You can only support the current manifestation of late-stage capitalism, if you believe that massive inequality of wealth is necessary to wealth creation, or if you believe that the total amount of wealth is unimportant so long as a very small minority are extremely wealthy.
“Trickledown economics” is at heart simply a statement of the idea that massive inequality of wealth is necessary to wealth creation. There is no evidence for it.
The truth is, of course, that the poor ultimately benefit only from the economic activity of the poor. But not nearly as much as the rich benefit from the economic activity of the poor.
Taking money off the poor does not lead to an increase in wealth creation. If you look at the billions the Labour government is seeking to remove from the disabled, that is not only money taken away from them, it is money taken out of the wider economy.
It seems astonishing that the Labour Party has forgotten the entire message of Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake. But then, the Labour Party expelled Ken Loach for opposing the genocide of Palestinians.
Those on benefits have a much higher propensity to spend than the more wealthy elements of society as they have no choice; they need to spend all their income to survive and enjoy a minimal acceptable standard of living. This income is spent on the local goods and services they need, again to a much higher degree than that of wealthier people.
Much of this spend benefits the landlord class, but it is almost all within the UK economy and it has a multiplier effect on economic activity. All of this is pretty obvious. By simply taking this money out of the economy (and it has no real relationship to taxes and revenue) the government is reducing the overall size of the economy.
This austerity is the opposite of pro-growth. It is absolutely anti-growth. It achieves the precise opposite of the alleged goal of Labour’s economic policy.
All this is designed to reduce the fiscal deficit, allegedly. But reducing economic activity will reduce revenue. It is a death spiral. If the aim were actually to reduce the fiscal deficit, taxing those who have money would be far more sensible than taking money from those who do not.
But actually that is not the object at all. The object is to convince the neoliberal finance system that this is a safely neoliberal government, willing to hurt the poor and leave the wealthy untouched.
That system brought down Liz Truss for failing to acknowledge orthodoxy on the fiscal deficit. The strange thing is that Truss was actually right on the non-importance of this shibboleth. Where she was wrong was in a desire to decrease still further taxation on the wealthy, rather than increase spending on the poor; but her attitude to deficit was not wrong.
A higher deficit only leads to an increase in interest rates if you wish to seek to maintain the value of your currency in international markets. But like so many of these economic targets, the justification of this is a matter of convention more than reason. I have seen massive swings in the value of sterling over my lifetime, which have had little impact on the UK’s steady economic decline, although a habitual tendency to over-valuation has contributed to the wipeout of British manufacturing industry.
We now have Rachel Reeves wedded to Gordon Brown’s doctrine on fiscal spend, that led to the horrors of PFI and paved the way for austerity. Yet when the Establishment want to bail out the bankers, unlimited money can simply be created, and when they want to boost the military, unlimited public spending is immediately possible.
New Labour’s economic policy is Thatcherism, pure and simple.
The truth is we do not really need economic growth. The UK economy produces enough wealth for everybody to live free of poverty and in real comfort. The problem is the distribution of that wealth. We live in a society where, astonishingly, 1% of the population own 54% of the wealth.
You can argue about the precise statistic but the massive inequality is clear. The cause of poverty is inequality. The answer is to reduce inequality in a variety of ways – not only by progressive taxation but also by changing the ownership structures of enterprises.
The purpose of reducing poverty and increasing comfort for the majority is to spread happiness. Eternal economic growth is not a necessity for this. Happiness is not merely derived from possession of stuff, and owning more stuff is not the panacea.
Happiness arises from comfort, good relationships, active and engaged minds and a balanced society. A society which prioritises the libertine wealthy over caring for its disabled can never be balanced and can never be happy.
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Agreed, the general course of the ship of state has been unaffected by a change of the person at the wheel since the days of Thatcher.
“The purpose of reducing poverty and increasing comfort for the majority is to spread happiness. Eternal economic growth is not a necessity for this.”
However, without economic growth, no one can afford to pay interest and where would the banks, the “investors” and the other money lenders be then? Britain has for centuries been a society run by people who live off rents, if you include interest as rent on money.
Yes, poverty is best addressed by printing money and giving it away so as to disincentivise people from earning any themselves.
@Tdg – Why not murder all working class disabled people whose families wouldn’t have enough money to pay for their subsistence even if they worked 10 hours a day at Tesco’s and a further 8 hours as street whores?
Start with cutting off the water supply, because why should they get something for nothing? Then poison them from the air, because the unhygienic wretches are stinking up the place for those who’ve managed to find themselves (or their money) a bit of “economic activity”. I mean do the rich have the right to decide how to invest their money, and their state’s money, or don’t they?
Who TF are those who support capitalism to talk about what incentivises anyone to do anything? Capitalism is the apotheosis of what’s anti-human and anti-social.
Thatcher spoke of the City of London as where real value was created. Duhhhhhh.
The City of London is where the real Power is wielded from. Their representitive in Goverment/ Westminster is the “Great Rememberancer” and he has a permanent seat to the right of the Speaker of the House. It acts as though a Country within a Country, and afaik, the Crown has to seek permission of entry.
Not everyone is a lazy bastard who won’t work unless they had to. Nor is this laziness only confined to those who can’t afford it. The rich can be lazy, too. Yet surprisingly, although very many people are rich enough not to have to work, a huge number of them still do. Some even work for no money – it’s called the voluntary sector, in case you were wondering’.
In any case, you have misread or misunderstood the point of Craig’s post. Perhaps you would like to re-read it now that the red mist has cleared.
Re: ‘Much of this spend benefits the landlord class, but it is almost all within the UK economy and it has a multiplier effect in economic activity. All of this is pretty obvious.’
It’s not obvious at all, Boss – mainly because it’s not true. Think about it: If there were an economic multiplier effect to paying benefits, rather than incentivising people to work hard and/or companies to invest to increase their productivity, or importing labour from all over the world with all the issues that leads to, all governments would have to do to grow their economies would be to pay benefits – ideally to almost everyone. Such economies would grow rapidly because an increased GDP would increase the tax base, meaning governments could pay out more benefits, further increasing GDP, etc etc. So before too long, almost everyone on benefits would own millions of dollars worth of assets that they’d bought with their benefit money, and the capitalists would all be squillionaires. As you may have noticed, no countries are like this.
The government is not taking money out of the economy; it may be slightly reducing what economists call its velocity. The only ways of taking money out of the economy involves central banks engaging in quantitative tightening (which almost never happens), or people actually burning it like the KLF did on Jura.
P.S. In the UK, the richest 1% of households have the same wealth as the bottom 54% of households. That’s not the same as them owning 54% of the wealth. In reality, they own about 20% of it, which is one of the lowest percentages in Western Europe, and far lower than in Russia or, believe it or not, Sweden.
—
Anyway, while I’m here: Are you still lying awake at night wondering what happened to Dawn Sturgess, Charlie Rowley, Sergei & Yulia Skripal, former Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, and maybe even PC Oliver Bell, in the Year of our Lord 2018, but can’t wait until the Right Honourable Lord Hughes of Ombersley delivers his comprehensive, no-stone-unturned report on the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry later in the year? Well, lie awake wondering no more:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/forums/topic/the-salisbury-poisonings-episode-was-all-staged/page/6/#post-103404
(Too long; I’m not reading all that shit? – skip to the final paragraphs of Parts 1 & 2 headed LA’s VERDICT.)
“rather than incentivising people to work hard”
Isn’t that just a pretty way of saying “starving them back to work”? You don’t “incentivise people to work hard” by forcing them to do shitty dead-end make-work jobs. You might incentivise them to “work”, but you won’t get much useful work out of them. Also, you don’t understand what the term “economic multiplier” means. The rest of your comment is no more than the “your economic model is false, but mine is true” argument.
By the way, if you are who you appear to be, have you proved that a small calibre bullet is not able to penetrate the skull at point blank range on yourself, yet and, if not, why not, since you appeared so convinced that it is true?
Thanks for your reply Bayard. No, it isn’t. There are many ways governments can incentivise people to work hard: for example, raising the minimum wage or the nil-band tax threshold. Of course I understand the term ‘economic multiplier’. It’s the ratio of a change in GDP to the change in spending (usually government spending) that caused it. For things like spending on state education, it is above 1. This is not the case in aggregate for the benefit system. Rather than just claiming that ‘your economic model is false’ in my above comment, I gave an outline of why this is the case, using a reductio ad absurdum argument.
If you really must drag this up again: I’ve never claimed that .22 short ammo is incapable of penetrating a skull at point blank range; it depends on its thickness and the bone density. What I said was that it couldn’t be guaranteed to kill with a single shot to the head at point blank. However, even if I didn’t think it could ever penetrate a skull, I wouldn’t be demonstrating this on myself because: a) whilst the bullet might not penetrate, it would still do quite a bit of damage; and b) handguns with barrels less than 12 inches are currently illegal in the UK (except in special circumstances) and therefore quite expensive. Neither of these drawbacks apply to you demonstrating your thesis that CO2 doesn’t cause global warming now that the spring sunshine is here, using a small CO2 gas cylinder and a couple of jam jars.
“all governments would have to do to grow their economies would be to pay benefits – ideally to almost everyone.”
That would, of course increase GDP and thus, by that measure, cause the economy of that country to grow. What your reductio ad absurdum argument demonstrates is not that benefits do not have an economic multiplier, but that growth in GDP is not a meaningful measure of growth in the economy. It is a well-known idea that paying people to dig holes then fill them in again increases GDP so, if the government spent billions on this, the economy would also grow, but nothing useful would have been done.
“Neither of these drawbacks apply to you demonstrating your thesis that CO2 doesn’t cause global warming now that the spring sunshine is here, using a small CO2 gas cylinder and a couple of jam jars.”
All that would demonstrate would be that the jam jar with CO2 in it got hotter than the one with air in it, if such an effect really happened, which I don’t know, as I haven’t tried. It wouldn’t demonstrate anything to do with the climate any more than an experiment with a pot of salt water would demonstrate anything about the oceans.
Bayard: “It is a well-known idea that paying people to dig holes then fill them in again increases GDP so, if the government spent billions on this, the economy would also grow, but nothing useful would have been done.”
This is again from Keynes’ General Theory. His point is that in certain ever more common economic conditions, subsequent “multiplier” effects would cause much useful work to be done – that if bad economics prevented doing anything better, it would be much better than doing nothing.
Thanks for your reply Bayard. It doesn’t matter whether GDP is an effective measure of economic output or not (it mostly is), because the multiplier is defined in terms of GDP. However, if some ‘effective’ (non-GDP-based) multiplier effect of paying benefits was greater than 1, it would be obvious that households had become super-wealthy a couple years after governments had started paying people large amounts of benefits (even if this wasn’t reflected in the GDP figures). If the temperature of both jam jars stayed the same, it would be a pretty good indication that CO2 is not causing global warming, and the fossil fuel industry would be cock-a-hoop and probably reward you handsomely for your efforts.
“However, if some ‘effective’ (non-GDP-based) multiplier effect of paying benefits was greater than 1, it would be obvious that households had become super-wealthy a couple years after governments had started paying people large amounts of benefits ”
Obvious to you, yes, but not to anyone who understands what the term “economic multiplier” means.
” If the temperature of both jam jars stayed the same, it would be a pretty good indication that CO2 is not causing global warming,”
Well, yes, it would, but it doesn’t prove the converse, as you should well know. Where A depends on B, A is false if B is false, however A is not necessarily true because B is true. If there is no fuel in my car, the engine won’t start, nor will it ever start. However, if there is fuel in my car, that does not mean the engine will necessarily start, the battery might be flat.
“here are many ways governments can incentivise people to work hard: for example, raising the minimum wage or the nil-band tax threshold.”
That might incentivise people to work, but it is not going to incentivise them to work hard. Who, pray, is going to employ these expensive people (expensive, because you’ve just upped the minimum wage)? Anyone who is keen to work and will work hard and enthusiastically, is already working. What you have left are those who need to be “incentivised” back to work. They are not going to be doing anything they enjoy, so they are not going to be doing it with any enthusiasm. They will do the minimum amount of work they can get away with and they won’t do it well. Most likely their cost will exceed the value they add. They will need to be constantly checked up on and they will moan and bellyache and depress all their colleagues. The only sanction their employer has, of sacking them, will not change their attitude. Far better such people are paid to be idle. I expect some people would prefer them to be left to starve, but that really doesn’t look good internationally.
Thanks for your reply Bayard. The UK minimum wage has risen several times since it was instigated in Blair’s first term. There are still millions of people employed on it. Private-sector employers will continue to employ them as long as they can make a profit greater than the risk-free rate of return out of them. Millions of people don’t particularly enjoy their jobs. They are doing them (to a reasonable standard) because they’re paid reasonably well. As you say, some people are basically unemployable and should be on benefits, but fortunately they’re fairly rare. Enjoy the weekend.
“They are doing them (to a reasonable standard) because they’re paid reasonably well.”
What basis have you in thinking that people do a job better when they are paid better, when logically, it is more likely to be the other way around?
“Private-sector employers will continue to employ them as long as they can make a profit greater than the risk-free rate of return out of them.”
So the higher the minimum wage, the less activities will add more value than the cost of employment, therefore less people will be needed to do the remaining value-adding activities and the fewer job opportunities for those who are only capable of adding a small amount of value per hour either through laziness, cussedness or lack of ability. These are the very people you are trying to “incentivise back to work”. Just because the minimum wage is not a total disincentive to private-sector employers doesn’t mean it’s not a disincentive. Yes, lots of people work on the minimum wage, but more would be working if it was lower and more still if it wasn’t there. It was only introduced because the Blair government reintroduced the Speenhamland System (aka Working Families’ Tax Credits), and wanted to prevent employers doing the obvious thing which was to pay their employees virtually nothing and have the government make up the rest of the wage bill. WFTCs were only introduced so that benefits could be paid to people in work as well as people out of work, and people could afford to work part time and the unemployment figures would go down. Basically the same number of jobs were being shared out amongst a greater number of people doing them. If putting up the minimum wage is such a good idea, why not make it £20/hr, or £50/hr, then we’d all be rich. Hell, why not make it £100/hr and we could all afford to go o the Caribbean on holiday.
Thanks for your reply Bayard.
‘What basis have you in thinking that people do a job better when they are paid better, when logically, it is more likely to be the other way around?’
So by your logic, companies should pay all their employees minimum wage since, not only do they save money, they likely get better jobs out of most of them. Not sure about that. I wasn’t suggesting the government set the minimum wage to £50+ an hour – just that an increase to, say, £14 an hour would incentivise some people back to work, rather than claiming ESA or whatever, and that most companies would still generate a profit out of them as they’re not subsisting on razor-thin margins.
This is getting silly. Do you really not realise that people are paid what they want to do the work? Paying them less won’t make them work less hard, it will make them not work at at all, because they will be working for someone else. That’s what happens if you don’t pay your staff enough, they leave for someone who is offering more. Most people work as hard as they reasonably can. Offering them more isn’t going to make them work harder. If they are getting away with not working hard, paying them more isn’t going to “incentivise” them to work harder. Why should they? Sure they might work longer hours of they were paid more, but they are not going to work harder during those hours unless the extra pay is specifically tied to results “If you can finish that report by Friday, there will be something extra in your pay at the end of the month”.
“just that an increase to, say, £14 an hour would incentivise some people back to work, rather than claiming ESA or whatever,”
Well, quite possibly, but this is just a variation of “starve ’em back to work”: the same differential between ESA and paid work can be achieved by lowering ESA payments. Meanwhile, now that you’ve raised the minimum wage to £14/hr there’s a whole raft of of jobs that it’s no longer worth employing anyone to do, as they don’t generate sufficient added value to cover the wage bill, plus the overheads and the taxes. You appear to live in some sort of C19th fantasy world, where all employers are raking in the loot on the backs of their workforce and a rise in minimum wage just means a small reduction in their vast profits. In the real world razor-thin margins are a fact of life for many small businesses, especially those that employ minimum wage labour and an increase in the minimum wage mean lots of them closing their doors as their outgoings now exceed the maximum possible income they can make from trading. Have you not noticed how many pubs have closed in the last few years?
However, don’t be downhearted at the unfeasibility of your cunning plan, the government has a better one: conscription. All those lazy, workshy dole bludgers can be drafted into the armed forces, win-win.
You are mostly wrong, Craig Murray is mostly right.
all governments would have to do to grow their economies would be to pay benefits – ideally to almost everyone. Such economies would grow rapidly because an increased GDP would increase the tax base, meaning governments could pay out more benefits, further increasing GDP, etc etc.
This is said sarcastically, but very grosso modo, it is what actually happened during the postwar Keynesian Golden Age. Not just in Britain, but across the planet. Targeted welfare spending, “benefits” of the sort our esteemed host here considers is almost just the thing. The very best thing as Keynes & Franklin Roosevelt knew and taught a generation that led the world to the greatest prosperity of all time, is that governments guarantee employment levels, ideally through directly guaranteed government jobs. Since the monopsony power of plutocrats is ever present, mere minimum wage hikes tend to make things better, often increasing employment.
But modern economists ignore history, when it remarkably does not abide by their stupid fake math and internally inconsistent and accounting-violating “theories”. History is consistent with economics devised to actually understand economic behavior, rather than support the rule of billionaires: Keynes’s Keynesianism including MMT etc. Some of Marxist economics, which influenced Keynes & MMT (through Kalecki for instance). Increased GDP would increase tax revenue taken out of the economy, but it would not directly augment the government’s ability to pay out more benefits, though it would have that tendency most of the time.
“The government is not taking money out of the economy; it may be slightly reducing what economists call its velocity. The only ways of taking money out of the economy involves central banks engaging in quantitative tightening (which almost never happens), or people actually burning it like the KLF did on Jura.”
Cutting spending – as in these benefit cuts most certainly is taking (a flow of) money out of the economy, and can and has caused recessions. Taxation is the only way governments directly take money out of the economy. Quantitative “tightening” or easing is just monkeying around with interest rates and is mostly a nothingburger that neither takes out or adds. Again, things that Keynes and his disciples understood and wrote about. Governments create money when they spend. They destroy it when they tax. It is insanity to disagree with that, as much bad economics does.
Thanks for your reply Calcagus. I’m afraid that, as is often the case, I am completely right and our host is wrong. During our post-war ‘Keynesian Golden Age’, large swathes of the male population were paid by the government, but most of them were paid to do productive work, which increases GDP, and not to do nothing. They were paid wages, not benefits. These days, large sections of the populations of developed economies are paid large amounts to do nothing, e.g. pensioners.
Taxation doesn’t destroy money; it just redistributes it. Quantitative easing (or tightening) is not ‘monkeying around with interest rates’ – it’s what central banks do when they can’t mess about with interest rates any more because they’re at or near the zero bound. The Bank of England base rate was kept mostly the same at below 0.5% when the Bank was effectively printing hundreds of billions after the financial crash. Governments don’t create money when they spend; they spend money that they’ve obtained via taxation or borrowing. This is standard macroeconomics, not insanity. Read a basic macroeconomics textbook for more detail. Enjoy the weekend.
“These days, large sections of the populations of developed economies are paid large amounts to do nothing, e.g. pensioners.”
Pensioners are paid today because of the work they did yesterday, or for having paid taxes as in the US Social Security system. So ending these pension payments is theft, just as much as if an employer or a bank took your work or money and refused to recompense you as agreed.
“Governments don’t create money when they spend; they spend money that they’ve obtained via taxation or borrowing. This is standard macroeconomics, not insanity. Read a basic macroeconomics textbook for more detail.”
I have had that frequently horrifying experience, in all likelihood have opened more than you have. I first read economics back in the 1970s, mostly from older books from a saner age. Today’s slowly dying mainstream “basic” or “standard” macroeconomics, especially concerning government finance, is gibberish.
The idea that governments get money from taxation or borrowing is absurd and impossible. Where did that money come from originally, how did people get it to render under unto Caesar in the first place, pray tell? In reality, the government prints/coins it & puts national heroes faces on it. You don’t print it and put your face on it.
For such points, see most pre-1970 textbooks or newer MMT books. Abba Lerner’s 1950 Economics of Employment is the best and easiest to read old book, in my opinion. On this precise point, see Stephanie Bell [Kelton]- Do Taxes and Bonds Finance Government Spending?- Journal of Economic Issues volume 34 issue 3 (2000)
(“Can taxes ….” not “Do taxes” is the easier available working paper version.) Some referees of that paper did not support publication due to non-novelty. 🙂 They had a point, while there are new points in MMT, had the world not re-adopted magical economics inconsistent with accounting in the 1970s, such new academic schools would have been far less necessary.
We do agree that the primary reason for the golden age was state employment. But under very common, naturally increasingly common economic conditions, paying (targeted) benefits increases such employment and production. As above, the one example you gave, pensions, should not be considered as such “benefits”, but as deferred compensation or repayment of forced saving.
Just reading some history of medicine. The economics which you have been brainwashed into swallowing is much like medieval Galenism. Galen was a great experimenter and anatomist. But his medieval followers took his writings as holy writ, even when Vesalius and others showed that some structures exist only in the apes Galen dissected, not in human beings. Defending ridiculous current macroeconomics is much like Galenites insisting that this only proved that the human race had devolved from the superior – and more ape-like 🙂 – humans of Galen’s age.
Thanks for your reply Calcagus. In the UK, provided you have less than 50 grand in savings or financial assets, you can have never worked a day in your life and paid not a penny in National Insurance contributions, and be entitled to Pension Credit, which is only a couple pounds a week less than the full State Pension. So here pensions are essentially a benefit that almost everyone over 66 can get.
I don’t know of single economy that operates on MMT which, rightly or wrongly, is reviled across the economic spectrum from the Austrians to Paul Krugman. Personally, I don’t think it’s hugely different from inflation targeting by central banks. As I stated, governments don’t create money when they spend it. Most taxpayers don’t pay their taxes using physical notes & coins – their taxes are deducted from their bank accounts, which contain money created by commercial banks due to fractional reserve.
“I don’t know of single economy that operates on MMT..”
Thus demonstrating that you have no idea what MMT is. MMT is not a way for economies to operate, it is a Theory (the T in MMT) of how ALL economies operate. You may not agree with the theory, but you should at least know what you are talking about before you slag it off.
Thanks for your reply Bayard. Monetarism is a theory. It was applied to the US, UK and several other economies in the early 80’s with, I would say, mixed results. MMT doesn’t explain how any modern economy operates. Instead it proposes that governments cover all public spending by creating money (whether physically or electronically) and control the resulting inflation by taxation. The problem is many voters would rather have low taxes than high inflation.
“Instead it proposes that governments cover all public spending by creating money (whether physically or electronically) and control the resulting inflation by taxation.”
No it doesn’t. It states that all money is created by government spending and is destroyed by taxation. It also states that if too much money is put into circulation (creation exceeds destruction), then the result is inflation and if too little is put into circulation (destruction exceeds creation) then the result is unemployment. I’m not saying MMT is correct, but it is an attempt to explain how the economy operates, not to propose how it should operate. It’s descriptive, not prescriptive.
Like taxation, it’s taking money directly out of that particular part of the real economy, thereby reducing it’s “velocity” if you must have it that way.
“Much of this spend benefits the landlord class, but it is almost all within the UK economy and it has a multiplier effect in economic activity.”
This is so confused. The upkeep of proletarians who don’t produce any value or ease its production is a cost for the rulers, not a benefit for them. It therefore makes perfect sense for the rulers to tighten up the slack.
Bursar boy Keynes was from back in the day of Ford. Sorry but no no no, the microchip implants that are coming aren’t anything like the Model T and each one probably takes as long to produce as about 1 square millimetre of one coat of paint on a car’s bonnet. What applied then doesn’t apply now.
As for where this “late stage capitalism” idea comes from….sheesh… The total amount of value produced measured in labour hours can fall. Capitalism can cope with that. Indeed it has done in part of the world.
Everything is moving towards a megacull and slavery:
* marginalisation of criticism of genocide as antisocial, soft on foreigners, and terrorist
* crescendo of propaganda about lots of employed labour being useless
* callousness being built up towards weak groups such as children, elderly people, the disabled
* heavy restriction on space for activity and even “speech” outside the control of the corporate state [1][2][3]
Those who missed what was going during Covid ought to take their heads out of their arses. This is meant in the kindest possible way. But stuff happened between Thatcher and now.
Notes
1) See the ongoing trial of Constance Marten and Mark Gordon which really should be of interest to all oppositionists. It’s happening at the Old Bailey now.
2) See the government’s plan to crack down on home education, mandating compulsory registration with local state Nazis
3) No references to “panopticons” needed. Please, no!
Incidentally the British state came *that close* to hygiene zoning, earlier in this decade that we’re only just past the halfway point in.
It is absolutely no surprise that disabled people are now being reviled and attacked. And they number far more than the residents of elderly people’s care homes who were flatlined in 2020-22. On average they are less individually isolated too. See how the ruling scum are moving their front line forward?
Soon it will be working class children who are reviled and attacked. Wait and see.
“It seems astonishing that the Labour Party has forgotten the entire message of Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake.”
I will always have a soft spot for Ken because he made “Cathy Come Home”.
But what does it matter, really, which party’s twats are on which benches in the Commons?
Nice thoughts but the system is now too far gone, we’re doomed.
Starmer, Reeves, Milliband. Things will get a lot worse before it shows any improvement.
The man in the street cannot vote himself out of this mess.
Incidentally it is not particularly radical to observe that “Starmer’s” “economics” are Thatcherite.
I recall Tariq “plantation owner” Ali writing a play in which he conveyed to le tout Islington the message that Blair in power was all style and no substance. He was like a guy charging money for well-off people to hear him declaim that 17 is a prime number. I can laugh, but we don’t need no intermediaries, whether they’re dimwitted or clever.
There is a connection between the ruling scum putting their jackboots on and wading with baseball bats into the living conditions of the weakest parts of the working class, and capitalism’s ongoing technological revolution. That is fundamental.
But who’ll be brave enough to introduce Universal Basic Income? I wish someone campaigned on this theme. It’s not a magic wand, but at least people will be incentivised to work by other factors than biological survival.
Conversely, the Housing Benefit – public money now flowing to private landlords – is largely blamed for being at the root of the current housing crisis. What’s a good balance between supporting the poor and not overflowing the market with money?
UBI sounds like a good idea. More public housing may be better than more housing benefit. But, and this is a real question, how can council housing stock be protected from the appeal to greed, which the Tories successfully made in the past?
@M.J. – Sure, more public housing would be great. It could go something like this:
the government
1. Nationalises banks and other moneylenders.
2. Exercises all the mortgages they now hold, thereby taking ownership of millions of houses.
3. Annuls all debts owed by occupier previous “owners” and offers them low-rent permanent tenancies.
4. Offers low-rent permanent tenancies of the properties acquired from non-occupier previous owners to whoever wants to occupy them. (Basically bye-bye private-sector landlords including buy-to-let scum.)
5. Government offers to buy remaining privately-owned properties at very low prices and also to offer their owners low-rent permanent tenancies too (for occupiers only).
The thing regarding 5 is that many people without mortgages once they woke up and smelled the coffee would say fine. They’d accept say £5K now and a permanent tenancy at low rent, given that that would be roughly the same amount they might get for their house on the open market (because there wouldn’t be much demand, because of 4), and given that houses come with maintenance costs.
Basically smash landlordism, crash the insane property market that currently only benefits landlords and moneylenders, and introduce secure housing for everyone. That’s win-win-win.
But of course here in the real world that’s never going to happen, because the idea of some kind of social democratic reform of capitalism is garbage and the only way to get rid of capitalism is by revolutionary violence…
… which similarly isn’t going to happen because almost everyone picks their f***ing smartphones and has been made as thick as two short planks …
…but hey, maybe after the megacull there will be some hope….
but once microchip implantation is compulsory at birth (or before) (probably less than 10 years away), I may be being somewhat unrealistically optimistic.
Seriously who can disagree with the above??
A revolution involving mass loss of life and being branded with the mark of some “antichrist” dictator in the case of adults, even if children get out of it somehow
This looks like the scenario in the film “Six: the mark unleashed“.
I hope we get spared such a thing.
MJ, they’re are’nt many Councils that actually, any longer, have a “Housing Stock”, that quaint concept disappeared around 20 years ago. Housing Stock transfer to ALMOs (Arms Length Management Organisations) and multiply merged housing consortia was the final nail in the coffin following Thatcher’s Right to Buy initiative. The vast numbers of former Council residential properties are now owned by the Banking sector and managed on their behalf by semi-privatised Social Housing Providers.
I’m not finding anything saying housing benefit/Universal Credit is a cause of the housing crisis. It’s underpaid compared to market rates. Though LLs are allowed loopholes to decrease size or facilities or support but still charge the full Local Housing Allowance rate (often more, so someone has to make up the shortfall). That does chronically contribute to ill health, social/family problems and homelessness.
The real theme seems to be underbuilding for decades, for whatever root reason?
@GratedApe – That’s so chock-full of buzzphrases I don’t understand a word of it.
If I look for a semantic minimum in your first two sentences, I get “housing benefit is paid at less than market rates”. (I hadn’t realised it was paid in return for anything, let alone something that could be sold on a market.)
If I try with the last sentence, I get “there should be more houses”.
You work in an office, where dealing in bureaucratic jargonistic terms that objectify people and what gets done to people and groups of people is the culture, am I right? And where no written sentence is considered truly tasty unless it’s got a forward slash in it?
There are easily enough houses for everyone to live in comfortably – fact.
“I’m not finding anything saying…” Are you Laura Kuenssberg? 🙂
No but I’ve had to deal with that bureaucracy too much.
Why do so many sources, and the Labour Party, talk about the need to build more houses then? Just lobbying by builders?
Housing Benefit is paid at a maximum called the Local Housing Allowance. Rents have often increased more than that.
To reduce the housing crisis, two things are required simultaneously: (1) gradual demand reduction – which unfortunately means a reduction in housing benefit rates, forcing people to downsize or move to cheaper areas (thus reducing rents in more expensive regions but risking further social stratfication), and an end to all those guaranteed mortgages, etc; and (2) increasing housing supply, which would be a much more fundamental change as it would require shifting to publicly funded homebuilding, with a large proportion of housing stock to remain in public ownership for decades (so, no right to buy whatsoever). They would be both extremely unpopular.
Vienna is often mentioned as an example of sensible housing policies – they had courage to take unpopular decisions decades ago, and now are one of best capitals in the world as regards quality of life. Rents are also half of those in London.
Would there be a government willing to risk the wrath of so many people – HB recipients and landlords alike – to reform the housing sector? I doubt.
Reply to Kacper in absence of reply button:
Surprisingly this 2015 research paper says its only the second ever done on your claim about UK rental subsidies (and its only cited by one paper on Scholar, out of New Zealand).
It https://www.sole-jole.org/assets/docs/15451.pdf seems to say you may generally be wrong.
After the housing benefit cap was reduced from covering 50% of rents locally, to covering only the cheapest 30% of rents locally, rents barely reduced for most tenants. Who instead just became poorer, rather than moving out of area, if im reading it right.
And after that paper, the cap was frozen against inflation for years, even as rents rose more than inflation, as i recall. Meanwhile the lords of the lands were allowed to use false advertising to claim full cap for ‘flats’ which are really ensuite bedsit rooms the size of prison cells (the minimum size in the Standards if councils choose to sign up to them) plus a kitchen sink & cupboard.
“Why do so many sources, and the Labour Party, talk about the need to build more houses then? Just lobbying by builders?”
No, lobbying by land speculators aka “developers”. The big money is to be made by buying up land at agricultural land prices and then getting permission to build houses on it. All the “developers” have huge land banks of farmland that they are hoping to get PP on and therefore make themselves billions.
There is absolutely no evidence that building more houses makes them cheaper and plenty of evidence that it makes them more expensive. All the periods of the greatest housebuilding activity in the C20th coincided with the periods of greatest price rises.
“To reduce the housing crisis, two things are required simultaneously”
The “housing crisis” is a myth made up by land speculators. There is no shortage of housing. If there was, estate agent’s windows would be empty. There is no shortage of cheap housing. The only shortage is of cheap housing in places where housing is expensive.
Supply and demand have almost no effect on the price of housing, which is dictated by location and the availability of money to buy said housing. The boom and bust cycle of house prices bears no relation to the supply of or demand for housing. In fact it is the other way around rising prices stimulate demand, as people want to own an appreciating asset and falling prices lower it as people don’t want to buy a depreciating asset.
“I wish someone campaigned on this theme.”
Nobody puts UBI on their platform for the simple reason that it is universally hated. The rich hate it because it gives money to the undeserving poor, and the poor hate it because it gives money to the rich who don’t need it.
If you look upthread you will see that there are already comments from two of the “if you give money to the poor they won’t work” school of thought, if not more by now.
I don’t hate it. I’d rather everyone got a benefit at the risk of some greedy rich people grabbing it, because they always do that anyway.
Yes, sorry, “universally” should perhaps have been “widely”. It is, however a monument to the mean-spirited nature of so many British that they worry about someone else getting something when that benefit to the other has no effect on what they themselves receive. I would like to conduct an experiment where groups of two people picked at random and one is asked whether they would prefer to receive £10 with the other also getting £10 or £20, with the other getting £100.
However the rich people wouldn’t be grabbing the UBI, they would be entitled to it as well. As it is, everyone who pays income tax is effectively getting a handout of £50/week because of the tax-free personal allowance.
To stop rich people getting UBI you’d have to add means testing and that’s not part of UBI
The easiest way to “stop” rich people getting UBI is to have, as an alternative, a nil income tax band, where the tax not paid is exactly equal to the UBI, so you can either pay no tax on the first £X,000 of your income or you can get the UBI and pay tax on the lot.
Yes, and it is so obvious. Why isn’t neoliberalism just dead in the water!
Because it suits the rich, who are the paymasters of the political class, just fine.
right on.. thanks for saying all that… the last section applies equally to canada where i live..
You need to be having a chat with Gary Stephenson of https://www.youtube.com/@garyseconomics 🙂
(Gasp) But Starmer took a picture of Maggie down from the wall of his study!
More seriously, I asked ChatGPT to compare and contrast the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher, Gordon Brown and Keir Starmer.* I won’t quote the long response in full, but Starmer appears to be greener and more committed to welfare state support for the most vulnerable than Thatcher, but not as much as Brown
*That just made me think of a joke. A teacher gives someone a C for an essay.
‘But Sir/Miss, to be honest I was in a hurry, and used AI to compose it.’
‘Well, I was also in a hurry and used AI to mark it!’
Best policy is as soon as something seems as though it was written by a biggie comp prog, don’t read the rest of it.
Join the human side.
Surely I’m not the only person who has noticed that when you ask a biggie comp prog a difficult question that can’t be answered in the same way as “What is the capital of France?”, it as often as not gives you an annoyingly sophomoric answer with all the inaccuracies and gaps in knowledge and logic covered up the way an annoying 14yo might contort himself to cover them up. And then you have to ask again in baby language as if you were talking to an idiot.
If people think this is a nice and stimulating and enriching experience their minds and souls must be very impoverished.
Then again, perhaps they work in an office or something.
Well the current upshot is that Reform is odds on favourite to win the forthcoming Runcorn and Helmsby by – election. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Powellism won in the country as a whole in 2016 and didn’t get what it wanted, so what do we expect?
It’s not a question of “We want X” but “We were robbed of Y”, which is a much bigger motivator. Cf. if you can do something to make an extra £1, compared with how you feel if someone steals £1 from your pocket. Almost everyone who voted for Brexit did so because they don’t like non-whites and foreigners living here and coming here and conducting themselves as if they have a right to. That is the ugly fact. And immigration has continued apace. And their living standards are falling down the toilet, and they are so f***ing stupid they blame non-whites and foreigners. Good luck to anyone who wants to talk to the thickos about Gaza.
Tommy “Hair Gel” Robinson is due to be released in July. Maybe Elon Musk can arrange for a Tesla to pick him up at the prison gate?
July is also the earliest time there could be another parliamentary election in France. The Macron link with Cyril Hanouna is fascinating.
“Almost everyone who voted for Brexit did so because they don’t like non-whites and foreigners living here and coming here and conducting themselves as if they have a right to.”
That is pure Remain propaganda. I take it you voted for Remain. A huge chunk of people who voted for Brexit only did so because David Cameron aligned the government with Remain and they hated the government and David Cameron and wanted to vote against anything DC wanted them to vote for. Leave didn’t win the referendum, Remain lost it.
The problem for the UK economy is that it isn’t just the unemployed or even the dependants of the lower paid who aren’t (in strictly macroeconomic, financial terms) productive. The employees in our enormous public sector are, of course, also entirely dependent on government for their salaries and wages too. Thus while, on paper, a GP earning £100,000 or so seems to be contributing to the GDP, because he or she is paying large amounts of tax – that salary is in its entirety paid for by taxpayers in the private sector, many earning less.
The Guardian’s columnists hypocritically wring their hands about the plight of the disadvantaged when much of the blame for the lack of money are a) ruinous spending on British foreign policy that they support, whether it is defence or Brexit, as well as the legacy of the lockdowns which ‘progressives’ said hadn’t been harsh enough and b) grossly overpaid (and too numerous) civil servants, managers and specialists in the public sector. ‘Thatcher’ is a convenient bogeyman for the Guardian and their ilk to hide the extremist policies at home and abroad that they themselves thoroughly support and have been complicit in (many of which Thatcher herself would never have countenanced).
Britain actually spends very little on defence. Aircraft carriers and Storm Shadow missiles have nothing to do with defence.
Re-naming the War Office to “Ministry of Defence” was a classic example of Orwellian Newspeak.
“Thus while, on paper, a GP earning £100,000 or so seems to be contributing to the GDP, because he or she is paying large amounts of tax – that salary is in its entirety paid for by taxpayers in the private sector, many earning less.”
doesnt that kind of prove that the private sector is flawed
“Thus while, on paper, a GP earning £100,000 or so seems to be contributing to the GDP, because he or she is paying large amounts of tax – ”
GDP has nothing to do with taxation and vice versa. If a GP earning £100,000 pa spend all that in the course of the year, that’s £100,000 on GDP.
Craig Murray This –
“.. A higher deficit only leads to an increase in interest rates if you wish to seek to maintain the value of your currency in international markets. But like so many of these economic targets, the justification of this is a matter of convention more than reason. I have seen massive swings in the value of sterling over my lifetime, which have had little impact on the UK’s steady economic decline, although a habitual tendency to over-valuation has contributed to the wipeout of British manufacturing industry… ”
… is mainstream false information. UK Gov *issues new £s* as it spends. Gov ‘borrowing’, aka Gov Bonds, Gilts etc. is a fake narrative, not applicable to UK monetary system since the Bretton Woods currency pegs (& US$ to gold peg) ended in 1971.
Further, the interest rate offered on Bonds (BoE base rate) is set by the Gov via its BoE, & not ‘markets’.
Not only is it not necessary for Gov to pay interest on these *risk-free savings accounts* for banks & the rich, Gov doesn’t need to offer them at all. The original reason was for Gov to manage its FX rates – increasing rates to encourage big finance to hold £s (in Bonds or reserves form) and not exchange for other currencies, which would push value of £s down.
Not applicable in floating rate regime since 1971.
But you are right to observe that FX rate fluctuations have very little impact on the real economy. (‘Real terms of trade’ are slow to move & not affected by short term Fx changes, which are driven by capital/big finance flows, not real trade.)
The reality is that UK Gov can buy or hire all domestic real resources & labour available priced in £s sterling.
Prof. Stephanie Kelton explains the basics in her lecture for UCL at the British Library in 2018 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IBEoWSiTHc
Fair enough, but what, then is the cause of inflation?
According to Richard Murphy, inflation is caused when the government releases lots of money but does not take enough of it back in taxation. (Richard Murphy’s blog, funding the future.) He also provides lots of simple ways the government could raise money without hurting poor people.
Thanks, but how does excessive government spending against insufficient taxation cause inflation? It’s not something that is immediately obvious.
It doesn’t necessarily. If the government spends on things that are in low supply the price of those things may rise, in which case it can tax those things to reduce demand for them, or it can try to increase supply somehow. Only if everything is in low supply will government net spending induce general inflation.
Something not mentioned so far is the issue of “Off-Shore holdings” or banking facilities performed overseas, often in, but not confined to, British Sovereign Territories like the Cayman Islands, Channel Islands etc. These provide an exhorbitant priviledge to the very wealthy, not enjoyed by 99%+ of the UK working population and/or small businesses or SMEs. The minimally waged Careworker in one of our privately owned Care Homes (locally owned and managed Council Old People’s Homes, of which there were plenty, disappeared ages ago) pays full tax and national insurance on their meagre earnings. The Care Home, charging upto £1000 per week per resident is not so wearily burdened, through perfectly legal tax avoidence measure and magical financial manipulation, they pay the barest minimum, if any at all apart from business rates and afaik they may even be exempt from paying them. I’m a great believer in the concept that: if you earn here, you pay your dues here. All this brass plated letter boxes in faraway lands needs sorting asap, as it’s clearly a unique advantage enjoyed by the very few and not the majority. In fact it’s even worse to the extent that these same few enjoy all the advantages and utility of our publicly funded utilities for free. Another small example of socialised costs and losses and privatised profits.
Note also that for ‘inflation’ to be *continuous* & not mere prices increase stabilised at a new level, it requires the Gov to continuously accept higher prices as the *currency issuer monopolist* setter of the general price level.
It is well within Gov’s power to provide reasonable prices stability in managing this, & at full employment.
This is the definitive statement of the system operation, written in US context, but UK system is functionally identical in a Gov issued fiat (floating) currency.
http://moslereconomics.com/mmt-white-paper/
If you do as Craig suggests ie Increase state borrowing and lower interest rates the result would be inflation fall in the value of the £ leading to further inflation further decreasing the value of the £.
It would take about 5 minutes for the financial markets to work out what was going on.
Net result UK goes from becoming a ” Rich” country to a 3rd world ” Poor ” country . ( With no power to harm a flee, perhaps what Craig really wants ).
The poor and disadvantaged would be worse off.
Most likely result in an economic collapse caused by hyper inflation leading to depression to revolution leading to some kind of dictatorship.
Warning! / spleen!
The Ziofascists of our uniparty nation – the Great Knight Dope , Brave Herr KyirStarmztrooper and his poxy Camelot. I won’t mention him again.
The purpose of our globalists neoliberal/neocon unipolar hegemonic system for the last 50 years had been to spread un-happiness.
Britons were happier and not so divided between rich and poor into the seventies!
You could rent or buy a house and raise a family on a single wage!
Maggie put paid to that with her hand bag economic voodoo and loddsamoney culture. The privatisations.
The purpose was to make people poorer. So they don’t raise their heads.
To set them against each other so the tyranny of the ages can be restored.
Back to the haves and have-nots.
Including removing these basic securities of housing, education, health and welfare.
The return back to the halcyon happy days for the tyrants , who used to glory in their aristocracy, born to rule certitudes and through the Crown hand themselves great wealth and keep the rest of the population as forelock tugging happy salt o’the earth servants or really poor starving to death vagrants of the Victorian era.
There was 30 years of the ‘Trente Glorious’ as a result of the old order having to kowtow to the masses – the working classes – after the Red Army survived and tore to pieces the mighty proxy Nazis that were set up to destroy and take over EurAsia. Thus winning the World Island for those who have long craved it. The ziofascist global robber barons our highest elites of the Collective West.
The Europeans and Americans were given the public spending to stop them from seeing the Soviets as a better system.
That post war consensus was to avoid mass uprisings across Europe and hence joining the Soviets, who had proved they could put produce and beat the might of the Western fascism and industry. Yup – Nazis’were’us.
Our gentry, industrialist and Bankers, academics and marketers.
Joined at the hip across the Anglo European centuries of imperialism.
Playing at pass the baton empire building relay from one nation to another, using up its citizens to put boots on the ground for their conquests. Leaving each such nation as depopulated husks emptied of its wealth.
The current one the USA is where the populations were concentrated to make the mightiest conquistadors. It was their industrialist, banker oligarchs who financed and built that ww2 proxy Nazi Fascist Europe. It too has met its limits. Ahead of schedule.
Their End of History hubris has met a sudden end!
The final Empire that would seat above us all as the Greater ‘Wasrael’ – a giant white supremacist apartheid entity straddling EurAsia and Africa and owning the Seas and the ultimate resources and lands of EurAsia and Africa – for ever more – is not ready to take the Crown and it is NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.
Hence their desperate genocidal attacks in the Levant.
The desperation to achieve the grand aim is what has driven this centuries wars, forced migrations , agendas of supremacy.
The allusions and illusions of the Garden (and so the supposed jungle); the Golden Billion (so the culling of the human population that would threaten the hegemony, leaving just enough to service the Few for ever); the narratives of Fear. Climate, oil, resources, disease, food shortages …Islamophobia, that replaced communism as the big fear all to grab control and power back from the masses. The ultimate failure of democratic choice, by crass politics. To incite apathy and welcome tyranny.
Our establishment, our hierarchy, our academia and ‘Intelligentsia’, the media and the political whores are all pulling in that same direction. As they have been for the fifty years and two generations. Raising the entitled, woke , broke, liberal and libertarian Collective Wastes crop of neo-upstairs/downstairs, Few/Many orthodoxy poisoned young minds through propaganda or the cultural hegemony.
They the now retirement age are the real class traitors – whether they play the game of left/right or centerism. They who cry about inequality but are part of enforcing the system that made it more so. They who teach their young that it’s ok, as long as they are ‘all right Jack’.
The lies ! ‘We’ are the best! The liberal tolerant West. Our great country – ‘look at all the Ilegal migrants who want to come here’ ; as some form of squirrel pointing dog whistle racism.
An excuse for the ever increasing austerity; the encouragement of ‘illegal migrants’, of large numbers flown and boated in young men stolen from their homelands from distant countries and continents. That can be housed in high profile hotels in their hundreds – what for? To achieve the inevitable angst of getting the locals wound up!
Blaming the illegal migrants for lack of housing and doctors and nurses and failing public service – because we don’t build anymore social housing, we don’t employ more doctors and nurses, we let the privatised companies run down the infrastructure and don’t nationalise them when they are bankrupt!
I see that ‘Brains Dr Strangelove c**t Cummings’ is out showering us with his genius again, as he did for BrexShit/Covid scams. Because Fartage and Yaxley-Lenon are not appealing to the younger generations anymore. Even the twatterspoons captured park benchers have abandoned these new churches where such ‘mass formation’ base racism was hot housed. Too hooked already on their TeeVee and football and cheap supermarket booze. Better to keep people divided and hooked on that rolling News propaganda.
The failure of the Great Game proxy Ukrainian Nazis war is driving them insane.
As is the exponential industrial and high tech production values of the Chinese.
The failure to retain the top of the pyramid in the world economy as the financial wizard hegemons, the social media app rentierism, the control of agro industry to induce mass starvation to cull the populations.
‘Slow down’ they beg the Chinese. ‘Give us your resources’ they demand of the Russians and Venezuelans, as they already the control of the Arabs except Iran now.
Remain poor ‘they demand of Africa’.
All of their great plans of the ages are like a fly meeting a truck head on!
They are being splattered and the last thing that will go through their minds is the arses they think and talk out of.
There is nowt left to do but crying, stages of grief, bargaining, denial, demanding respect, demanding obedience … anything but acceptance.
Imposing censorship. Shutting down multipolarist voices. Supporting daily genocide in Ukraine, the Levant and farther away. Blaming any dissent as judaeophobia! Illegal summary arrests and jailing and punishing anyone who refuses the Narrative.
The end is nigh for our Collective Waste and our supposed elites and professors – crying more daily of the unfair world of multipolar rising bogey fascism, threatening our unipolar … real life daily fascism!
The scapegoats are being readied – heroes to villains, a lot of smoke and mirrors for the old shapeshifters to escape with their loot into the next century, to build another proxy generation to try again at that world domination! If the multipolar are dumb enough to let them.
Fuck them and all who sail with them.
Phew \ spleen.
“Economic growth” has to stop (second link), because global human energy usage cannot continue growing (first link):
Galactic-Scale Energy (below) proves that human total energy usage has to stop growing, really quite soon:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
Can Economic Growth Last? (below) proves that the economy cannot grow unless energy usage grows:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last/
Summary of second point using reductio ad absurdum – If the economy could continue growing without using ever more energy, energy and physical things like food would become infinitely cheap compared to all the flashy new products and services, such that even a pauper could buy up the entire world’s energy supply.
So Craig is right; we are witnessing the death throes of capitalism. “Good luck, Jim.”
“Summary of second point using reductio ad absurdum – If the economy could continue growing without using ever more energy”
Clark.
I’d image – when the politicians and the huge corporations that now run the world talk about growth they mean their growth, and not ours – they’ve been hinting at population reduction in one way or another for years now -and with the leap in AI and robotics – many humans in their cold business like eyes of figures and spreadsheets – we will be seen as surplus and expendable.
There is a simpler argument against continuous economic growth, which is that all activity generates heat as a byproduct, therefore the more activity you have, whether it is in computers, physical work or just thinking, the more heat it produces. Thus it can be seen that contiuous growth of the amount of activity must eventually reach a point where the heat generated makes the Earth uninhabitable. Of course, the energy would run out long before that, but we are talking about continuous growth here, which means no check or hindrance.
Well said Clark.
By the year 2040 the ppm of CO2 will be 600. From now on every year will see an increase in CO2 equivalent to 100million years of past increases and nobody dares to speak about this record breakng development. Not even in the run up to the warmest period ever did the earth experienced such a rapid rise.
Methane is not part of the equation, it has a longer lifespan until it breaks down, but more and more warming will see more methane released.
No economic program is dealing with such financial debilitating facts, or remedial actions to increasing loss of forrests, beneficial species, or the lack of water.
Our economic politics are geared towards fighting wars for the last reserves of resources that can be used to further enrich the already rich.
Offshore assets should be nationalised and taxed accordingly. Most of these vast sums have bypassed the exchequer, a crime imho and a 50/50 split tax agreement, with raised sums to be used to reduce the North south divide, better services, a revitalised NHS and long awaited care and mental health services.
There should be a triple lock ban on spending anything on wars in other countries, armaments, or space weapons.
Environmental degradation and deforestation should also be regarded as more important than environmentally devastating wars. Military budgets should be halved in favour of environmental restitution on a massive scale.
When I was at school Clark, I remember hearing about the grains of rice on the chessboard. However, that doesn’t mean that humanity isn’t currently producing a ****-ton of rice and, if it put its mind to it, couldn’t produce at least an order of magnitude more.
Anyone thinking that humanity will destroy itself through global warming or an energy crisis may wish to gain some perspective by reading this book:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Precipice-Existential-Risk-Future-Humanity/dp/0316484911
(For those not wanting to contribute to Toby Ord’s effective altruism fund, it has its own Wiki page, which should give you the nub of the gist of the take-home point).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Precipice:_Existential_Risk_and_the_Future_of_Humanity
Three years ago, Ukraine produced virtually no drones. Last year, drones were estimated to have caused around 70% of the Russian casualties in Ukraine. This year, Zelensky says it will produce over four million drones (so that’ll be around two million then – still plenty). The Ukrainians are starting to experiment with mesh networks and AI targeting, and several militaries are paying close attention (not so much EU ones mind because most of those can barely grasp what’s going on at the best of times). In the words of David Wojnarowicz: I’d smell the flowers while you can.
The MoD’s new weapons will be paid for – off the backs of the poor, disabled and vulnerable – the same group of people, the most vulnerable in society – will also suffer, so that weapons and aid can be sent to Israel and Ukraine – the Neo-Nazi, Zionist supporter Starmer – has also signed a hundred year deal with Zelensky/Ukraine – whatever that entails, and I’ve read that Stramer has underwritten much of Ukraine’s debt, which of course will be paid for by the British taxpayer, at a later date.
As you rightly say the poorer folk in society on benefits spend their moneys in their local communities – so if you reduce their money – then you reduce the amount they spend in their local communities – which inturn will see shops close and jobs lost – its a vicious circle – that only spirals downward; but hey look on the bright side they’ll be new shiny weapons – that the British government and their corporate buddies can use to murder then exploit foreign lands, under the guise of bringing freedom and democracy – to where none existed.
Its all downhill from here on in.
And if one tries to argue with a supporter of Guns before Letting the Proles have Butter, inevitably they will fall back on the knuckledragger-brained “Because otherwise Russian soldiers will be soon be bivouacking in the Home Counties”.
Even in their own terms – their own f*cking terms! – what they SAY is currently the international relations position would mean that 80 years of British foreign policy, including the last 35 years, was based on allying with the USA for completely idiotic reasons. One could also ask why don’t they take their pathetic little regime under China’s wing…but it would soon come back to the idea of soldiers with red stars on their hats crapping in Surrey rhododendron bushes and undermining inherited wealth.
Although of course I don’t think the ruling scum really are idiotic. They’ve made profit all along.
I recently met someone for whom it seemed to be of major importance that there was a “Labour” government now rather than a self-described Tory one, and I was like “What planet do you live on?” Maybe I should have asked the person to tell me three policy differences.
“New Labour’s economic policy is Thatcherism, pure and simple.”
Well yes it might try to be, but current politicians seem to forget that Thatcher had much higher income from various North Sea oil revenues, utility privatisations, and selling off companies such as Rolls Royce.
Starmer does not have this kind of money to play with.
Rail got far more state subsidy after the privatisation scam than it did when it was in the state sector.
The Thatcher government invested very little in Britain. Nor did it encourage rich b*stards to. Let them take their money abroad was one of the first things Thatcher did.
Fat John
In one.
The truth is that those who work receive the least and the capitalists ( who’s only work is to’ work ‘ out the best plan for exploiting said workers ) is probably the only work they will do in the course of their lives.
the UK as an example is split into two component GDP parts;
1) The Finance and Services sector
2) The Manufacturing/Industrial Sector.
Number 1) relies on number 2) for actual genuine capital accumulation ( the thing where a profit is made by exploitation of workers – The Theory of Labour Value) and then the profit can be either spent ( buy an Antique Vase or shop at Lidl ?) or
re-invest some of the profit ( like buying a Loom that does the work of 100 people and not ten) and further enhance your next amount of profit to re- invest or shop at Aldi.
Finance Capital ( the current mode of non production materially produces nothing and adds to GDP as a mathematical addition rather than a material addition.
If the capitalist makes something of use – maybe a Washing machine then the thing is actually materially made and has a use.
People can wash their clothes in it – it is useful.
If the Red Braces wearing Boys in ‘ The City ‘ lend the money to buyers of said Washing Machine then they have added absolutely nothing to its use value except fees – interest and Service Insurance in case it breaks down.
In other words they are parasites on the means of production.
They had no role in the making of the Washing machine but, gain income/profit from its existence.
That in the majority of GDP ‘ Growth ‘ is its function.
Nice work if you can get it.
So Finance and GDP are based on a fiction.
Gross Domestic ‘ Production’ ( note production ) means producing ( making ) material goods and not shares – property ( houses already built ) and paintings and antiques and possibly yachts etc etc should not come into any equations re: GDP
but they are added in as though they represent Growth.
Growth in Finance but not ‘ Production’
No doubt Faisal Islam will explain all that to BBC viewers in the very near future but it is unnerving yet., not surprising that he won’t ,as he is not alone in being one many defenders of capitalism who has no idea as to how capitalism works ( not even the basics) and his possibly expensive University education was wasted on not understanding anything.
To be fair to Faisal – Starmer and Rachel Reeves know even less about capitalism than he does.
Small comfort – but there it is.
The worker shopping at Lidl is what Marx would have analogised with “small-scale circulation”. The only thing it helps produce is the labour-power of the worker.
The idea that the ruling class don’t know what they’re doing when they reduce the incomes of parts of the working class, because then they can’t sell them so much stuff in shops, and “effective demand” is “good for the economy”, is…shall we be kind and call it “naive”?
Marx was right about the increasing centralisation and concentration of capital, as is evidenced all around us. There is just no denying this.
He was also right about the falling rate of profit, but this can be offset
1. by intensification (again, we can see all around us how so many areas of life have become increasingly dominated by the law of value – including outside of “production” in the strict sense) and
2. (as will soon become clear) by the destruction of a megacull.
The big question for communists is what to do about this in an epoch where in much of the world the large majority of people have been sheeple-ified with no sudden throwing off of mental shackles on the horizon, and no large-scale resistance to microchip implantation and the megacull to be reasonably expected.
What do you think of this kind of orientation, @Mark? I’d be interested to hear your views.
“Number 1) relies on number 2) for actual genuine capital accumulation ( the thing where a profit is made by exploitation of workers – The Theory of Labour Value”
Your economics were already out of date by the mid C20th, if you think that all profits are made by idle capitalists employing masses of exploited workers in some grimy factory. Mind you, you are in good company, the government is similarly out of date.
You are however, right about GDP not being a measure of useful work, since it contains so much that is zero sum activity (the measure of your gain is entirely the measure of my loss).
Bayard
Of course it will be outdated and if Marx was around now he would write another mountain of books on the subject of Capitalism and of course Modern Imperialism. But the actual way capitalists gain capital to either invest or spend is through exploitation of workers by the hour.
Nothing has really changed and by and large inputs to production do not vary too much. So if you used to be able to get one hour say for a tenner an hour with an old machine then if you re-invest your capital to buy a machine that does the work of ten men and still pay him a tenner (or £12 just for goodwill) that’s how you do it.
You can also sack the other nine workers too as a bonus. Or exploit 10 men with machines that do the work of ten men – the gains are extremely good. This is called Productivity which all the sages rattle on about.
Not a lot has changed in terms of exploitation whether you work for Uber/Amazon or do a paper round. It’s just all hidden in the mask of Finance Capital.
Commonly known as The Giant Squid in the case of Goldman-Sachs.
So your answer to the exploitation of workers is Luddism, is it? Get rid of the machines! Everything will be built by hand, using hand tools only. Get rid of power tools while you are about it, they only enable workers to produce more for the same wage, increasing their exploitation.
You obviously haven’t thought this through. You have completely discounted the effects of competition. A reasonable laptop computer costs about £1K. Twenty years ago, such a computer also cost about £1K, yet £1K today has nothing like the purchasing power that it had twenty years ago. Your wonderful new machine that produces ten times what the old machine produced for the same labour input firstly has to be paid for out of those horrid profits you so dislike. All that extra produce must be sold if that profit is to be made. In order to sell ten units where you were previously selling one, you will need to reduce the price. Other manufacturers who have also bought the new machine will be making similar calculations so down the prices will come until the profit made after paying for the new machine is little greater than the profit made before. Yes, there are nine workers out of a job in every factory where the new machines are brought in, but the argument against that is not to have machines at all, and I’ve already addressed that.
The main problem is not capitalist greed, but that the cost of labour is too high. The cost of labour is too high because labour has four separate taxes levied on it, income tax, employee’s national insurance, employer’s national insurance and compulsory pension contributions. Also much labour is further taxed by having VAT levied on it.
Sure you could get rid of capitalists, but who then will stump up the capital to fund all those capital-intensive things that are necessary to keep commerce moving on? Any organisation that makes things which has lost access to capital faces a slow death as things wear out and there is no money to replace them. Having the government do this is not the answer as government spending is always spending other peoples’ money on other people, so no-one really gives a shit whether the price or the product is right. The problem isn’t capitalism, or any other ism, the problem is as old as the human race, greed, selfishness and a lack of care for others. If you think that getting rid of capitalism will get rid of those three, I have a bridge to sell you.
Just this minute turned on my laptop to check my email, and there was one from Declassified UK – ie a notification sent out a couple of hours or so ago with a list of articles from last week, and this was the first one in the list, posted on March 18th:
How Starmer aided Trump’s deadly bombing of Yemen
Exclusive: Britain provided aerial refuelling for US jets during Yemen airstrikes that killed 53 people, including women and children.
Prime minister Keir Starmer quietly involved Britain’s armed forces in President Donald Trump’s bombardment of Yemen last weekend, Declassified can confirm.
A Royal Air Force (RAF) Voyager aerial refuelling tanker carried out two flights from Akrotiri airbase in Cyprus into the northern Red Sea to support the USS Harry S. Truman.
The US aircraft carrier launched multiple waves of air raids across Yemen on Saturday and Sunday in Trump’s largest military operation since returning to office….
https://www.declassifieduk.org/how-starmer-aided-trumps-deadly-bombing-of-yemen/
Apologies if anyone posted it at the time (in another thread) [ Mod: Yes, Stevie Boy did, a week ago – see ‘The Curious case of Mahmoud Khalil’ 18/3/2025 @ 9:53am & ‘The Rot at the Core of Democracy’ 18/3/2025 @ 1:56pm. ]
Yes, it seemed unlikely to me that someone hadn’t seen the article at the time and, as such, posted a link to it. And having just checked SBs posts that you linked to, I recall that I read them both, BUT, didn’t click on the link in either post, OR, as I realise now, actually read what the link said.
Not much gets passed the guys and gals on here!
The Atlantic leak regarding the US bombing of Yemen was probably a Zionist operation to widen divisions between the USA and the EU.
(See especially the 3% and 40% figures that were mentioned in the conversation about the proportions of trade that go through Suez for the USA and “Europe” respectively.)
Not sure where Britain fits in in that scenario.
I don’t believe anyone gets included in such conversations by accident.
The 3% and 40% figures were mentioned – in a conversation about military action to be conducted within hours, not in a strategic discussion – by J D Vance. He probably said it so it would be leaked, and probably on his Zionist handlers’ instructions. I am assuming he doesn’t say whatever comes into his head whenever he feels like it.
One of the aims of the US government, or more exactly their owners, is to crash the global economy. They didn’t manage it in Q1 or at least not before triple witching day but…
Brian Red
From a ‘ Transactionalist ‘ point of view Vance is correct.
But, if the US and Israel attack Iran then there is a prospect of the Iranians scuttling ships in t
the Straits of Hormuz and daring any body to try and move them plus, Hezbollah – the Yemenis and Iran
itself blowing up all the OPEC Oilfields and causing energy prices to go through the roof.
Trump is the Master of the Deal and his MAGA supporter would not take kindly to the loss of their cheaper
oil imports becoming very dear in the future.
Perhaps Putin gets it and Trump and Netanyahu don’t?
Looking likely to me if trump is a dumb as I think he is?
Netanyahu will shrug his shoulders and think:
‘ Keeps me out of jail – so who cares’
Trump’s “transactionalism” only goes so far. One could say look at all the benefits the rich elite in the US have received from their weapons contracts with the US government, an organisation that has has upheld property laws to protect their interests, so why not quadruple their taxes to make them pay for their benefits. But of course no rightwinger ever thinks like that.
Trump and co are testing out how much various “things” or existing ways of doing things are worth.
Hopefully in at least one or two hitherto pro-USA European countries, there will be some who try to expose what this all says about the compradore hegemony that has now lasted for several generations. Our opponents will of course shout “Russia”, because that’s the only thing they’ve got.
If one wishes to talk about “cost”, how much has e.g. Britain’s NATO membership and alliance with the f***ing USA cost? How much has it “cost” to buy nuclear weapons and warplanes from a foreign power that controls the switches in them, a foreign power that no longer wants to be an ally?
Anyway, vive Mélenchon!
They were already recklessly using an unsuitable unauthorised app. Which is designed to auto add contacts and detect if they’re on it too.
Sure, but the leak comes NOW.
Auto-add contacts? I doubt if someone’s got 100 contacts and they set up a group this messaging program will add all their contacts to the new group. (Not that I’ve ever belonged to a messaging service group of any kind.) Besides, these are basically white-collar d*ckheads who enjoy setting up meetings and controlling who’s at the meetings, and using all the lingo when they’re engaging in this pathetic activity, as if it makes them not the tw*ts that they are but as cool as cowboys. That even seemed like half of what their chat was about in this particular conversation! (Not to sound like a Maoist, but 10 years digging the fields would be good for them!)
Your last paragraph sounds like the ‘good life’ philosophy of Epicurus. I agree that society benefits from being founded on some such ‘good life’ philosophy (as in doing/being good, not having goods). There are other variants.
Here’s the latest re Trump’s war on the student protesters:
‘This Is a Witch Hunt’: Trump Admin Demands Colleges Provide Name and Nationality of Student Protesters
“There is no doubt that it can be used improperly,” said one attorney.
Eloise Goldsmith
Mar 25, 2025
Critics are raising grave civil liberties concerns after the Washington Post reported Tuesday that the Trump administration is seeking to collect the names and nationalities of “students who might have harassed Jewish students or faculty” as part of a U.S. Department of Education probe into alleged antisemitism on multiple college campuses.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/university-investigation-antisemitism-witch-hunt
Funny how the US government dislikes federal authority when we’re talking about
* the Department of Education
* the right to abortion
* protection of minorities
but it absolutely loves federal authority when it can be used
* to crack down on opposition to the genocide
* to detain and deport immigrants (we don’t hear them saying “let the states pay for disregarding illegal immigration”)
Staying on the US theme: perhaps it wasn’t the Zionists who were behind Signalgate – perhaps it was the Brits! It would make sense, because driving a wedge between the USA and the EU could be a British foreign policy aim, insofar as the Brit regime is allowed to have one. Or perhaps there were a coupla bods in SIS who thought it would be a wheeze and who also said thank you kindly (whether to Russia or the Zionists) for the payment. Has Christopher Steele commented yet?
One lesson to draw from Signalgate is that the USA gang, while talking with the Russian gang in Riyadh about freeing up the Black Sea, may be about to help close the Suez Canal (or Red Sea, which comes to the same thing).
Think about what that could mean for Europe.
This time, ships are hardly going to stack up in the region. Their insurers wouldn’t allow it.
They’ll go around the Cape as shipping did back in the 60’s when Nasser closed the Suez canal…Yep, more expensive and inconvenient…but, hey ho!
Starmer have praised Thatcher repeatedly for her obvious raw, inhumane, neo-liberal policies:
“Keir Starmer has praised Margaret Thatcher for effecting “meaningful change” in Britain in an article directly appealing to Conservative voters to switch to Labour.
Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, the Labour leader said Thatcher had “set loose our natural entrepreneurialism” during her time as prime minister.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/dec/02/keir-starmer-praises-margaret-thatcher-for-bringing-meaningful-change-to-uk
The result? Rising poverty, mass unemployment, weak unions.
Keir is nothing but a LOIN – Labour Only In Name.
Here’s Starmer’s piece in the Sunday Torygraph that they are referring to, from Dec 2023:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/02/voters-have-been-betrayed-on-brexit-and-immigration/
He boasts about having smashed the left in Labour to help his country.
He dares to quote William Blake when he’s doing it. Genocide Boy Starmer, you aren’t fit to lick Blake’s boots. (Although the same could be said about the Tory party.)
Starmer is saying vote Labour if you don’t want an immigrant for a neighbour.
“Keir is nothing but a LOIN – Labour Only In Name.”
Why do you call him by his first name, which incidentally he doesn’t deserve to carry?
He’s also a lickspittle of TORIP – The Occupation Regime in Palestine.
“Why do you call him by his first name, which incidentally he doesn’t deserve to carry?”
It seems to me that only hated politicians are called by their first name only, like Maggie or Boris. All others are generally referred to by both first and surnames or surname only.
Starmer seems set fair to combine the unpopularity of Maggie with the mendacity of Boris.
The US embassy will have been involved in the University of Sussex “freedom of speech” case, either directly or with Whitehall and British ministers, regulators, and judges wanting to show off to them for a biscuit.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/mar/26/university-of-sussex-fined-freedom-of-speech-investigation-kathleen-stock
The university has been fined nearly £600,000.
Curiously, similar developments are occurring simultaneously in the USA. Might the two possibly be related?
Not that I have a problem with Kathleen Stock saying what she wants. I’m not sure what she has said – I’m really not into reading academic material about gender identity – but if it’s against all the trans bullsh*t it might be OK.
In my opinion the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, was right when she said said: “Free speech and academic freedom are non-negotiables in our universities, and I have been clear that where those principles are not upheld, robust action will be taken.
“If you go to university you must be prepared to have your views challenged, hear contrary opinions and be exposed to uncomfortable truths. We are giving the OfS stronger powers on freedom of speech so students and academics are not muzzled by the chilling effect demonstrated in this case.”
The OfS criticism was directed at the university’s trans and non-binary equality policy statement, which required course materials to “positively represent trans people” and said “transphobic propaganda … will not be tolerated”. The regulator said it had “a chilling effect”, which could result in staff and students self-censoring.
“An example of this chilling effect materializing in practice is the experience of Prof Stock while at the university. Prof Stock said that she became more cautious in her expression of gender critical views as a result of the policy,” the OfS said. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/mar/26/university-of-sussex-fined-freedom-of-speech-investigation-kathleen-stock
Looking at it from another angle, many people who do not look positively at Zionism i.e, are vehemently opposed to it are ostracized and no platformed, some are accused of hate speech and are prosecuted. The Regulator is correct in his judgement.
I did a search earlier re the amount of money British companies pay out to shareholders, and this came up in the results:
Ownership of UK quoted shares: 2022
The value of ordinary shares held in UK incorporated companies listed on the London Stock Exchange by sector of the owner, with a geographical breakdown for shares owned outside the UK.
1. Main points
At the end of 2022, shares in quoted UK-domiciled companies listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) were worth a total of £2.42 trillion.
The proportion of UK shares held by overseas investors (rest of the world) increased again to a record high of 57.7% of the value of the UK stock market.
The proportion of UK shares held by UK-resident individuals fell to 10.8%, down by 1.2 percentage points from 2020.
The proportion of quoted shares held by banks continued to rise and stood at 3.4%, an increase of 0.3% from 2020.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/investmentspensionsandtrusts/bulletins/ownershipofukquotedshares/2022
And also this, posted in October, 2022:
Shareholder pay-outs growing three times faster than wages under the Tories – TUC analysis
Shareholder pay-outs have soared £440bn above inflation since 2008, while wages have been squeezed, growing £510bn less than inflation
Analysis demonstrates that the UK economy has the capacity for wage increases that workers are being denied
Truss should crackdown down on shareholder pay-outs that deprive British industry of investment instead of pitching herself against workers, says TUC
A new TUC report published today (Sunday) details how UK businesses have prioritised the interests of shareholders over workers, and how profits have been directed away from wage growth and investment in favour of dividend growth.
https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/shareholder-pay-outs-growing-three-times-faster-wages-under-tories-tuc-analysis
I don’t suppose much has changed in the last couple of years…
” A new TUC report published today (Sunday) details how UK businesses have prioritised the interests of shareholders over workers, and how profits have been directed away from wage growth and investment in favour of dividend growth. ”
Forty or fifty year old news although it has got worse thanks to private equity funds.
“Forty or fifty year old news although it has got worse thanks to private equity funds.”
It’s essentially asset stripping, although not quite as obvious as that practiced by Messrs Slater and Walker. After a few years of a company being starved of investment in both labour and other assets, the company goes bankrupt, but the private equity funds don’t care, they’ve already loaded the company up with debt and fleeced the other shareholders and employees, probably hoovered up their pensions as well. As you say, it’s been going on for decades. That’s why nobody makes much any more, there’s much easier and much more money to be made being a spiv.
My point of course was that couldn’t Starmer and what’s-her-face raise the dosh they say they need by putting a !% or 2% tax on the dividends paid out to shareholders, instead of clobbering the disabled etc. And I forgot to say in my post that I don’t suppose the vast majority of the population are aware of these two facts, and especially the first one. I had absolutely no idea how much it was – and I assume it’s been much the same in the last couple of years, and if I’ve got my arithmetic right, Starmer and Co could raise between 40 and 50 billion quid a year.
No they couldn’t. The powers that be wouldn’t let them. We only got the socialist government that we did after the war because a majority of the working population not only had been trained in the use of weapons, but had actually used them to kill people and there were a lot of “souvenirs” kicking around.
Bayard
There has never been a Socialist government in the UK
The only reason a Welfare State was ‘ allowed ‘ was due to the existence of The Soviet Union
For a period the Bourgeoisies of Europe thought it would be better to be a bit of a poorer capitalist
than not one at all after WW2.
Prior to that Roosevelt thought the same in The Depression.
They only do things out of fear – never out of concern for their people.
Another little fact for you.
European ( including British CND ) only started up when The Soviet Union developed the Atom Bomb.
Fear – not concern.
THEY – appear not to be scared now I think.
“There has never been a Socialist government in the UK”
I didn’t say there had been, I said that we had a socialist government.
“For a period the Bourgeoisies of Europe thought it would be better to be a bit of a poorer capitalist
than not one at all after WW2.”
Exactly, what stopped them preventing it was fear of an armed insurrection. Possibly the idea, not necessarily true, that the Soviets would have supported it, would have contributed to that fear, but the Soviet Union after the war was unlikely to be coming further west than the Iron Curtain.
“They only do things out of fear – never out of concern for their people.”
I have long been disabused of the notion that governments do anything out of concern for their people.
Bayard
When you say the PTB wouldn’t let them, what would, or could they do to stop them? I mean there’s no way the Starmerfuhrer and Reeves would ever do that of course, but if say Jeremy Corbyn had won and become PM in 2017, what could they have done to stop him doing that (in a scenario where Labour had a big majority and the vast majority of Labour MPs supported it)?
They simply would have told them not to do it. That’s why Corbyn had to go, it looked like he wouldn’t do what he was told.
Bayard
But what would they have done if they had? What do you think they COULD have done if they went ahead and did it anyway, despite the PTB telling them not to?
“But what would they have done if they had?”
The reason that Starmer is PM and not Corbyn is that he can be relied upon not to do things like that and Corbyn couldn’t. However, if we suppose that Reeves and Starmer have a Damascene conversion to real Socialism, I would expect the response of the PTB would be twofold: Publicly, they would “do a Corbyn” on them, sex being the traditional scandal of choice, although racism would do. Privately, I expect that they would be ostracised from all the coteries, clubs and grouping in Westminster than makes politics so much more of a pleasure.
Thank you good sir, for standing up for truth…
Bayard
I have to reply to your reply this way as being a Luddite is not much use in the age of the internet.
Someone said to Karl Marx ( a Commun – ist) that all human wealth is found in labour.
He replied : All human wealth is found in nature.
I have read endless missives about Natural Selection – Psychology of the masses and the law of the Jungle – Survival of the fittest and that is neither politics or economics – that’s psychology at worst and sociology at best.
I would recommend that you watch a few videos of Michael Hudson as he is much better placed to explain Marxism than myself.
But ( using Marx again ) if you ( humans ) don’t dig that Iron Ore out of the ground then convert it into steel to make XY and Z then by making the XY and Z you change humanities way of life and living I’ve got a Cave to sell you.
There you could light a fire and either stare at its beauty and warmth or convert it into something more useful to the tribe.
You are confusing natures bounty with the human action of exploiting nature and the ‘ ism ‘ called capitalism exploits humans as much as the humans used to exploit nature say growing crops.
Only the Mode of Production changes – Peasant to Industrial capitalist to Luddite to ruined and Left Behind Coal Miner etc etc.
It is not ‘ Natural ‘ to bring in a price for allowing someone to grow a crop – have a house – a decent education and eat well.
The Slaves ate well ( bad as slavery was) and the Serf ate well on The Landlord’s rented land but the introduction of Wage labour meant that if you don’t work – neither shall you eat.
Sound familiar in terms of the current debates above?
Wage labour is as I described before and my point was that products are actually physically produced by human beings working with machinery.
The billionaires/Millionaires that exist today are nothing like the old Industrial capitalists.
True that some do produce products with a use value but in the main they are rich due to share prices and skimming off profit from already manufactured goods – they have added nothing of value but they become involved in the lending of money to buy those products as well as charging fees and insuring already made goods.
That is roughly the state of play in The western capitalist world.
And I have sympathy with the Luddites as their ‘ means of production ‘ was under threat and their exploitational hourly rate ( when they had to surrender and work in the factories ) was subject to the capital and labour fight.
Nothing has fundamentally changed – to coin a phrase and the fight between capital and labour continues and it doesn’t matter what ‘ ism ‘ anyone calls – the fight and battles are a fact of life.
And I mean not just in the declining West but in the real other parts of the world.
Big mistake to think that the West will lead the charge towards World Socialism and that the other parts of the world must wait until that happens.
The West has failed spectacularly on that score so if it it is introduced in The West then it will have to be introduced from without.
By the way – productivity with technology and machinery can shorten the working week – we could then go fishing – read/write poetry and even go shopping if we wish.
The only thing getting in the way of that is the main ‘ism ‘ capitalism.
It restricts Humanity, as its sole aim is to make profit not to further the progress of the people of the world.
Donald is telling you this right now.
Now there’s a guy who loves retail and you know why?
Because ( and you are not wrong ) the people pay the end price ( including taxes) on everything.
Meaning ( if you think about it ) that the capitalist have not paid for anything.
The retail buyers have.
Nice work disguised as for our own good by the capitalists.
Basically we are paying for ourselves – so why not cut out The Middlemen?
It is a very seductive idea that there is an easily identifiable group of people who are bad and responsible for all the ills of the world and, if society could only get rid of them, the world would be a much better place. Who these people are depends on your point of view, they could be capitalists, communists, Jews, Russians, landlords, bankers, lawyers, politicians, feral youth (insert name of bogeyman group here). Unfortunately, like all simple answers to complex problems, it is false. The problem is what might be summed up as a bad attitude to other humans and this, like all human attributes, is normally distributed, which means that people who have it are found in every walk of life, every stratum of society, every race and every age group. There is no magic sieve you can pass through the population that will take out the bad guys so that the good guys can control them. Not only that, but the balance of motivation is always on the side of the bad guys. They are far keener to exploit their fellow man that their fellow man is to prevent them doing so. What the majority of people want is to be left alone and not exploited, not to have to struggle continuously against exploitation. How many of the people who comment on blogs like this and other forums of the evils of the current system actually do anything constructive to change it? Given the amount of work and expenditure necessary, as evidenced by our host’s life and activities, to effect even the smallest change and given the recent added possibility of ending up in prison or “committing suicide”, I would say damn few.
Bayard
“Who these people are depends on your point of view, they could be capitalists,”
I think Marx was making the point that the larger process produces the bad effects, not the character of the individuals concerned. If you put any group of people in the position of being capitalists they are going to behave the same way because their interests will dictate that.
“If you put any group of people in the position of being capitalists they are going to behave the same way because their interests will dictate that.”
No they aren’t. They are only going to behave like bastards if they are bastards to begin with. Not everyone does something simply because it is their financial interest to do it. It is no-one’s financial interest to give to charity, yet the charity sector is worth billions. The effect Marx was describing is much more likely caused by the fact that the unscrupulous tend to make more money out of capitalism and are more likely to enjoy doing so in that way, so tend to be over-represented amongst capitalists. Similarly prison camp guards tend to be bastards because people who are not bastards don’t usually end up being prison camp guards.
Bayard
Or, those who are not prepared to be bastards do not survive very long as capitalists so the capitalist class tends to be populated by bastards. Its about the process not the individuals who inhabit it.
“Or, those who are not prepared to be bastards do not survive very long as capitalists”
There’s an awful lot of historical evidence that that isn’t the case. It’s much more that good news is no news. A capitalist being a bastard like “Sir” Philip Green gets into the media, but who wants to read about one treating their workers decently? “Man racially abuses old lady” is news “Man smiles at old lady and wishes her a good day” isn’t.