it. And we need to get some discipline. Brexit destroyed us and ripped us apart. We let those who never want to see a truly fairer society dictate the fights – never ever again!
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Post by Admin on Sept 3, 2020 12:18:29 GMT
From The Socialist newspaper, 2 September 2020 Socialism on the rise www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/31276/02-09-2020/socialism-on-the-risePaul Couchman, Staines Socialist Party Staines Socialist Party members are seen by many as the 'go to' people on issues like fighting cuts in local services, and campaigns against racism and discrimination, such as Black Lives Matter (BLM). But the branch has struggled to grow beyond a handful of stalwarts for some time. Our large contact list, who we keep in touch via an email newsletter, increased during Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, as more and more people became interested in socialist ideas. But we remained a very small band of Socialist Party members. All that changed when Keir Starmer took control of the Labour Party and put it firmly back in the hands of the right wing. We wrote to all the Labour Party members we knew, asking them to consider joining us. We energetically participated in Black Lives Matter protests, meeting more young people interested in the Socialist Party. We are meeting online via Zoom and attendance is picking up. I took a few days off work to meet as many of the people who wanted to know more as I could - outside, observing social distancing - and to ask them all to join. I made the appointments and took my laptop, so they could sign up straightaway. The end result is eight new Socialist Party members and the party branch is revitalised. And there are still a few people left to see! Some new members are already building the Socialist Party. Lisa has set up a twitter account, @surreysocialism. Nathan has put together a programme of meetings. And Louis has set up an email account and is running our Facebook page.
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Post by Admin on Sept 4, 2020 12:25:12 GMT
Social Europe – A Manifesto By Colin Crouch www.socialeurope.eu/book/social-europe-a-manifestoThe European Union is excellently equipped to pursue the most urgent issues facing the advanced world: combating environmental damage and climate change, coping with the massive aftermath of the coronavirus crisis, reforming globalisation, regulating financialised capitalism, reducing material inequalities and reconciling the future of work in a rapidly changing economy with workers’ needs for secure lives. The EU’s leading role as global standard-setter, and the potential of the social-investment welfare state, are among the instruments at its disposal. But, argues Colin Crouch in this manifesto for a return to the ‘social Europe’ agenda, to achieve these goals the EU needs to face the two menaces stalking today’s politics: neoliberalism and xenophobic nationalism. To do so it must confront the weakness of social democracy, historically the main political protagonist of the causes of co-operation and inclusion on which the strategy depends. Colin Crouch is a professor emeritus of the University of Warwick and external scientific member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies at Cologne. He has published within the fields of comparative European sociology and industrial relations, economic sociology and contemporary issues in British and European politics. His most recent books include The Globalization Backlash (Polity, 2018), Will the Gig Economy Prevail? (Polity, 2019) and Post-democracy after the Crises (Polity 2020).
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Post by Admin on Sept 8, 2020 1:05:34 GMT
Under Capitalism, There’s No Such Thing as a “Fair Day’s Wage for a Fair Day’s Work” BY HADAS THIER We’ve got some bad news for you on Labor Day: your boss is exploiting you. Karl Marx explains how. www.jacobinmag.com/2020/09/capitalism-marxism-economics-hadas-thier-book-excerptModern capitalism is characterized by an immense expansion of wealth. Its entire history is marked by growth. The US economy, when healthy, grows by about 4 percent per year. The Chinese economy, until recently, was growing by as much as 10 percent per year. And the world economy as a whole has expanded by roughly 3 percent annually since 1980, according to data from the World Bank. In fact, if any country’s output stops expanding, it goes into recession. If economies throughout the world contract all at once — as we’re seeing today — the result may well be a global depression. How do capitalists generate this expanding surplus? Karl Marx, though he was writing 150 years ago, made an indispensable contribution to uncovering the internal laws of capitalism beneath the façade of equity. A useful starting point is to look at what Marx calls the “the general formula of capital,” which he summarized with a simple formula: M-C-M’. Capitalists start with money (M), which they use to invest in the production of commodities (C), and then they sell those commodities on the market to get back more money than they started with, (M’). In a pre-capitalist bartered exchange, commodities of roughly equal value could change hands, using money as an intermediary to facilitate the process. But the circuit of capital instead turns money into the driver of the process. Capitalists don’t exchange goods for the sake of qualitative enrichment. Steve Jobs didn’t one day decide he had more iPhones and MacBooks than he reasonably needed and therefore might as well trade them for something he didn’t have. (What didn’t Steve Jobs have?) A capitalist invests for the sole purpose of accruing further wealth. To exchange like-for-like items and wind up with the same amount of money that they started with would be, to use Marx’s words, “absurd and empty.” The sole purpose of exchange among capitalists is the accumulation of extra value, or surplus value, which forms the basis of capitalist profit. As Marx explained: The simple circulation of commodities [basic bartered exchange] — selling in order to buy — is a means to a final goal which lies outside circulation, namely the appropriation of use-values [goods for use], the satisfaction of needs. As against this, the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for the valorization of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The movement of capital is therefore limitless. In pre-capitalist societies, the satisfaction of even the most extravagant of needs could only go so far in compelling an expansion of the production of goods. But under capitalism, the goal of acquiring more money through its circulation is an inexhaustible endeavor, which has the potential to provoke continual growth. Unlike systems of mercantilism which preceded it, modern capitalism doesn’t depend on a process of “buying cheap and selling dear,” and the thievery that this entailed. Surplus value is produced when capitalists are buying goods for their true value and selling them for their true value. Capitalists may certainly defraud other players along the way — pay less for inputs or charge more for the final product. But surplus is produced without that duplicity occurring, even when the system is at its most “honest” and “lawful.” Rather than being cunning in the market, the key to surplus value is a production process that creates more wealth than it begins with. Contrary to mainstream explanations, capitalist surplus is not generated within the realm of exchange at all. It is created, argued Marx, within “the hidden abode of production on whose threshold there hangs the notice ‘No admittance except on business.’ Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is itself produced. The secret of profit-making must at last be laid bare.” Wherein lies the secret? Let’s look more closely at the circuit of capital. The merchant bought commodities that had already been produced and then sold them for a higher price. However, the capitalist invests not in finished products, but rather purchases two different types of commodities: 1) means of production (MP), and 2) labor-power (L). The “means of production” are the tools and materials that are necessary to make goods (e.g. factories, office buildings, land, machinery, software, IT infrastructure, etc.). And “labor-power” is our ability to labor. The capitalist employs both “inputs” in a production process (P) that creates a new set of commodities, worth more than the combined value of the original inputs. The circuit of capital can thus be expanded to a more precise formula: M-C (MP+L) . . . P . . . C’-M’.
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Post by Admin on Sept 8, 2020 10:40:40 GMT
Tax the rich - but it is about a lot more than that September 4, 2020 Written by Kevin Ovenden Published in Analysis www.counterfire.org/articles/analysis/21581-tax-the-rich-but-it-is-about-a-lot-more-than-thatKevin Ovenden looks at the growing crisis facing the government over the soaring deficit and the debate on taxation The Tory government already staggering from one U-turn to the next faces a schism this autumn about taxation, spending and what to do with the ballooning deficit. The Labour frontbench position on what is going to be a major national argument appears to rest on this proposition: Increases in taxation (of whatever form, upon whichever class) will choke off any prospect of recovery by taking money "out of the economy". Superficially, it can appear to have some Keynesian legitimacy. And in today’s world that is still taken to have something to do with the left. The general position citing the economist John Maynard Keynes is that governments should not cut spending or raise taxes in a recession. Instead they should borrow, spend, stimulate economic growth and then recoup the money through taxation and curbing future spending (through falling costs as employment returns and so on) when growth "picks up". But this is superficial. It depends on what is done with extra tax revenues. If they are used to pay down debt – given to the banks and bondholders – that does indeed mean taking money out of circulation in the real economy and reducing economic activity. That has been the decade-long problem in Greece, where the austerity memoranda mean the government must draw in 3.5 percent more than it spends, with the primary budget surplus going to debt repayment. It is why the anti-capitalist left argued that the critical issue was the repudiation of the debt, with all the socialist measures following upon the rupture that would cause. That included breaking from the euro. Syriza’s initial argument – until 2011 – was to “tax the rich to pay the debt”. That is clearly preferable to taxing the working and middle classes to pay the banks. But it ran up against the fact that, as all serious economists said, the debt was actually unpayable, and even if taken from the rich the policy still meant sucking vast sums out of the national economy and killing economic activity. That reality and the pressure of a movement that strongly raised rupturing from the debt led to a shift in position by Syriza in 2011 towards repudiating the debt (or at least the “odious”, illegitimate portion of it) in order to get out of the austerity debt-trap. British conditions of today are not the same, but the fundamental points for the left of 2008-2013 are – in fact they are intensified. The UK budget deficit is soaring. It was already predicted in May to be £200 billion this year. It is going to be much higher, obviously on account of the emergency measures in the face of the pandemic and slump. Hence the major row developing in the British government as it tries both to carry through its promise to its new voters and to be a responsible capitalist government. Those who say it is simply not an issue because the government can print money and borrow at ultra-low interest rates ignore the fact that Britain is part of a global system of financial markets and complex exchanges. Those will turn against any government that is held not to be “credible” in keeping debt under control. At the same time, ending the furlough scheme, pulling back the varied economic support mechanisms and raising taxes on working people (more on that in a moment) will hit what economic activity there is and is likely to mean a further sudden collapse. It is absolutely right to make these arguments. If not, then we risk falling into the discredited old Thatcherite fallacy that the national economy is like household finances, where you have to balance the books and there is no impact of less spending beyond the hardship of the person spending less not being able to buy more. That isn’t the problem with Labour’s position on taxation. There are other and much bigger problems. First, it makes no differentiation in opposing rising taxation between, say, raising corporation tax on company profits and hitting working people through rises in VAT, National Insurance (which if it happened would be sold as investing in the NHS – an old Lib Dem policy), and any of the myriad ways of raking in tax. So there is no recognition of the huge wealth disparities in Britain and the way the tax system is already skewed in favour of capital and the wealthy – the wealthiest of whom have got richer in this crisis. Thus there is no sense that taxation (and spending) policy can be used to redistribute to address those inequalities. Second, it relies on an underlying assumption that we can exit this crisis by prolonging emergency measures so that “the economy” picks up, returns to “normal” and in that way automatically the ship rights itself. The huge flaw in this is that the economy was sinking before the pandemic shock and mired in deep, long-term structural crises. One of them is investment. It has been at chronically low levels since before the last crisis in 2008. If Labour’s argument is that taxing more of profits will lower business investment, then it ignores the reality that cuts to corporate taxation over 20 years have not produced investment in the first place. Instead – and exacerbated by the bank bailouts of 2008 – they have produced one financial or property bubble after another. A large amount of that has been commercial real estate – look at shopping malls and office blocks in London, Manchester and (some) other cities. These now face a monumental crisis with a historic cycle of oversupply every 20 years or so coinciding with both the pandemic shock and changes to shopping and the organisation of office work that were already underway. Maintaining low corporate tax or slashing local business rates is not going to bring large investment or even keep some big retailers in business. Household names have closed or, like Debenhams, are in administration. Stores are closing across the country. One in ten shop fronts are already shuttered. In some town centres it is nearly three in ten. Some 200,000 jobs are set to go this year in the retail sector alone. The third problem is spending. It took until 2018 for average hourly wages in Britain to return to the level of 2008. Most people were not spending much money before this crisis because they didn’t have any. At the same time, while extra money for the wealthy does not go into productive investment or higher consumer spending, but into property and financial bubbles, any increase for the working class and much of the middle class does go into spending on goods and services. Taking money via taxation from the wealthy and giving it to the rest to spend does produce economic activity. All of this is ruled out, it seems, by the Labour Party’s approach. To be clear, even doing that – say cutting VAT but raising corporation tax – would only be a modest, palliative measure in the face of this crisis and the underlying malaise in the British economy it has exposed. But at least it would point to the fundamental issues of class and class power. At the heart of those are ownership and control. And this is the biggest problem of all in Labour’s position. It is a flight from any kind of transformation of the structure of ownership, control and power in Britain. Instead, it posits leaving that intact, with the state stepping in just to prop up demand and stave off the worst of the impact of profound economic shocks. I’m sure Labour will talk of some kind of tinkering dressed up as transformation for the future. But at the moment when it is really called for it is out the window in favour of one or other version of conventionality. It is like being passionately for a policy of peace… except when a war is on. Within conventional bounds – though wider than in 2008 – stands Tory policy also, both wings of it. That will be true even if a bit of the expected tax rises do fall on sections of business and the rich in order to project a curve of “getting on top of the deficit” – projections that will not be worth the graph paper they are written on. What is wrong with Labour’s approach is not the part that warns of sucking money out of the economy. And Tory tax rises to satisfy the bond markets and deficit reduction do not become socialist even if some of them also fall on some rich people. What is wrong with Labour’s response is that it comes across as opposed to any redistributive let alone anti-capitalist state intervention into the economy at all. It leaves a political vulnerability also. So how will you reduce the debt and deficit? The anti-capitalist answer is ultimately to rupture from that via pursuing a fundamental reorganisation of society and economy, not just keeping a life-support system going in the hope it will work itself out. But Labour’s answer? Just that future economic growth will do it as it did from the mid-1990s to 2008. But those years are not returning and we still have the consequences in social and economic inequality from those “good” times. In the narrow compass of what passes for official political debate Labour will stand accused of not having an answer. All of this poses the need for the left coming together to put its own radical programme of measures that provide relief for working people by cutting into and against capitalism. That is instead of relying upon it, under various types of tinkering, to recover. All in the context of the spiralling environmental crises, to which the Covid pandemic is connected. Naturally, we are for taxing the rich and capital. But the issues at stake go way deeper. And we are not for using such tax revenue to pay the bondholders. That is merely redistribution within the capitalist class, leaving the exploitative structure intact while indeed sinking useful economic activity to propitiate the financial gods. Such a radical programme is not some dusting off of something written nearly a century ago as if it were in every jot and tittle the voice of Moses and the prophets. Nor is it some forensically elaborate set of policies, into micro-detail, as if it were to be implemented by an incoming left Chancellor of the Exchequer. There is not one imminent – or distant. Rather, something is needed that in a plain way points to the radical approach that has to be fought for, in all arenas from popular agitation to arguments about policy. That is with a view both to imposing its direction politically and linking together all the many struggles that are unfolding – from evictions to job losses. Why should firms that have received furlough subsidies be allowed to sack people over the next year? Or sack anyone if making a profit? The Tory government has instituted a Tory version of nationalisation of the rail companies – one that keeps profiteering intact and looks to getting “back to normal” as soon as possible. Why can’t other major industries be nationalised, but to public not private benefit and under democratic and worker control? Some projections talk of four million unemployed by Christmas. Whatever the figure is, what about the state taking on the assets of bankrupted outfits and marrying them up with workers on the dole? And why not raise demands such as these in the battle to stop job losses, which the union movement has to step up to or face a crisis of its own? Scrapping Trident would free vast sums and the skilled workers involved to engage in socially useful, productive activity. For five years the left discussion about these kinds of issues was framed by the possibility of a radically reforming Labour government being elected. So they necessarily looked from the standpoint of a future cabinet and ministries of state downwards. There is not going to be such a government. It’s time to reframe all this from the bottom upwards. And it is that that also, if part of big social and class struggles, can force the hand of even a Tory government, as it did in 1972. That is just not going to happen from the Labour Party under a “new management” that will not raise even taxing the rich, let alone taking the levers of power from them. The radical left of whatever affiliations is going to have to come together and press this itself. Before you go...we need your help Counterfire is expanding fast as a website and an organisation. We are trying to organise a dynamic extra-parliamentary left in every part of the country to help build resistance to the government and their billionaire backers. If you like what you have read and you want to help, please join us or just get in touch by emailing info@counterfire.org. Now is the time!
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Post by Admin on Sept 10, 2020 1:09:44 GMT
While the real economy has fallen off a cliff in recent months, stock prices have reached record highs. Capitalism is nothing but a casino. In place of this speculation and gambling, we need a rational socialist economic plan. Stock market booms and the insanity of capitalism BY NELSON WAN, BETHNAL GREEN AND BOW CLP 09 SEP 2020 www.socialist.net/stock-market-booms-and-the-insanity-of-capitalism.htm
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Post by Admin on Sept 11, 2020 12:30:58 GMT
America’s Dire Inequality Demands a New Conceptual Framework. This Economist Has One. By Lynn Parramore SEP 10, 2020 | MACROECONOMICS www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/americas-dire-inequality-demands-a-new-conceptual-framework-this-economist-has-oneIn a new book from Cambridge University Press, Lance Taylor reveals that wage repression — far more than monopoly power, offshoring or technological change — is driving rising inequality. In Lance Taylor’s new book, Macroeconomic Inequality from Reagan to Trump, the noted economist examines how and why the United States, starting in the 80s, started to break down into a sharply divided country of haves and have-nots. How it happened is hotly debated among experts. Is it the lofty rate of return on wealth enjoyed by the affluent? Or the impact of monopolistic corporations that can charge high prices for basic goods and services? What about globalization? Technological change? Taylor, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research, reveals what he sees as the insidious invisible hand that has been slipping into the pockets of ordinary people and stealing their chances for security and prosperity. This is not some natural process, he holds, but the outcome of deliberate choices and policies made by people who do not prioritize the wellbeing of most Americans. As a result, we are well on our way to constructing a society more unbalanced than what prevailed in the Gilded Age. In the following interview with the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Taylor explains his approach to the problem of inequality and why the conclusions in his book stand in contrast to those of many of his colleagues. He issues a strong warning that misguided assumptions and methods of today’s mainstream economics block us from confronting one of the most pressing challenges of our time. Lynn Parramore: In your new book, you name wage repression as the biggest driver of inequality in the U.S. over the last several decades. Your conclusion differs from many who have studied the issue, such as Thomas Piketty, who theorized that inequality is caused mainly by a tendency of profits to run ahead of the growth rate in the economy. What’s different about your take? Lance Taylor: Piketty & Co. deserve a lot of credit for using tax and other data to estimate how income distribution differs across households over 200 years. The question is, what explains these differences? I wanted to analyze how income differences among various kinds of households (poor, middle class, and affluent) came about over time. That meant drilling down into macroeconomic indicators as well as the data associated with the various industries in which people worked and the streams of income they received from them. Özlem Ömer and I assembled what we needed by reworking Congressional Budget Office data along the lines of the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) National Income Accounts. This allowed us to look at both macroeconomics and individual industries or sectors — 16 in all. We studied changes in the structure of payments, employment, and output of products and services across these 16 sectors. What we found is that except in volatile and low-profit agriculture and mining sectors, real wages grew less rapidly than productivity since around the time of Reagan’s presidency. Wage shares decreased, but profit shares increased at the industry and macro levels, and the money from those profits ended up in the pockets of business owners and the wealthy instead of being shared. For the most part, Americans workers have been working more productively, but they haven’t been getting paid for it due to forces that aren’t natural and inevitable. Wage repression doesn’t just happen. It is apparent that something other than the market is at work here – like power relations, ideology about unemployment levels, and many innovations in business strategy, such as subcontracting. These are all feeding on and reinforcing processes within national political institutions that are more and more reflective only of business interests and concerns. LP: You’ve noted that mainstream economists have been getting the story on inequality wrong. Why is that? LT: Mainstream American PhD students are brainwashed into believing crazy economic theory. The history for “new Keynesian” macroeconomics goes back to the “Neoclassical synthesis” that economist Paul Samuelson and many of my former colleagues at MIT developed in the immediate postwar period. One can always hope that it will change. But here’s the reality: insofar as the ideas of academics influence politics and policy formation, mainstream analysis today will not help in reducing economic inequality. Economists would refer to my approach to inequality as a post-Keynesian way of looking at the problem, because there is no obvious way you can explain the changes observed in terms of the kind of Neoclassical microeconomics that is typically taught today in economics departments – the framework of supply, demand, and games that “ optimizing agents” play around them. LP: Some point to monopolistic corporations, especially Big Tech, as key contributors to inequality. The idea is that companies with this kind of power can charge more for basic goods and services, for example, which hits ordinary folks hard. What’s your view? LT: My research does not show Big Tech monopolies as a major part of the inequality story. Since 1970, the overall corporate profit share of U.S. national income has risen 8%. The corporate share of America’s income as a nation is now around 46% — which is a huge number. Yet, the current share in income of profits in the information sector is just a bit more than 3%. Throw in parts of retail (Amazon) and you might get up to 5%. If this is Big Tech, the share of its profits in income is actually much less than the share of the real estate rental and leasing sector, which stands at 14%. When we analyzed profit share growth across sectors over time, we found that the big movers were actually manufacturing, wholesale, retail, finance-insurance, and information — in that order. So, the narrative of Big Tech as a principal driver of rising profits and inequality is just wrong. A very important part of the story is the spread of low wage across major parts of the whole economy. For example, seven low wage/low productivity sectors including education and health, accommodation and food, and business services saw their share in output between 1990 and 2016 fall from 48% to 41%. Meanwhile, their share of total employment rose from 47% to 61% with an essentially constant share of total wages (56%). In effect, the structure of production is being hollowed out, and the U.S. is becoming what many analysts are starting to refer to as a “dual economy” — one with good wages for a minority of people who work in areas like finance or technology, and stagnant or falling wages for the majority who work in sectors such as retail with relatively high productivity growth but low wages. That pushes overall inequality way up. LP: Just how bad has inequality in the U.S. gotten in your view? LT: Things have become very alarming, and there are no quick fixes. To a large extent, rising corporate profits are transferred to the lucky few households in the top 1% of the income distribution through interest, dividends, and capital gains. Everybody else is stuck or falling behind. The extreme inequality we are witnessing today didn’t develop overnight: It took five decades of steady growth in the overall profit share — adding up to a full 8% increase in that share, as I’ve noted — to land the economy in its present distributional mess. I’ve experimented with mathematical models of the economy in which I test out the effects of various policies that might help reduce inequality. The results are pretty sobering: even if the government enacted fairly aggressive policies to put money in people’s pockets, it would probably take decades to get things back to what we had in the U.S. in the 1970s. At that time, things were far from perfect, but there was more balance in the economy. Unfortunately, mainstream economists do not learn post-Keynesian macroeconomics, so they may not see the full extent of how dire things have become. That was painfully obvious in Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. His famous explanation for inequality, which posits that it occurs when rates of return on capital are greater than growth in the real economy (and, by extension, growth in wages), is not really an explanation at all. It’s actually just a statement of what happens if the economy simply grows at a constant rate, what in the jargon is called the “steady state.” That assumption is also implicit in his recent book, Capital and Ideology. You can’t hope to reverse trends in inequality until you figure out what is driving it. The problem of inequality is so urgent that it demands a whole new conceptual framework, which I have tried to offer in my book.
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Post by Admin on Sept 12, 2020 12:55:13 GMT
David Graeber, 1961–2020 Astra Taylor, Molly Crabapple, Marshall Sahlins, Beka Economopoulos, and Melissa Flashman, et al. www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/09/05/david-graeber-1961-2020/David Graeber, the anthropologist and activist, died aged fifty-nine on September 2, 2020. The New York Review, to which he began contributing last year, is collecting tributes from his friends and colleagues. Astra Taylor I was supposed to talk to David this past week, the beginning of September, and record a conversation for this magazine. We were going to reflect on a few recurring themes of our friendship: the still-evolving legacy of Occupy Wall Street, the politics of debt (especially given the current economic calamity), how leftists should engage with and push beyond electoral politics, and the prospects of small-d democracy. The conversation was something I’d been looking forward to and meaning to arrange for months, but the pandemic gave me plenty of reasons to delay. And delay I did until last week, the end of August, when David and I finally decided to set a date. He told me he was going to Venice, and that he’d be there until September 7, but that we’d make time. It turned out to be a trip from which he would never return. After sharing some lines over text message from a piece he was writing for this publication about the upcoming election, his last and final note to me read: “No idea of time, time is being reinvented.” Looking through my emails and texts from David over the last decade, I’m struck by how instantaneously we became friends. A single coffee in the West Village in 2009 or so was all it took. We knew lots of people in common, so there was a sense we were part of the same extended community, but that was also just how David operated. There was an openness about him, a willingness to let people in and give strangers a chance. Given how knowledgeable and prolific he was, it’s clear David spent a lot of time engaged in the solitary activities of reading and writing. But he was also wonderfully gregarious—he always seemed up for a phone call to check in, a ramble through an antique market, or a night on the town to talk shop or gossip. For some reason I keep thinking of David on the day I visited with him in London in 2014, when I was on tour playing with my partner’s band, Neutral Milk Hotel. He dressed up for the show, in a long jacket, with these ridiculous colorful John Lennon glasses that made everyone laugh. He was a fun person, and his mischievousness suffused everything he did, including his writing and his activism. David changed my life, and he did it without my realizing it. In August 2011 he tried to get me to go to the planning meetings of what would become Occupy Wall Street. I shrugged it off, but promised to come to the first day of the protest. I did. I remember how pleased he seemed that afternoon, like a radical maître d’ going around welcoming people, checking in on our progress as we held the first assemblies. He didn’t push me into the movement, but he kept opening doors that I kept walking through, steadily becoming more deeply involved and invested. Before long, he had roped me into to an initiative that would be known as “Strike Debt.” One of our opening salvos was a propaganda video featuring a dozen of our friends in balaclavas dancing around a burning trashcan igniting their debt notices; David can be spotted amongst the throng and wrote the voice-over. Those were the early days of a project we called the Rolling Jubilee—David named the effort—that bought portfolios of debt in order to abolish them, erasing tens of millions of dollars overdue medical bills and payday loans belonging to tens of thousands of people. The group also collaboratively wrote the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual, a radical financial guidebook, and gave away thousands of free copies at Occupy Wall Street’s one-year anniversary protest. David never lorded the fact that he had written Debt over his co-authors, many of whom had not written a single article; he understood that mastering five thousand years of history doesn’t mean you necessarily know the best tricks to evade bill collectors or the most effective ways to fight our modern-day form of mafia capitalism. We were all learning and experimenting together. After David relocated to London in 2013, the effort kept going and evolving. In 2014, a small group of us launched the Debt Collective, a union for debtors, which I remain involved in to this day. David’s work provided a potent critique of the dominant financial morality, which sees debtors as blameworthy or even criminal. “There’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong,” David has written. Building on his conceptual intervention, the Debt Collective has devised a comprehensive theory of debtor organizing, including an analysis of debt’s centrality under conditions of financialization and the development of concrete strategies that have helped win over a billion dollars of debt relief while opening up a national conversation about the need for mass debt cancellation. We’ve always taken heart knowing David was cheering us on from afar and ready to brainstorm or scheme—it pains us to know he won’t be able to witness all the campaigns and revolts he helped inspire. David had very strongly held views, but he wasn’t dogmatic or sectarian. Disagreeing was part of the fun. David proudly called himself an anarchist while I could never embrace that label; we argued about things including consensus decision-making (I think it rarely works) and the role of the state (I want a strong one). We both embraced the word “democracy,” analyzing it and writing about it and trying to actualize it, but I was more critical of what I saw as our movements’ failed attempts to manifest the concept. And yet David pushed me to think in new ways every time we debated, and he expanded my view and helped me change my mind many times. In a conversation we did last October at the LRB Bookshop he spoke about the pleasure of changing one’s mind through deliberative processes, and said that it was an underappreciated form of “political happiness”— as in, “Oh, I don’t have to think what I think, why don’t I think something else!” He was one of the only people I could count on to credibly make an even more far out, hopeful, utopian argument than I do—I’ll miss getting to play the curmudgeon in our duo. “Credible” is the operative word, with David. His conviction that our society could be organized another way was empirically based, after all. As an anthropologist and generally curious person, he was well aware that human societies and value systems vary wildly across space and time. Very often, the stories we tell ourselves, or are told, about why things are the way they are simply aren’t true; our political and economic arrangements can be transformed and remade. But David also understood that you can’t produce such seismic shifts alone. A brilliant, best-selling book like Debt can help expand readers’ understanding and imaginations, but words on a page are no substitute social for movements, for collectivities, for rebellions and riots. David engaged in activism with extraordinary humility, as a peer among equals (his in-person kindness contrasted rather dramatically with his persona on Twitter, where he could be a bit punchy). In organizing meetings, he sat quietly and listened to others, never pulling rank. It was in one long grueling activist session that it hit me just how profoundly he embodied his egalitarian principles and how much I respected him for that. He despised affectation and abhorred hierarchy, even one that might put him at the top. Over a decade in, it seemed like we were still at the beginning of our comradeship. David thought in millennia-long spans, after all—I was so sure we were just getting started. I don’t understand how the body can give out on a mind and spirit that alive, that excited and alert and full of passion and conviction and ideas and plans. I have no doubt that we’d all be grieving the loss of our friend David Graeber under normal circumstances, but the awfulness of this moment compounds the anguish. We’ve lost a central member of a precious tribe: activist academics are a rare breed, and rarer still are ones as eccentric, ingenious, and committed as he was. His perspective remains vital: his insistence on seeing things differently, siding with the underdog, engaging as an equal, challenging the pompous and powerful, finding joy, and keeping a utopian horizon in sight. Despite the gathering storms, let’s channel David’s astonishing and heartfelt faith in his fellow human beings and refuse to lose sight of the possibility, not inevitability, of our collective liberation. ■
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Post by Admin on Sept 26, 2020 10:56:49 GMT
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