US deficit debate [Archive]

Lenina Rosenweg

31st July 2011, 01:20

Debt Ceiling Debate Provides Cover for Historic Attacks on New Deal Programs

July 25, 2011
Teddy Shibabaw
Socialist Alternative (CWI)

Job growth has collapsed in the last two months, with the official U.S. unemployment rate rising to 9.2%. Since 2008 we have entered a period of high structural unemployment with the economy stagnating and unable to effectively pull out of the recession. Yet the politicians in Washington are not talking about jobs. Instead, they are playing a dangerous game of chicken with the August 2 deadline to raise the federal debt ceiling.
The debt ceiling is normally raised with little fanfare. But the Tea Party and the Republicans are demanding drastic cuts to social programs for ordinary people. They are not alone. Obama is also proposing deep cuts. Raising the debt ceiling has become captive to attempts by both parties to push through cuts that give them a political advantage.

A variety of proposals for deep cuts and a number of slight tax increases have emerged out of White House talks with key legislators only to be shot down by House Republicans, who have refused to accept anything that includes tax increases or even closing tax loopholes.

With the August 2 deadline looming and neither party able to make an agreement, a possible fallback position has emerged to avoid a historic U.S. government default. The most talked-about plan is one hatched by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. This would allow the president to raise the debt ceiling without congressional approval but allow House Republicans a symbolic vote against the plan as long as the president proposes cuts to offset new borrowing.

But before we can get to that point, some background is necessary. House Republicans managed to pass their symbolic and outrageous “cut, cap, and balance” bill on Tuesday July 19 only to meet with a swift defeat in the Senate. This would cut $5.8 trillion over 10 years, cap future spending, and require Congress to approve a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget before raising the debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion. If it had passed the Senate, the president had promised to veto it. Needless to say such a plan would all but kill off an economy where private sector spending is extremely tight, and where consumer spending is incapable of providing enough impetus to allow the U.S. economy to emerge from this debt-laden and weak “recovery.”

If a limited fallback deal like the McConnell plan goes through and the president successfully lifts the debt limit, an extended debate over a deficit-cutting plan will continue. Before the emergence of the McConnell plan, President Obama himself offered the cruelest austerity measures: a four trillion-dollar cut in the deficit over ten years, including three trillion dollars in deep cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal spending – the most popular social programs that were until recently considered off-limits. This plan of Obama was to be combined with one trillion dollars in new revenue. This would come in part from ending a few of the most egregious tax breaks for the wealthy. Yet it would leave in place the Bush tax cuts to the rich as well as be combined with possible reductions in the top corporate tax rate.

The prospect of reaching a deal on such a large plan was considered dead until shortly after the defeat of the “cut, cap, and balance” bill. Some momentum was building for a similar plan drawn up by the “Gang of Six” bipartisan Senate group . Things seemed to be heading toward an agreement until Speaker of the House John Boehner left the negotiations because the plan was to include limited revenue increases. According to the Washington Post, this was a plan that would have not only included massive budget cuts, it would also have cut the top tax rate for the wealthiest individuals and corporations. Having failed once again to come to an agreement, uncertainty has deepened, and the McConnell fall-back plan seems like the likely way out.

Why is Obama demanding such deep cuts?
While the agenda of Republicans is designed to shore up its right-wing base in preparation for the upcoming presidential elections, there has been a wide-ranging discussion on the motives behind Obama’s policies.

The drastic attacks on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid announced by Obama represent a massive shift in policies by Democrats. Over the last 80 years they have built a base of support among workers, the poor and disadvantaged, and progressive movements by giving lip service to policies that, if enacted, would help the poor and workers. These new budget proposals by Obama are a bolt of lightning that will start to shatter the widespread myth that Democrats are friends of workers and the poor.

Obama’s approach is cynically designed to garner Republican cover and support for the deeply unpopular cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. That’s because the Tea Party House Republicans could be counted on to demand a plan like the “cut, cap and balance” bill which makes even deeper cuts and includes absolutely no revenue increases, not even a limited tightening of tax loopholes. Under this scheme, any liberal dissenters could be bypassed.

Having adopted deeply conservative policies already, Obama does not have to follow these Tea Party policies to the letter to satisfy Wall Street and big business. The Tea Party Republicans in the House have become so extreme that even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and other business executives released a letter rebuking their short-sighted behavior and demanding they raise the debt limit immediately. Obama had even offered Republicans what David Brooks called “the deal of the century” – three trillion dollars in cuts for a trillion dollars in new revenue. Yet Republicans rejected it, demanding ”no revenue increases.”

Tea Party Republicans in their eagerness to placate their right-wing base, forget that their zeal to gut social spending is not as popular as they might think. When cuts in Medicare came up for a test of voters in a New York special election, the candidate who professed such zeal lost. A July 17 Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 72% of Americans support raising taxes on the rich and that the same amount are opposed to any Medicaid cuts. Majorities are also opposed to cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

Under his present “centrist” strategy, Obama has gambled that he can win the 2012 elections by posing as the wizard of a “grand bargain”, and by posing as the adult in a room filled with crazy Tea Party Republicans.

It’s instructive to see what he said at a recent press conference: “[W]e have these high-minded pronouncements about how we’ve got to get control of the deficit and how we owe it to our children and our grandchildren. Well, let’s step up. Let’s do it. I’m prepared to do it. I’m prepared to take on significant heat from my party to get something done. And I expect the other side should be willing to do the same thing - if they mean what they say, that this is important” [emphasis author’s] (“President Obama on Deficit Reduction: ‘If Not Now, When?’”, The White House Blog, 7/11/11). http://m.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/07/11/president-obama-deficit-reduction-if-not-now-when

Obama’s broader goal is to win over Wall Street and signal he’s prepared to promote a broad pro-big business agenda of continued austerity once reelected into a second term. As far back is 2009, David Brooks reported in his column about a conversation he had with senior White House advisors in which they related that Obama “is extremely committed to entitlement reform and is plotting politically feasible ways to reduce Social Security as well as health spending” (“When Obamatons Respond,” New York Times, 3/5/09) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/06/opinion/06brooks.html

This is not the “hope” or “change” that tens of millions of Americans voted for.

Obama’s conservatism
What is most astonishing is the speed with which Obama has dropped the argument that creating jobs is the most immediate and pressing policy goal. Instead, he has adopted some typical Republican talking points about spending cuts. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman quotes Obama saying: “Government has to start living within its means, just like families do. We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs” (“What Obama Wants,” 7/7/11) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/08/opinion/08krugman.html

Krugman goes on to say: “That’s three of the right’s favorite economic fallacies in just two sentences. No, the government shouldn’t budget the way families do; on the contrary, trying to balance the budget in times of economic distress is a recipe for deepening the slump. Spending cuts right now wouldn’t ‘put the economy on sounder footing.’ They would reduce growth and raise unemployment. And last but not least, businesses aren’t holding back because they lack confidence in government policies; they’re holding back because they don’t have enough customers — a problem that would be made worse, not better, by short-term spending cuts.”

How come these arguments about government “living within its means” were never made when Wall Street got its bailout, when trillions were spent on wars of occupation in the last decade, or when Obama institutionalized Bush’s tax cuts? Stepping back, it’s amazing how the corporate politicians and corporate-dominated media around the world have managed to pull off a major coup - switching attention from anger at Wall Street and high unemployment to the need to cut the deficit as the biggest problem.

Given the extreme weakness of the private sector economy, only a massive jobs program of public works could begin to attack high unemployment in a serious way. But this would of course require shifting fiscal priorities away from protecting Wall Street and corporate profits and towards ordinary working people and the poor. We have seen that there is no shortage of money to satisfy the needs of the super-rich investors and CEOs. So we must conclude that it is a political choice on the part of the Democrats and Republicans as to who deserves more support: the wealthy magnates of finance and industry or the vast majority of Americans who actually create all the wealth through their labor.

Armageddon – The Real Danger of Default
The needs of working people, the unemployed, and the poor are never granted the kind of priority that is being given to the debt ceiling debate by the corporate media and the politicians of the big business parties. However, there is real danger if the debt limit is not raised. If Congress doesn’t pass a bill raising the ceiling by August 2, The Economist magazine laments: “the American government will go into default. Not, one must pray, on its sovereign debt. But the country will have to stop paying someone: perhaps pensioners, or government suppliers, or soldiers” (“America’s Debt: Shame on Them,” 7/7/11). http://www.economist.com/node/18928600

In other words: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid checks may not be paid out, but the big banks, investors, and foreign governments that loaned money to the U.S. to create the national debt will be prioritized to ensure they continue getting their debt service payments.

Nevertheless, if the U.S. Treasury is eventually forced to stop paying its creditors, that would trigger a dangerous bond market crisis that could sink the global economy back into a slump. Legions of investors and creditors holding U.S. debt could begin a massive sell-off, collapsing the dollar and together with it the credit markets which are the life blood of the modern capitalist global economy. This is what they are concerned about.

The ongoing crisis of families and individuals being foreclosed upon, unable to find jobs; declining wages, disappearing benefits, and layoffs in the public sector - all of that can wait. But not the bond markets. These corporate CEOs and bond-holders, whose unelected power holds economies ransom, are willing to cause massive cuts in social spending in Greece, Ireland, Spain, and the U.S., because they “must” receive their interest payments.

A wave of fury has grown among working people around the world against austerity programs, resulting in strike action, mass demonstrations, and other direct action. Just last month, 750,000 British public sector workers held a one-day strike to reject attacks on their pensions and other austerity measures.

Build a national movement against ALL cuts
The dynamic mass struggles in Wisconsin this spring against Governor Walker’s anti-worker, anti-union policies demonstrate the way forward. We need to build in the U.S. a national anti-austerity, anti-cuts movement that puts blame for the deficits and unemployment where it belongs: on Wall Street and big business. The movement should take up demands such as the following:

No to all cuts on workers, the poor and social services. Instead, end all the wars and slash military spending.
Enact massive taxes on Wall Street, big business, and the very rich.
Pass single-payer healthcare to save hundreds of billions of healthcare dollars now wasted on wild-eyed industry profits and unaccountable private bureaucracies.

Both parties are beholden to Wall Street, the big bankers and investors. They argue we need massive cuts to pay off the national debt, which is now over $13.5 trillion. About $4.5 trillion is “inter-governmental loans” which is a nice way of saying they’ve raided Social Security and Medicare to pay for military spending. $9 trillion is held by private investors, mainly banks and billionaires, looking to get rich off interest payments.
Providing working people with homes, living wage jobs and health care should take priority over paying back money to rich investors who take low-interest loans from the Federal Reserve, then buy back government bonds and charge taxpayers higher interest! We should cancel the debt, only repaying creditors with proven need like retirees.

Corporate economists object to this. They argue that cancelling the debt would produce a financial crisis, with banks refusing to make future loans to government. But this only underscores how the entire financial system is totally reliant on taxpayer money to stay afloat. The big banks and hedge funds are essentially parasites sucking the lifeblood out of our public finances. These financial institutions should also be brought under public ownership and democratic control, with their massive ill-gotten assets invested in green jobs programs, rebuilding crumbling urban centers, infrastructure, health programs, and other social needs.

You will never see the corporate-controlled Democrats or Republicans propose such measures unless they are forced to by a huge mass movement of workers, young people, poor, and retirees. That is why we need to build an anti-corporate, working-class political alternative that fights in the streets, workplaces, campuses, and neighborhoods - and in elections as well. In the elections, we can start by running independent working-class candidates who will stand on a no-cuts, no-concessions, tax-the-rich platform – backed up by the anti-cuts movement, progressive organizations, and unions.

The need for a socialist program
In the end, even a powerful movement of ordinary people will be limited in how much it can do within the confines of capitalism. The capitalist class will resist with all its might any attempt to really end the corporate welfare system of tax breaks, bailouts, and wars for profit. Big bankers and investors would retaliate by threatening to withdraw their deposits in the US and seriously restrict future investment. We need to build a movement that has the power to enforce these measures: a movement for democratic socialism that says that if capitalism cannot afford our basic needs, we can’t afford capitalism.

If Wall Street and big business refuse to accept our demands, we should take the big banks and major corporations into public ownership under the democratic control of the vast majority of the public. Instead of economic decisions being made based on the interests of big business, a democratic planned economy could instead address the needs of the majority - by creating millions of living wage jobs, and providing everyone with decent healthcare and housing.

For more facts on the budget deficit, see Budget Myths 101 - Understanding the Debate on Taxes, Deficits and Jobs (http://www.socialistalternative.org/news/article10.php?id=1624) by Chris Gray and Ty Moore.

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thesadmafioso

31st July 2011, 04:20

S.Artesian

31st July 2011, 16:31

So we should support a raising of the debt ceiling on the basis that the already pathetically feeble American social spending budget would be cut? I mean, I support that measure, but I just get the impression that this article does a sub par job at really imparting upon the reader the reality of the situation. It seems to slip into the realm of 'disfranchisement liberalism' a bit too often, while straying away from any thoughts which do not operate under the dichotomy of capitalist thought.

Why should the working class be regulated to the useless goal of forcing the major parties of the bourgeoisie to play nice? Capitalism is not an ailment of history to be cured by a healthy dose of reformist socialism, it is something to be moved past entirely, and this article seems to ignore that fundamental aspect of Marxist theory.

No, we should not support raising the debt ceiling, anymore than we should have supported TARP, the taking over of FNMA and FMAC, etc.

The demand that should be raised is simply-- "Cancel the Debt" but that demand cannot be raised separately from a program that projects a class alternative to capitalism-- universal, free, access to health care, housing, education, food, public transportation; expropriation of the banks; immediate removal of US military from areas outside the US; elimination of all weapons procurement programs; immediate ban of the exports of weapons; etc. etc.

Nox

31st July 2011, 16:44

I think it's ironic and funny that the most successful capitalist country in the world by far is in $14 trillion of debt :laugh:

thesadmafioso

31st July 2011, 18:11

No, we should not support raising the debt ceiling, anymore than we should have supported TARP, the taking over of FNMA and FMAC, etc.

The demand that should be raised is simply-- "Cancel the Debt" but that demand cannot be raised separately from a program that projects a class alternative to capitalism-- universal, free, access to health care, housing, education, food, public transportation; expropriation of the banks; immediate removal of US military from areas outside the US; elimination of all weapons procurement programs; immediate ban of the exports of weapons; etc. etc.

I only support it due to the fact that the situation in the US is still far from revolutionary, and when the economic impact of a failure to extend the debt ceiling hits the world, it's going to do more harm to the working class than anyone else.

I support the general theory behind canceling the debt, as US treasury bonds are not exactly held en masse by members of the proletariat, but that is not to say that such theory is applicable at this exact moment. As the current matter stands, an inability to raise the debt ceiling would have dire consequences for employment rates and conditions. The bourgeoisie control the economic means of production unilaterally and globally, such a default would only encourage them to strengthen the extent of their exploitation of labor. I can't openly support the enactment of a measure such as debt cancellation or default knowing that it would bring such conditions upon the working class.

S.Artesian

31st July 2011, 18:34

I only support it due to the fact that the situation in the US is still far from revolutionary, and when the economic impact of a failure to extend the debt ceiling hits the world, it's going to do more harm to the working class than anyone else.

I support the general theory behind canceling the debt, as US treasury bonds are not exactly held en masse by members of the proletariat, but that is not to say that such theory is applicable at this exact moment. As the current matter stands, an inability to raise the debt ceiling would have dire consequences for employment rates and conditions. The bourgeoisie control the economic means of production unilaterally and globally, such a default would only encourage them to strengthen the extent of their exploitation of labor. I can't openly support the enactment of a measure such as debt cancellation or default knowing that it would bring such conditions upon the working class.

That's why I said it has to be raised in conjunction with the other demands.

In a letter to some German socialists after the Franco-Prussian war, Marx stated that the "first principle of our party is not a farthing for this government." He wasn't kidding. Why provide financial support to the bourgeoisie.

You could make the same argument you make for supporting the bank bailout, the bailout of GM, Chrysler; rescuing AIG; supporting Greek banks with the EFSF/EFSM, etc. etc. Only obscures the class issues... and for the workers, as the bourgeoisie have no such illusions and know that all those programs are only the opposite identity of the austerity, of the attack on labor that must be launched.

thesadmafioso

31st July 2011, 18:45

That's why I said it has to be raised in conjunction with the other demands.

In a letter to some German socialists after the Franco-Prussian war, Marx stated that the "first principle of our party is not a farthing for this government." He wasn't kidding. Why provide financial support to the bourgeoisie.

You could make the same argument you make for supporting the bank bailout, the bailout of GM, Chrysler; rescuing AIG; supporting Greek banks with the EFSF/EFSM, etc. etc. Only obscures the class issues... and for the workers, as the bourgeoisie have no such illusions and know that all those programs are only the opposite identity of the austerity, of the attack on labor that must be launched.

Oh, I guess we just had basically had different interpretations of other demands on that matter then.

But political approach aside for a moment, we really can't make much of a case of immediate revolution in the US. There is no reason that we should not have parties arguing for these demands as they are incredibly important to the larger struggle at hand, but at the same time we should also be willing to oppose measures that alone would just serve to cause immense and immediate distress for the proletariat. The bourgeoisie are caught up in what is mostly political grandstanding here and they will likely raise the debt ceiling, but if a compromise is not reached then I am sure that the working class would, as always, be the class to suffer for such mistakes. Hence my tentative and contextual support for raising the debt ceiling.

We really just need to take this issue in the context of revolutionary struggle and in the realistic perspective of bourgeoisie politics. If the actual material conditions for revolution were upon us, we would obviously need to support an argument for complete cancellation and default on the debt acquired by the bourgeoisie across the board. But the current state of affairs does not give us that luxury, so it becomes necessary to suspend theory for a moment in the name of protecting the proletariat from further abuse. This is not to say that such theory should be abandoned though, it needs to exist congruently to what is being advocated in the short term.

syndicat

31st July 2011, 18:59

the debt "crisis" can be viewed as entirely faked. it arises from at least the following two facts: (1) the vast expenditures of the imperial war machine are sacrosanct to both Dems and Repubs, (2) both Dems and Repubs have engaged in persistent cutting of taxes (loopholes, credits etc) to business and the wealthy for the past 40 years.

it's well known that there is no crisis in terms of Social Security and Medicare since they are largely self-financed out of things like payroll deductions and user premiums. to the extent there would be a shortfall 30 years down the road due to growing numbers of elderly, a minor tweak of the payroll tax so that the rich pay the same percentage as others would fix it. right now there is a cap on maximum taxable income under the social security payroll tax.

Fulanito de Tal

31st July 2011, 19:13

I have a feeling that this is a show. The debt ceiling will not be lifted, and the workers of the US will feel it financially. This will result in a need for drastic measures which the ruling class will use to their advantage.

MustCrushCapitalism

1st August 2011, 02:43

Die Neue Zeit

1st August 2011, 04:31

The demand that should be raised is simply-- "Cancel the Debt" but that demand cannot be raised separately from a program that projects a class alternative to capitalism-- universal, free, access to health care, housing, education, food, public transportation; expropriation of the banks; immediate removal of US military from areas outside the US; elimination of all weapons procurement programs; immediate ban of the exports of weapons; etc. etc.

That's nice, but why should weapons procurement programs in principle be scrapped when what's really needed is the expropriation of the military-industrial complex?

Lenina Rosenweg

1st August 2011, 04:42

That's nice, but why should weapons procurement programs in principle be scrapped when what's really needed is the expropriation of the military-industrial complex?

We have a capitalist military. The US armed "services" are solidly embedded within the ruling class, it cannot be otherwise.We need the abolition of the military industrial complex.

ckaihatsu

1st August 2011, 05:40

- No Cuts, No Concessions! Hands Off the Social Safety Net, Especially Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid!

- Make the Billionaires and the Corporations Pay -- NOT Working People!"

- For a Federally Funded Pubic Works Program to Put Every Unemployed and Underemployed Person Back to Work at a Living Wage!

- Bring the Troops Home Now from Iraq and Afghanistan! Money for Jobs and Human Needs, Not for War!

EDITORIAL: "Debt Ceiling Debacle Points to Need for an Independent Labor Movement; Labor Must Reject Any Debt Deal From Congress and Call for Mass Mobilizations in the Streets to Oppose the Impending Attacks on Working People and the Poor!"

THE ORGANIZER
P.O. Box 40009
San Francisco, CA 94140
Email: [email protected]
Website: www.socialistorganizer.org
----------

[NOTE: Following is the editorial of the July-August 2011 issue of The Organizer newspaper. Please excuse duplicate postings. To order a sample hard copy of this new issue, please send a note to The Organizer, P.O. Box 40009, San Francisco, CA 94140.]

Debt Ceiling Debacle Points to Need
For an Independent Labor Movement

Labor Must Reject Any Debt Deal
From Congress and Call for Mass
Mobilizations in the Streets to
Oppose the Impending Attacks
On Working People and the Poor!

By THE EDITORS

JULY 30 -- It has come down to the wire on the debt-ceiling negotiations.

At this writing, the House has just adopted a bill proposed by House Majority Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) that had to cater to the Republican Party's Tea Party wing to win passage; it now insists that Congress must approve a balanced budget-amendment to the Constitution and send it to the states for ratification before the debt ceiling can be lifted. This will only further complicate a compromise with the Democratic majority in the Senate which, as expected, quickly rejected the House bill and supports the version proposed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

In a televised press conference on July 29, President Barack Obama promised the high priests of Wall Street that there will be a final agreement by Monday, August 1. Obama has made such pledges in the past. This time the financial markets aren't quite so reassured. Press releases from Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernake have sounded the alarm, raising the specter of a "global financial meltdown" should the U.S. default on its obligations.

Despite the heightened uncertainty, most political analysts -- noting that the two bills are really not that far apart -- still expect that an-11th hour agreement will be worked out before the deadline. The fact is that both bills before the Congress are all about spending cuts without any revenue increases from taxing the rich and the corporations.

Boehner's bill calls for raising the debt limit to cover debts for six months in exchange for $1 trillion in spending cuts, followed by an election year debate over the same debt limit in exchange for cuts of $1.8 trillion coming largely from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid over the next 10 years.

The Reid bill -- which has been endorsed by President Obama and House Minority Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-S.F.) -- calls for raising the debt limit to cover debts for 18 months in exchange for $2.7 trillion in spending cuts, mainly deep cuts in domestic programs ranging from schools to the environment to mass transit and food safety.

Both bills would set up a bipartisan commission -- a so-called Gang of 12 -- with special powers to make further cuts to the social safety net, including to "entitlements."

Indeed, for all the promises by Obama, Reid and Pelosi that they would never accept a deal that excluded tax revenues, neither bill calls for the wealthy to pay anything in taxes. Both bills, moreover, call to form a bipartisan commission with an explicit mandate to make cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Behind all this political theater -- which is part posturing for the 2012 election and part the expression of a huge crisis of the two-party system in the face of the deepening crisis of capitalism -- one basic fact must not be overlooked: There is overall agreement between the central leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties when it comes to making the working-class majority shoulder the burden of the crisis created by Wall Street and fueled by the permanent war economy.

We Must Put a Stop to This Assault!

In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of letters have been sent to members of Congress calling for "Hands Off to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid!" The AFL-CIO, Change to Win, and unions across the country have taken a similar stand, reflecting the immense opposition among labor's ranks to any cuts to these three benefits programs.

In poll after poll, and through their massive letter-writing campaigns, the large majority of working people have supported the call to defend Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. They have supported the call to tax the rich and the corporations. They have supported the call for an end to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the redirecting of war dollars to create jobs and meet human needs.

The compromise that is likely to develop between Boehner, Reid and Obama over the next few days will not only target schools and vital social programs, such as Pell grants and funds for welfare recipients, it will also target the three so-called "entitlements" -- whether in six months (the Republican plan) or in 18 months (the Democratic plan).

Most important, any compromise will preclude federal funding for a massive public works program to put the 27 million unemployed and underemployed people back to work.

For an Independent Labor Movement Now!

This must be clear: To preserve and expand Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; to fight for a real job-creation program, and to fight against any and all cuts targeting the social safety net, it is vital for the unions to break their ties of subordination to the Democratic Party and act as an independent labor movement.

Despite all the talk by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka on the need for an independent labor movement, the actual policy statements by the labor federation in recent days point in a different direction.

A July 27 posting by Manny Herrmann, online mobilization coordinator of the AFL-CIO, urges union members to oppose the Boehner plan but does not say one word about the Reid plan. And Herrmann concludes as follows:

"The president already has conceded to painful spending cuts -- cuts that we believe go much too far. But he rightly insists that we not put the entire burden of deficit reduction on working families."

The AFL-CIO believes that the cuts have gone too far and doesn't want to put the entire burden of deficit reduction on working people. This is not the language of an independent labor movement. It is a back-handed call for smaller cuts and for sharing the burden ("shared sacrifice") of deficit reduction with Wall Street and the employers. It is a call that accepts all the false premises of the twin parties of the bosses and the corporations concerning the origin of this financial crisis.

Our language must be clear: "It is Not Our Crisis, We Refuse to Pay For Any of It!"

The AFL-CIO, Change to Win, the National Education Association and all the independent unions must take a clear and uncompromising stance against any deal that may come out of Washington in the next few days. It must call to mobilize in the streets around demands that address the urgent needs of the working-class majority:

- No Cuts, No Concessions! Hands Off the Social Safety Net, Especially Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid!

- Make the Billionaires and the Corporations Pay -- NOT Working People!"

- For a Federally Funded Pubic Works Program to Put Every Unemployed and Underemployed Person Back to Work at a Living Wage!

- Bring the Troops Home Now from Iraq and Afghanistan! Money for Jobs and Human Needs, Not for War!

The Coordinating Committee of the Emergency Labor Network issued a Call to Action in which they include a specific appeal for labor and its communities allies, including the antiwar movement, to organize a nationwide Day of Actions on October 1, 2011 -- the day the new 2012 budget is slated to be made public and just a few days before the 10th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan.

If the AFL-CIO and Change to Win were to issue such a call around the demands listed above, there could be hundreds of thousands of people in the streets nationwide. This could jump-start a real fightback movement. We could begin to turn things around. We could recreate the energy and excitement of Wisconsin everywhere.

Fightback Committees & Independent Political Action!

The Action Program adopted by the Emergency Labor Conference at Kent State University (Ohio) on June 24-26, 2011, calls for building Labor-Community Fightback Committees around these class-struggle demands, and it goes on to urge such fightback committees to organize Regional Working People's Assemblies to organize local and regional actions in the streets and workplaces.

Also, as proposed in the ELN Action Program, these fightback committees could further call on the labor movement and community organizations "to promote and support strike actions around our demands, such as the strike organized by ILWU Local 10 on April 4, 2011, in solidarity with the struggle waged by Wisconsin unions and their community supporters. The workers in Wisconsin, in their struggle, posed the urgent need for workplace actions, including a general strike, to win their demands."

Building these Labor-Community Fightback Committees and Popular Assemblies to promote the overall struggle around "No Cuts, No Concessions!" -- and linking labor's main fightback demands to the pressing demands of labor's community allies, such as "Organize the South!" and "Full Rights for All Undocumented Immigrants!" -- is an urgent task.

It is also important to note that the Action Program adopted by the ELN's Kent State conference affirmed, that "The time has come for the labor movement to promote a discussion on what it will take to build a Labor Party in this country. The ELN will make every effort to publicize and advance this goal."

We concur. In addition to acting independently in defense of its members and the working-class majority in the workplace and in the streets, the labor movement must open a wide discussion among the ranks of labor on the urgent need to break with the Democratic Party, one of the two parties of the bosses, and build a Labor Party based on the trade unions and involving all the organizations of the oppressed.

Let's send out the message far and wide: Working people need to build a party of our own, a Labor Party, if we are to fend off and reverse the steamroller that is headed our way!

Lynx

1st August 2011, 06:39

There is no danger of the US being insolvent. If there is a default, it will be a political decision. This is, as the OP describes, cover for gutting social programs.

Obama's chances for re-election will depend on who runs for the Republican ticket. If they're scary enough, he may have a chance...

Die Neue Zeit

1st August 2011, 09:06

We have a capitalist military. The US armed "services" are solidly embedded within the ruling class, it cannot be otherwise.We need the abolition of the military industrial complex.

Comrade, I understand your concern, but the word "abolition" in this context still sounds too much like turning swords into plowshares. What about calling for a fully socialized defense industry (in conjunction with dealing properly with the military question)?

I already stated my case re. the "standing army" here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/political-oversight-over-t157827/index.html

RED DAVE

1st August 2011, 18:06

Comrade, I understand your concern, but the word "abolition" in this context still sounds too much like turning swords into plowshares. What about calling for a fully socialized defense industry (in conjunction with dealing properly with the military question)?

I already stated my case re. the "standing army" here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/political-oversight-over-t157827/index.htmlWhy don't you cut out this social democratic bullshit about the "standing army"? Any army under socialism will have little or no resemblance to a bourgeois army.

RED DAVE

S.Artesian

1st August 2011, 18:10

Why don't you cut out this social democratic bullshit about the "standing army"? Any army under socialism will have little or no resemblance to a bourgeois army.

RED DAVE

Yeah, but that's nothing compared to the bullshit about a "fully socialized defense industry." Fucking amazing. And while we're at it, how about a fully socialized imperialism, a fully socialized secret police, a fully socialized slave labor, and hell... a fully socialized capitalism?

Jose Gracchus

1st August 2011, 18:14

He does call for all those things.

Klaatu

1st August 2011, 18:23

Unless I missed something, there is NOTHING about (at the very least) closing tax loopholes for the rich, let alone raising the tax even a little bit.

Mark my words, these spending cuts will drive the U.S. into a depression, just the opposite of what this so-called "tea-party" claims. That's because spending is spending, no matter who spends, governments or citizens. And a depression is just that: a retraction in spending. Basically, it's that simple.

Klaatu

1st August 2011, 18:27

These fucking conservative politicians are cutting into our benefits WHICH WE PAY FOR

But I don't see them cutting their own gold-plated benefits WHICH WE PAY FOR

Klaatu

1st August 2011, 18:32

Anyone that does not see this as a colossal failure of capitalism, cannot see the forest through the trees anyway.

Goodgod, it's so obvious :crying:

Die Neue Zeit

2nd August 2011, 14:26

Yeah, but that's nothing compared to the bullshit about a "fully socialized defense industry." Fucking amazing. And while we're at it, how about a fully socialized imperialism, a fully socialized secret police, a fully socialized slave labor, and hell... a fully socialized capitalism?

He does call for all those things.

Um, I never called for S.Artesian's slander of "fully socialized imperialism." :glare:

Why don't you cut out this social democratic bullshit about the "standing army"? Any army under socialism will have little or no resemblance to a bourgeois army.

RED DAVE

I perceive the DOTP's military model to be a combination of soldier unionization and intra-military democratic rights (like recallability) with the old Armed Forces of the USSR (not the preceding "Workers and Peasants Red Army"), its zampolit apparatus (http://www.revleft.com/vb/political-oversight-over-t157827/index.html), and its supporting defense industry.

RED DAVE

2nd August 2011, 14:57

I perceive the DOTP's military model to be a combination of soldier unionization and intra-military democratic rights with the old Armed Forces of the USSR (not the preceding "Workers and Peasants Red Army"), its zampolit apparatus (http://www.revleft.com/vb/political-oversight-over-t157827/index.html), and its supporting defense industry.Yeah, whatever.

How's your political career going off the Internet?

RED DAVE

Die Neue Zeit

2nd August 2011, 15:25

^^^ Your repeated ad hominems are getting quite tiresome, and you still have no credible alternative to the model I just proposed.

S.Artesian

2nd August 2011, 15:53

Um, I never called for S.Artesian's slander of "fully socialized imperialism.It's not a slander. I never said you did call for it. It was a hyperbole, posed as a question. I do note however, that you take no similar exception to the notion of "fully socialized capitalism."

RED DAVE

2nd August 2011, 16:52

^^^ Your repeated ad hominems are getting quite tiresome, and you still have no credible alternative to the model I just proposed.Tsk-tsk. Maybe many of us are tired of your endless seach for one savior after another. How is it this week? LaSalle? Julius Caesar? Kautsky? Or some third-world dictator.

Anyway, you have no model. What you have is a bourgeois army with some pseuo-socialist trappings. Your army is like your ideas: bureaucratic to the core. You have no concept of democracy at the base.

RED DAVE

CAleftist

2nd August 2011, 17:07

The entire budget deficit could be wiped out if taxes were raised on wealth and high income, and military spending and war spending was cut.

The politicians aren't serious about eliminating the deficit. They are however serious about cutting whatever is left of the social "safety nets".

piet11111

2nd August 2011, 19:44

Dave maybe more argumentation about the actual topic instead of making personal attacks ?

S.Artesian

3rd August 2011, 00:11

Dave maybe more argumentation about the actual topic instead of making personal attacks ?

That would be fine, except the discussion is supposed to be about the US debt/deficit conflict. DNZ, in his typical fashion, wants it to be about him and his latest advertising campaign for the rehabilitation of comrade Kautsky.

So yeah, DNZ, stick to the debt/deficit discussion or piss off.

PS, I object to DNZ's slanderous accusation that I slandered him when I did no such thing.

Die Neue Zeit

3rd August 2011, 02:56

It's not a slander. I never said you did call for it. It was a hyperbole, posed as a question. I do note however, that you take no similar exception to the notion of "fully socialized capitalism."

Lenin's sound bite that "socialism is state-capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people" or something along those lines - a continuation of a key theoretical mistake in Kautsky's Social Revolution re. the post-monetary lower phase of the communist mode of production - was one reason why I took no exception to that. I'd have taken even less exception if you had said "fully socialized state capitalism."

Another reason is my programmatic commentary on Fully Socialized Labour Markets as structural, radical, pro-labour reform in the Economics forum - again touching upon "statism" and state capitalism.

That would be fine, except the discussion is supposed to be about the US debt/deficit conflict. DNZ, in his typical fashion, wants it to be about him and his latest advertising campaign for the rehabilitation of comrade Kautsky.

So yeah, DNZ, stick to the debt/deficit discussion or piss off.

Look who "advertised" first"? :rolleyes:

elimination of all weapons procurement programs

You tried venturing into the realm of solutions instead of the stereotypical leftist "Prognosis Mode" (and feeding the bourgeois assertions of having good prognosis but poor solutions if any at all). True enough, the measure you proposed merited criticism - and not just criticism, but an alternative.

A fully socialized defense industry / military-industrial complex would pare down military spending big time, since there's unproductive surplus extracted by the current oligopoly who are dictating terms for procurement programs.

[The only spending problem with the Soviet military and its burdens on the economy was the blatant prioritization of "guns" over "butter" or even "margarine."]

Anyway, you have no model. What you have is a bourgeois army with some pseuo-socialist trappings. Your army is like your ideas: bureaucratic to the core. You have no concept of democracy at the base.

You clearly glossed over the part where I wrote "soldier unionization and intra-military democratic rights (like recallability)." The army of ancient Athens had a similar model (elections of commanding officers), and now you'll call it "bourgeois" too? :glare:

RED DAVE

3rd August 2011, 03:10

Anyway, you have no model. What you have is a bourgeois army with some pseuo-socialist trappings. Your army is like your ideas: bureaucratic to the core. You have no concept of democracy at the base.
You clearly glossed over the part where I wrote "soldier unionization and intra-military democratic rights (like recallability)."Until there is revolutionary democracy from below in the army, until the working class is the army and runs the army, the class nature remains the same.

The army of ancient Athens had a similar model (elections of commanding officers), and now you'll call it "bourgeois" too? :glare:No, since a bourgeoisie as we understand it was not the dominant class. What would you call it? A socialist army?

RED DAVE

Die Neue Zeit

3rd August 2011, 03:12

Until there is revolutionary democracy from below in the army, the class nature remains the same.

So as not to derail this thread, I'll respond in the Theory thread.

S.Artesian

3rd August 2011, 03:33

You tried venturing into the realm of solutions instead of the stereotypical leftist "Prognosis Mode" (and feeding the bourgeois assertions of having good prognosis but poor solutions if any at all). True enough, the measure you proposed merited criticism - and not just criticism, but an alternative.

Except you weren't responding to me, remember? You were responding to Lenina. Try and keep up, please. Remedial work should be done on your own time.

A fully socialized defense industry / military-industrial complex would pare down military spending big time, since there's unproductive surplus extracted by the current oligopoly who are dictating terms for procurement programs.

No shit? Unproductive surplus? A fully socialized defense industry/military industrial complex would be an abolished military-industrial complex, a non-existent defense industry. What you have done is take an oxymoron and make it a political program.

Die Neue Zeit

3rd August 2011, 03:40

Except you weren't responding to me, remember? You were responding to Lenina. Try and keep up, please.

Lenina posted in response in this thread in response to my critique of your post.

No shit? Unproductive surplus? A fully socialized defense industry/military industrial complex would be an abolished military-industrial complex, a non-existent defense industry. What you have done is take an oxymoron and make it a political program.

I don't believe in the pacifist nonsense of turning swords into plowshares all of a sudden.

ckaihatsu

3rd August 2011, 06:55

The debt limit deal and the social counterrevolution in America

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/aug2011/pers-a02.shtml

RED DAVE

3rd August 2011, 15:00

I don't believe in the pacifist nonsense of turning swords into plowshares all of a sudden.Of course you don't. You're such a big, bad revolutionary. The abolition of war and the liquidation of all trappings of militarism will be one of the first tasks of the revolution.

RED DAVE

piet11111

4th August 2011, 13:18

Of course you don't. You're such a big, bad revolutionary. The abolition of war and the liquidation of all trappings of militarism will be one of the first tasks of the revolution.

RED DAVE

Yeah ! what we really need to do is a sit-in and sing kumbaya while holding hands and weaving flowers together to make necklaces that will show them !

Die Neue Zeit

4th August 2011, 14:18

piet11111

4th August 2011, 14:43

Class-strugglist defencism /= "militarism"

This

Clearly the recent attack in Norway proves the need for self defense measures against the right wing forces.
Anders breivik is unfortunately not the only one that would harm us there are many more that would love a similar opportunity.

S.Artesian

4th August 2011, 16:35

This

Clearly the recent attack in Norway proves the need for self defense measures against the right wing forces.
Anders breivik is unfortunately not the only one that would harm us there are many more that would love a similar opportunity.

First off, the attack on Norway proves the need for self-defense. It does not prove the need for a "socialized military-industrial complex" as advocated by DNZ.

Secondly, we are not confronting the acts of 1 or 2 or even 1000 lunatics, but the organized force of the bourgeois state. More than a mere technicality. The military-industrial complex is an appendage of the bourgeois state and cannot be socialized, no more than the bourgeois state can be socialized. It can be destroyed, and it needs to be destroyed by a socialist revolution, not incorporated as slightly different military-industrial complex, manufacturing depleted uranium clad weapons on "behalf" of the "workers."

DNZ wants to know the rationale for calling for the end to all procurement programs when what is needed is the expropriation of the military-industrial complex. Indeed. But that's simply stating that what is need is a socialist revolution.

We're trying to develop programmatic demands based on the current conditions and movement of the working class, so we include the demands for withdrawal of all US military, end to weapons procurement based on the US conduct of wars, the costs of those wars, the cost of maintaining the military backing of US capitalism.

RED DAVE

4th August 2011, 18:16

Of course you don't. You're such a big, bad revolutionary. The abolition of war and the liquidation of all trappings of militarism will be one of the first tasks of the revolution.
Class-strugglist defencism /= "militarism"First of all, what do you mean by "class-strugglist defensism"? If you mean defense of the the class struggle, picket-line guards, etc., this is the antithesis of militarism.

If you mean the necessity of defending revolutionary socialism against capitalism, (a) if this comes to a fight of army against army, in civil war or international war, the proletarian army will little resemble the bourgeois forces and will not be subject to the perversion of militarism. (b) It is most likely that such an armed conflict will not happen as the revolutionary will be international or it will not be at all.

In any event, you retain, as usual, a bureaucratic, fundamentally social democratic world view.

RED DAVE

syndicat

4th August 2011, 19:20

Well, there can be a worker run industry that produces military hardware to support a working class army. in 1936 the anarcho-syndicalist labor organization in Spain built a militia of 120,000 members. It was internally democratic...periodic assemblies, election of unit delegates, chief delegates for divisions or regiments, use of officers or noncoms of the old army as technical advisors under the control of the members of that unit. This "proletarian army" was directed by a National Defense Committee elected by the unions.

at the same time this army was built by the workers organizations, the workers in Catalonia took the initiative to create 283 factories making munitions and supplies to keep the militia in the field. The Hispano-Suiza auto facttory (which made luxury cars in the same league as the Rolls Royce) was converted to the manufacture of armored cars. but the anarcho-syndicalists always differentiated this from "militarism" which they identified with hierarchical command structures, a privileged officer caste, and lack of accountability to the working class.

Lenina Rosenweg

4th August 2011, 19:39

The US military currently has about 700 military bases around the world and something like 7,000 military installations of some sort around the world. This is obviously to serve the geopolitical and economic needs and goals of the US ruling class which include among other things the encirclement and containment of China, the containment of the Arab Spring uprisings, control over the global oil supply and maintaining the US right of seignorage and the use of the dollar as the global reserve currency.

There is no way these can be changed into socialist objectives. Besides the US military has been devastating and degrading the societies of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and other places.

The US military budget is approximately $700 billion a year. Obviously this is money taken from education, high speed rail, rebuilding the rapidly deteriorating US infrastructure, and many other pressing needs.In addition there are the distortions created by the vast complex system of military Keynsianism, the unofficial US industrial policy.

Most of the US officer corps are recruited from conservative areas of the US South, are deeply conservative, fiercely loyal to the ruling class, and heavily indoctrinated with variations of extremists Christian fundamentalism.

There is no way the US military can become any sort of "revolutionary people's army".

having said all this, I do not think a revolutionary military can be run by worker's councils or "people's assemblies" or whatever. The experience of the Paris Commune and Trotsky's experience in the Russian Civil War showed the need for military discipline.

piet11111

4th August 2011, 19:59

Until the whole world is communist we would unfortunately still need to manufacture weapons that are preferably of better quality and capability then those of the capitalists.
Having an actual army to use those weapons is unavoidable and maybe they can even be used for things like disaster relief.

The actual manufacturing of weapons is no different from other industrial jobs so i see no conflict of interest there for the work-floor employees so as far as that goes this can be completely taken over from the military industrial complex.

Depleted uranium is not necessary as a way to create tank shells Tungsten is effective enough.

syndicat

4th August 2011, 20:33

having said all this, I do not think a revolutionary military can be run by worker's councils or "people's assemblies" or whatever. The experience of the Paris Commune and Trotsky's experience in the Russian Civil War showed the need for military discipline. let me translate. by "discipline" apparently you mean top down, repressive control of grunts by a privileged officer class. indeed it was "successful" in Russia in helping to build a bureaucratic class dominated mode of production.

in the harsh winter of 1920-21 a protege of Trotsky was head of the Baltic fleet. He and his wife...another Communist bureaucrat...lived on their own ship and had a bevy of servants providing them meals with cooked pheasant and such...while the working class in St Petersburg were starving. this was after Trotsky decreed an end to the previous practice of elected officers, created by the sailors in the revolution in March 1917.

yes, very "effective"...if you want to live the life of a privileged bureaucrat.

S.Artesian

4th August 2011, 23:34

Well, there can be a worker run industry that produces military hardware to support a working class army. in 1936 the anarcho-syndicalist labor organization in Spain built a militia of 120,000 members. It was internally democratic...periodic assemblies, election of unit delegates, chief delegates for divisions or regiments, use of officers or noncoms of the old army as technical advisors under the control of the members of that unit. This "proletarian army" was directed by a National Defense Committee elected by the unions.

Of course, but that is not what a military-industrial complex is. A military-industrial complex represents its own, particular, needs and demands for profits for the purpose of preserving the property of the military-industrial complex.

You cannot "socialize" such a complex. It is already socialized by its intimate connections with the capitalist state.

You can expropriate it and destroy it's social organization, its need to reproduce itself on a larger basis, with more weapons systems, etc etc etc.

Die Neue Zeit

5th August 2011, 01:38

First off, the attack on Norway proves the need for self-defense. It does not prove the need for a "socialized military-industrial complex" as advocated by DNZ.

Secondly, we are not confronting the acts of 1 or 2 or even 1000 lunatics, but the organized force of the bourgeois state. More than a mere technicality. The military-industrial complex is an appendage of the bourgeois state and cannot be socialized, no more than the bourgeois state can be socialized. It can be destroyed, and it needs to be destroyed by a socialist revolution, not incorporated as slightly different military-industrial complex, manufacturing depleted uranium clad weapons on "behalf" of the "workers."

According to your logic, financial services are also "an appendage of the bourgeois state and cannot be socialized... can be destroyed, and... needs to be destroyed." After all, without central banking and government spending you can't have the military procurement programs at all, whether the MIC is private or not.

DNZ wants to know the rationale for calling for the end to all procurement programs when what is needed is the expropriation of the military-industrial complex. Indeed. But that's simply stating that what is need is a socialist revolution.

We're trying to develop programmatic demands based on the current conditions and movement of the working class, so we include the demands for withdrawal of all US military, end to weapons procurement based on the US conduct of wars, the costs of those wars, the cost of maintaining the military backing of US capitalism.

Developing programmatic demands based on the current conditions and movement are necessary, but toning things down isn't good. You merely responded to my statement that

A fully socialized defense industry / military-industrial complex would pare down military spending big time, since there's unproductive surplus extracted by the current oligopoly who are dictating terms for procurement programs.

[The only spending problem with the Soviet military and its burdens on the economy was the blatant prioritization of "guns" over "butter" or even "margarine."]

With a completely inappropriate hyperbole.

Class-strugglist defencism means maintaining some sort of defense industry (albeit a socialized one) that is competent in repelling foreign aggressors. It does not engage in, say, notorious arms trading.

Die Neue Zeit

5th August 2011, 01:51

The US military currently has about 700 military bases around the world and something like 7,000 military installations of some sort around the world. This is obviously to serve the geopolitical and economic needs and goals of the US ruling class which include among other things the encirclement and containment of China, the containment of the Arab Spring uprisings, control over the global oil supply and maintaining the US right of seignorage and the use of the dollar as the global reserve currency.

Scrapping all those military bases has nothing to do with my call for expropriating the military-industrial complex, like Lockheed-Martin and Boeing's respective divisions tasked with military production (and that's just two such companies).

The US military budget is approximately $700 billion a year. Obviously this is money taken from education, high speed rail, rebuilding the rapidly deteriorating US infrastructure, and many other pressing needs.In addition there are the distortions created by the vast complex system of military Keynsianism, the unofficial US industrial policy.

Military Keynesianism is fundamentally anti-working class, not least of which because there are no instances of a publicly owned military-industrial complex within this doctrine. The most notorious example of this was, of course, applied by Nazi Germany.

Having said all this, I do not think a revolutionary military can be run by worker's councils or "people's assemblies" or whatever. The experience of the Paris Commune and Trotsky's experience in the Russian Civil War showed the need for military discipline.

Kudos, comrade, for your realistic assessment, but soldier unionization and election and recall of commanding officers are still necessary. Check out my Theory thread on the subject of military affairs. :)

S.Artesian

5th August 2011, 02:00

According to your logic, financial services are also "an appendage of the bourgeois state and cannot be socialized... can be destroyed, and... needs to be destroyed." After all, without central banking and government spending you can't have the military procurement programs at all, whether the MIC is private or not.

Well, that's the difference between us, you believe that socialism = "socialized" state capitalism, much as Kautsky and even Lenin believed, and I think socialism is the workers overthrow of capital, the expropriation of the means of production, and the self-direction of production itself for use and need...........which military production is not and cannot be.

Weapons production does not produce a use-value, and object of production that gets absorbed and reproduced either in the enhanced reproduction of labor power, or in the amplification of labor productivity through improved means of production.

Yeah, and by that logic, "socializing" financial services is also incompatible with socialism-- sorry if that presents an obstacle to your plans to be the certified financial planner to the new Second International, but that's just the way it is.

That weapons production or finances may, for a time, be necessary doesn't change the fact that both represent deductions from socialist production, and the production of socialism, and that both represent the incomplete nature of the revolution.

But hey, don't trouble yourself. You keep on keepin' on with your socialized military industrial complex, your socialized slave labor etc.

RED DAVE

5th August 2011, 03:24

Class-strugglist defencism means maintaining some sort of defense industry (albeit a socialized one) that is competent in repelling foreign aggressors. It does not engage in, say, notorious arms trading.You obviously have a concept, derived from the coexistence of stalinism and capitalism, that socialist and nonsocialist countries are going to coexist over a long period of time.

Ain't gonna happen; can't happen. Your nonsense about class-strugglist defensism is and maintaining an arms industry has nothing to do with defense of socialism but with the maintenance of state capitalism.

RED DAVE

Die Neue Zeit

5th August 2011, 03:38

Well, that's the difference between us, you believe that socialism = "socialized" state capitalism, much as Kautsky and even Lenin believed, and I think socialism is the workers overthrow of capital, the expropriation of the means of production, and the self-direction of production itself for use and need...........which military production is not and cannot be.

I never said anything about my definition of "socialism" because

1) It is in most cases different from the post-monetary lower phase of the communist mode of production
2) There are so many definitions (and here I'll be more limited in my "socialist family" claimants than Cockshott re. what I call the "social-democratic family")

What Kautsky and Lenin believed is just one version, just like actual market socialism (Lange, not Deng) is another.

Weapons production does not produce a use-value, and object of production that gets absorbed and reproduced either in the enhanced reproduction of labor power, or in the amplification of labor productivity through improved means of production.

You're taking a very short-term view here. Certain military technologies get absorbed into the civilian economy and gain civilian use-value there, such as the very fibres and networks that form today's Internet.

Yeah, and by that logic, "socializing" financial services is also incompatible with socialism-- sorry if that presents an obstacle to your plans to be the certified financial planner to the new Second International, but that's just the way it is.

:lol:

You do realize that what I had in mind was primarily banking, right, and that I was "hedging" so that I wasn't limited just to banking?

That weapons production or finances may, for a time, be necessary doesn't change the fact that both represent deductions from socialist production, and the production of socialism, and that both represent the incomplete nature of the revolution.

But hey, don't trouble yourself. You keep on keepin' on with your socialized military industrial complex, your socialized slave labor etc.

Again, re-read the counter-arguments in the "Contradictions" thread.

S.Artesian

5th August 2011, 03:43

^^^^Again, get over yourself. You wouldn't know a contradiction if it ran and smacked you in the face.

Die Neue Zeit

5th August 2011, 03:55

You obviously have a concept, derived from the coexistence of stalinism and capitalism, that socialist and nonsocialist countries are going to coexist over a long period of time.

Ain't gonna happen; can't happen. Your nonsense about class-strugglist defensism is and maintaining an arms industry has nothing to do with defense of socialism but with the maintenance of state capitalism.

You're off the mark. My take on maintaining a defense industry well into a revolutionary period entails, mainly:

1) Retaliatory proletarian WMD deterrents (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/letters.php?issue_id=845) and related launch silos (read my post history also on this and repelling foreign counterrevolutionary military action)

2) Precision bombing technology and appropriate vehicular delivery mechanisms (for neutralizing foreign counterrevolutionary paramilitary units trying to crush revolutionary situations elsewhere)

3) Future meso-stratospheric vehicles ("flying" higher than today's aircraft, thus surpassing strategic bombers and ground-mobile ICBM delivery systems)

4) Space exploration and defense (unless you're unaware of asteroid or other threats to Earth from space)

5) Bread-and-butter assault rifles (hello, AK-47 symbolism)

6) Underwater naval forces (think Seaquest DSV's sci-fi submarine and underwater facilities)

S.Artesian

5th August 2011, 04:15

Proletarian WMDs. Love it. Yeah Willy Peter [white phosphorus], will make you a believer.

WTF? You just don't know what you're talking about. Proof?

"Precision bombing." Aint no such thing, that's why you pack as much explosive energy as you can in the charge-- expand the kill radius.

Die Neue Zeit

5th August 2011, 04:20

Proletarian WMDs. Love it. Yeah Willy Peter [white phosphorus], will make you a believer.

WTF? You just don't know what you're talking about. Proof?

It's the MAD logic. It's also taken from a past heated poll discussion on Iran's nuclear program:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/should-iran-possess-t129671/index6.html

"Precision bombing." Aint no such thing, that's why you pack as much explosive energy as you can in the charge-- expand the kill radius.

Yes there is such a thing. The most well-known example of precision bombing is the bunker buster.

Lenina Rosenweg

5th August 2011, 04:21

In brief I see a protracted revolutionary situation not as a rerun of the Cold War with militarized states confronting each other and threatening MAD but as subverting and opposing the nation state itself from within.I would like to see revolutionary workers dismantle the WMDs, not contract to build more.

The military defense complex is an integral part and product of capitalism, it can't be otherwise.

Die Neue Zeit

5th August 2011, 04:31

^^^ Russian military technology conducive to MAD would have prevented Western intervention in the Russian Civil War. Re. the other part: check out today's news re. China being blamed for a string of cyber security attacks:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/05/us-china-cyberattacks-idUSTRE7740C420110805

RED DAVE

5th August 2011, 11:51

Again and again, once more, and again, DNZ, your concept of socialism is hopelessly corrupt. You either will not see or cannot see that the esence of socialism is revolutionary workers democracy. All that crap you posted above, WMDs, etc., has nothing to do with socialism. Socialism, to the extent it will be concerned with getting rid of the last remnants of capitalism, isolated, with no state of their own, will embrace methods of conflict that we can hardly think of. Revolutionary war is class war; the military aspects of it are secondary or tertiary.

Your stalinism, like your family member Paul Cockshott, runs deep.

RED DAVE

piet11111

5th August 2011, 12:53

Again and again, once more, and again, DNZ, your concept of socialism is hopelessly corrupt. You either will not see or cannot see that the esence of socialism is revolutionary workers democracy. All that crap you posted above, WMDs, etc., has nothing to do with socialism. Socialism, to the extent it will be concerned with getting rid of the last remnants of capitalism, isolated, with no state of their own, will embrace methods of conflict that we can hardly think of. Revolutionary war is class war; the military aspects of it are secondary or tertiary.

Your stalinism. like your family member Paul Cockshott, runs deep.

RED DAVE

So you would gamble on the whole world turning socialist in a matter of days ? leaving us with no need for a standing army ?

I hope your right but it sounds dangerously optimistic to me.

Die Neue Zeit

5th August 2011, 14:14

You either will not see or cannot see that the esence of socialism is revolutionary workers democracy.

I just don't subscribe to your incessant sloganeering that "revolutionary workers democracy" = (non-party) councilism.

Your stalinism. like your family member Paul Cockshott, runs deep.

Who gave you the idea that we're blood relatives, old man?

RED DAVE

5th August 2011, 17:00

You either will not see or cannot see that the esence of socialism is revolutionary workers democracy.
I just don't subscribe to your incessant sloganeering that "revolutionary workers democracy" = (non-party) councilism.As usual, you are so far up in your own head that you can't complete a sentence without adding your bizarre spin to it. What you don't subscribe to, Comrade, is workers control of the economy and society from the workplace up. That's your problem. You have a fundamentally bureaucratic notion of a future society that is not socialism but stalinism.

What you call incessant sloganeering, I call letting people know how politically off the wall you are.

Your stalinism. like your family member Paul Cockshott, runs deep.
Who gave you the idea that we're blood relatives, old man?(1) I was playing with the word "family" as used in the OP of another thread.

(2) You wouldn't be, of course, be engaging in ageism, would you? Because, old and feeble as I am, politically I can wipe the floor with the likes of you six ways from Sunday.

You're a fine stalking horse for all kinds of bureaucratic, social democratic and stalinist nonsense, so it's instructive for younger comrades to watch you get your ass kickedaround here week after week.

RED DAVE

Ele'ill

5th August 2011, 20:13

Hey everyone, how are we doing today?

Something I've been noticing a lot lately is that there are many politically active leftists who know a lot of stuff about a lot of things, are way smarter than me, have way more 'experience', are excellent speakers or writers, can really articulate thoughts in a politically poetic fashion - all of which leaves me wondering where myself, a working class person treading just below the poverty line, fits into this working class revolution. I wouldn't consider myself unintelligent or inexperienced in regards to politics either.

piet11111

5th August 2011, 20:16

RED DAVE

5th August 2011, 21:20

S.Artesian

5th August 2011, 21:45

Die Neue Zeit

6th August 2011, 01:22

As usual, you are so far up in your own head that you can't complete a sentence without adding your bizarre spin to it. What you don't subscribe to, Comrade, is workers control of the economy and society from the workplace up. That's your problem. You have a fundamentally bureaucratic notion of a future society that is not socialism but stalinism.

What you call incessant sloganeering, I call letting people know how politically off the wall you are.

Bureaucracy is a process. It is not what mainstream or left sloganeering deems as "hierarchy" or even "red tape."

(2) You wouldn't be, of course, be engaging in ageism, would you? Because, old and feeble as I am, politically I can wipe the floor with the likes of you six ways from Sunday.

I have more senior comrades, so no I'm not engaging in ageism. My words were aimed at you personally, and of course boast as much as you like about the usual sloganeering and "Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!" wiping the floor with "Educate! Agitate! Organize!"

RED DAVE

6th August 2011, 02:11

As usual, you are so far up in your own head that you can't complete a sentence without adding your bizarre spin to it. What you don't subscribe to, Comrade, is workers control of the economy and society from the workplace up. That's your problem. You have a fundamentally bureaucratic notion of a future society that is not socialism but stalinism.

What you call incessant sloganeering, I call letting people know how politically off the wall you are.
Bureaucracy is a process.So is baking a cake. You've just said nothing. As usual.

It is not what mainstream or left sloganeering deems as "hierarchy" or even "red tape."So speaks a man in love with bureaucracy, who has no concept of workers control of the economy.

(2) You wouldn't be, of course, be engaging in ageism, would you? Because, old and feeble as I am, politically I can wipe the floor with the likes of you six ways from Sunday.
I have more senior comrades, so no I'm not engaging in ageism. My words were aimed at you personally, and of course boast as much as you like about the usual sloganeering and "Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!" wiping the floor with "Educate! Agitate! Organize!"I am originating a new Marxist category: political asperger's syndrome. You are the first diagnosed case.

RED DAVE

RadioRaheem84

6th August 2011, 02:22

US has just been downgraded to a AA-.

What does this mean for the economy?

Die Neue Zeit

6th August 2011, 04:06

^^^ Other than the US workforce and pensioners getting royally screwed to the Nth power, who knows?

RED DAVE

6th August 2011, 04:57

^^^ Other than the US workforce and pensioners getting royally screwed to the Nth power, who knows?Actually, you're quite wrong, as usual. The US has actually decreased its debt. How do I know? Your hero tells us so.

We see that the national debt of the United States is decreasing.http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1909/power/ch09.htm

:D

RED DAVE

Die Neue Zeit

6th August 2011, 04:58

Actually, you're quite wrong, as usual. The US has actually decreased its debt. How do I know? Your hero tells us so.

Don't be ridiculous with your out-of-context, tongue-in-cheek jab. You easily forget the shift from federal to state debts, not to mention business and consumer debts.

RED DAVE

6th August 2011, 05:12

http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2196672#post2196672) Actually, you're quite wrong, as usual. The US has actually decreased its debt. How do I know? Your hero tells us so.
Don't be ridiculous with your out-of-context, tongue-in-cheek jab. You easily forget the shift from federal to state debts, not to mention business and consumer debts.Jesus maybe you really do have political asperberger's syndrome. It's impossible for you to respond to a post unless it's in reference to some weird bird flying around in your skull.

I hear Julius Caesar reduced the taxes on the plebs. Maybe we need him to bail us out.

RED DAVE

piet11111

6th August 2011, 13:41

US has just been downgraded to a AA-.

What does this mean for the economy?

It means the USA will need to pay more for its borrowed money but the USA is in a position where they can just deflate out of debt something that they are doing already through quantitative easing.

The euro country's are straightjacketed by their monetary union and can not resort to the printing press to deflate out of debt.

But the market resembles a herd of animals more then rational thinking so anything that undermines confidence can trigger a stampede and a credit rating can be quite scary so who knows how the markets will react.

S.Artesian

6th August 2011, 14:15

That's not deflation you are describing. The printing of money to pay off debts is associated with inflation, devaluing the currency and thus devaluing the debt.

As for the downgrade itself, this is what happens when you turn the national treasury into a "bad bank," taking on the non-performing assets of the financial sector.

S&P issued the downgrade, based of course on the inability of the bourgeoisie to even count that high, for explicitly political reasonings, questioning the ability of the bourgeoisie's paid agents to actually lead after the debt ceiling fiasco.

However, it doesn't matter why S&P thinks it issued the downgrade. The economic determinants behind the thinking are what matters; and thus economic determinants are the slowdown, worldwide, in output; the continued overaccumulation in means of transport; the persistent non-performing debt in the residential and commercial real estate sectors; the restricted revenue base of the government.

Monday should be very, very interesting. It's not simply the US economy that is affected, but every economy participating in the world markets.

ckaihatsu

6th August 2011, 14:18

But the market resembles a herd of animals more then rational thinking so anything that undermines confidence can trigger a stampede and a credit rating can be quite scary so who knows how the markets will react.

Yeah, everyone will go and park their non-performing liquid assets with that *other* world-dominating imperial global hegemon....

(8 p

6th August 2011, 14:18

However, it doesn't matter why S&P thinks it issued the downgrade. The economic determinants behind the thinking are what matters; and thus economic determinants are the slowdown, worldwide, in output; the continued overaccumulation in means of transport; the persistent non-performing debt in the residential and commercial real estate sectors; the restricted revenue base of the government.

I think the current account deficit, particularly the balance of payments, has been the deciding factor that has led to this crisis and ultimately this downgrade.

ckaihatsu

6th August 2011, 14:25

Monday should be very, very interesting. It's not simply the US economy that is affected, but every economy participating in the world markets.

At this point the bourgeois world leaders would have more of a base for mutual understanding and economic agreement by friending each other on Facebook.

S.Artesian

6th August 2011, 15:18

I think the current account deficit, particularly the balance of payments, has been the deciding factor that has led to this crisis and ultimately this downgrade.

I disagree. The balance of payments issue is really secondary. It is driven by the balance of trade, and once you adjust that balance for related-party trading, that is trade between US corporations and their foreign-based subsidiaries, it drops dramatically.

The balance of payments has not caused the deficit in the US government's budget. Maintenance of tax cuts, the costs of the wars, and financing the bank bailouts have.

ckaihatsu

6th August 2011, 15:36

The balance of payments has not caused the deficit in the US government's budget. Maintenance of tax cuts, the costs of the wars, and financing the bank bailouts have.

( I attached a couple of graphs from a periodical that depict this, at this post: )

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2182371&postcount=8

piet11111

6th August 2011, 16:13

Die Neue Zeit

6th August 2011, 18:56

So speaks a man in love with bureaucracy, who has no concept of workers control of the economy.

Um, workers' bureaucracy (that is, bureaucracy by, of, and for the workers)? Think about that.

RED DAVE

6th August 2011, 19:44

Um, workers' bureaucracy (that is, bureaucracy by, of, and for the workers)? Think about that.You are politically insane. You really do have political asperberger's syndrome to come up with an idea like that.

The essence of a bureaucracy, the essence, heart, center, purpose, raison d'etre, etc., is hierarchical authority.

Is that your concept of socialism? As I have said, you are some kind of weird hybrid of stalinist and social democrat.

RED DAVE

Die Neue Zeit

6th August 2011, 20:06

The essence of a bureaucracy, the essence, heart, center, purpose, raison d'etre, etc., is hierarchical authority

And that is where I strongly disagree with that Weberian evaluation and the swear-word implications. Again, the essence is one of processes.

6th August 2011, 20:13

I disagree. The balance of payments issue is really secondary. It is driven by the balance of trade, and once you adjust that balance for related-party trading, that is trade between US corporations and their foreign-based subsidiaries, it drops dramatically.

The balance of payments has not caused the deficit in the US government's budget. Maintenance of tax cuts, the costs of the wars, and financing the bank bailouts have.

The balance of payments issue is what allowed them to spend at such a deficit in the first place. Without it, "tax cuts, the costs of wars, and financing the bank bailouts" never would have happened.

S.Artesian

6th August 2011, 21:08

That is absolutely not the case, and does not at all correspond to the actions taken by the US in recovering from the 2001-2003 recession.

If you look back at the history, you will see the US was running budgetary surpluses to 2000 and US debt was expected to be retired in a decade.

What happened next was not at all a result of balance of payments.

Ele'ill

6th August 2011, 21:14

You are politically insane. You really do have political asperbr's syndrome to come up with an idea like that.
RED DAVE

Hey, in case you all missed the subtle suggestion on the previous page, cut the personal attacks the hell out of your daily revleft itinerary. Thank you so much for completely understanding why. Consider this a verbal warning. RED DAVE

Ele'ill

6th August 2011, 21:19

Revolution is not a question of individual talents, but of class organization for the conquest of power. That's where you "fit in," as a member of the class organizing itself for the conquest of power.

I meant regarding organizing efforts- when we have people (organizers apparently) acting like snobbish jerks who will 'wipe the political floor with person X'. I guess everyone missed this intentionally vague/brief point in my first post.

S.Artesian

6th August 2011, 21:21

I meant regarding organizing efforts- when we have people (organizers apparently) acting like snobbish jerks who will 'wipe the political floor with person X'. I guess everyone missed this intentionally vague/brief point in my first post.

Well, I sure missed it. I thought it was an honest, sincere question. And I gave it an honest answer, subtlety not being my strong suit.

RED DAVE

7th August 2011, 00:37

Um, workers' bureaucracy (that is, bureaucracy by, of, and for the workers)? Think about that.I have thought about it. It is absolutely ridiculous and one of the weirdest things I have ever heard at RevLeft or any other left-wing venue.

Revolutionary workers democracy, the heart of socialism, is antithetical to bureaucratic hierarchies such as you imagine. Such hierarchies are typical of stalinism and social democracy.

RED DAVE

Die Neue Zeit

7th August 2011, 00:54

^^^ No you haven't thought about it. Post #83 eluded you.

I meant regarding organizing efforts- when we have people (organizers apparently) acting like snobbish jerks who will 'wipe the political floor with person X'. I guess everyone missed this intentionally vague/brief point in my first post.

FYI, he's more a political agitator (in the sense of "Educate! Agitate! Organize!") than an organizer.

RED DAVE

7th August 2011, 01:03

^^^ No you haven't thought about it. Post #83 eluded you.It did not elude me. I just ignored it. However, if you insist:

The essence of a bureaucracy, the essence, heart, center, purpose, raison d'etre, etc., is hierarchical authority.
And that is where I strongly disagree with that Weberian evaluation and the swear-word implications. Again, the essence is one of processes.You can disagree all you want, but it's not an accident that "bureaucracy" is a swear word. There is no way in which a bureaucracy is compatible with revolutionary democracy.

One more time, for all younger comrades: a bureaucratic concept of socialism is typical of stalinism and social democracy. It has nothing to do with revolutionary socialism.

RED DAVE

ckaihatsu

7th August 2011, 01:24

Um, workers' bureaucracy (that is, bureaucracy by, of, and for the workers)? Think about that.

DNZ, are you merely *describing* a Stalinist-type nationalist bureaucracy here, or are you *advocating* it?

Your position is unclear.

S.Artesian

7th August 2011, 03:03

WTF does this have to do with the topic of this thread?

Die Neue Zeit

7th August 2011, 03:16

Your position is unclear.

Check your Visitor Messages.

ckaihatsu

7th August 2011, 03:23

WTF does this have to do with the topic of this thread?

This is admittedly off-topic, but I'm hoping to bring some clarification and possible resolution to this flare-up between Red Dave and DNZ.

I support the pre-war SPD's model, which Lenin looked up to, with respect to its full-timers.

Offhand I'd say that your regular emphasis is on the process of *socialization* ("nationalization") of private-capital and bourgeois-national assets -- as a matter of politics you may want to emphasize this strength for the short-term and either leave off on more long-term aspects, which you're not as interested in addressing, or else at least concede that 'socialization' is simply an *initial* step and that the revolutionary workers would practice collective self-determination from that point onward.

I think you're catching flak for getting stuck in an in-between temporal period wherein your use of the term 'workers bureaucracy' is easily understandably interpreted as 'Stalinism' even if you actually mean it in a more revolutionary-progressive way.

RED DAVE

7th August 2011, 12:45

DNZ, are you merely *describing* a Stalinist-type nationalist bureaucracy here, or are you *advocating* it?

Your position is unclear.Knowing his general politics, both.

RED DAVE

Paul Cockshott

7th August 2011, 15:56

to artesian, why do you think it relevant to disregard the deficit on trade with subsidiaries overseas. Overseas plants ae not US sovereign territories.

S.Artesian

7th August 2011, 16:39

to artesian, why do you think it relevant to disregard the deficit on trade with subsidiaries overseas. Overseas plants ae not US sovereign territories.

Because if Hewlett-Packard in the US does transactions with HP in Malaysia or Mexico, the dollars used in that exchange do not "belong" to Mexico or Malaysia, but are deposited with regional banks, commercial banks, financial institutions that have to transfer those dollars to central banks in return for the local currency. Thus the "foreign reserves" that everyone thinks belong to China, or Singapore, or Mexico derived from these exchanges do NOT belong to those countries, and actually belong to the US mother corporations, and such deposits must be held in securities that are liquid and broad enough to absorb the cash. The only market that fits that requirement is the market for US Treasury securities.

Nobody knows how much corporate cash US corporations hold overseas. Inside the US, the amount held by non-financial corporations is about $1.8 trillion, including cash-type securities [usually T-bills]. I think S&P or Moody's or one of those clown rating agencies that can't add and subtract right, estimates corporate cash held oversees at over $500 billion, which I think, given the known amounts held by certain corporations-- Apple, Intel, Coca-Cola, Cisco-- is way too low.

Given the importance of international corporations to the total revenue base of the largest non-financial US corporations I would estimate [and this is obviously guessing on my part] the cash held overseas to be at least equal to the $1.8 trillion in the US.

I think the "balance of payments" has precisely zero to do with this as a "cause" of the debt downgrade.

Certainly, other countries can seize those dollar reserves, just as they could seize the plants on their territory. That however risks war.... or revolution.

Lenina Rosenweg

7th August 2011, 17:09

S.Artesian

7th August 2011, 17:12

BTW I know you are not a Hudson fan, he's more of a left-Keynsian.

Bit of an understatement there. Can't stand the guy's theories. I mean really, how can you write a whole book about US 'super-imperialism' and never analyze corporate profits?

Hudson, after all, does imagine himself chairman of the president's "council of economic advisers" once Kucinich gets elected president.

RED DAVE

7th August 2011, 18:17

I think you're catching flak for getting stuck in an in-between temporal period wherein your use of the term 'workers bureaucracy' is easily understandably interpreted as 'Stalinism' even if you actually mean it in a more revolutionary-progressive way.There is no "revolutionary-progressive" way to interpret the term "workers bureaucracy." That would be lIke saying, "workers capitalism."

RED DAVE

Die Neue Zeit

7th August 2011, 20:01

^^^ "Workers state capitalism" may be a long-term oxymoron, but is quite sensible in the immediate term.

ckaihatsu

7th August 2011, 20:53

Okay. Reading Super Imperialism by Micheal Hudson I got the impression that the US was the engine of world growth, the "consumer of last resort" only by continuing an alarming debt overhang/ Essentially the global economy is a gigantic Ponzi scheme.Isn't this a very fragile situation?

BTW I know you are not a Hudson fan, he's more of a left-Keynsian.

Anyway I really wish I knew more about international economics and where we're headed.

I really can't see anyone here disagreeing with the characterization of world capitalism as being akin to a giant Ponzi scheme -- what *I've* wondered about is the relative elasticity of the various nations' levels of sovereign debt, described as varying percentages of each country's GDP.

Examining this aspect of the world's velocity only serves to call *further* into question the authority resting on it -- what are the guidelines for the respective levels of national debt for each, and how did the prevailing norms of geopolitics arrive at such standards?

Obviously there's no regular-type 'government oversight office' for this pan-national system of sovereign economics, except for the markets, of course. The markets have lately been punishing the relatively smaller, more specialized, and less exploitative sovereign economies ('PIIGS') -- and now increasingly the U.S. economy, too -- with the kind of inflation-making speculative activity that is conventionally seen in actual *productive*, *growth-oriented* sectors like manufacturing.

Instead we now have the financial floating craps game taking action over boring *non-productive* sectors like food, raw materials, and national debt just because it can't ever stop. The question of concern is how this all does / will affect the "real economy" -- meaning that at some point people may just get sick of *hearing* about how stupid financial sector activity has become and may revolt due to the sustained distastefulness alone. (!)

Die Neue Zeit

7th August 2011, 20:59

How are food and raw materials "unproductive"? :confused:

S.Artesian

7th August 2011, 21:14

I really can't see anyone here disagreeing with the characterization of world capitalism as being akin to a giant Ponzi scheme

I disagree. Just as I disagree with the notion that "fictitious capital" has "offset" the "crisis" of "global capitalism" in the past.

Value, the aggrandizement of surplus labor time as surplus value, really exists. The accumulation of capital, its expanded reproduction, actually occurs, and its just that real aggrandizement, real expansion that drives capital up against the inside of the cage of its own making.

Fictitious capital, derivatives, etc. are just that-- derivative; the cause for the predicament of capital is in its organization of labor, in its real exchanges with labor power.

ckaihatsu

7th August 2011, 21:51

How are food and raw materials "unproductive"? :confused:

According to my understanding, there's no transformative process of value taking place with activities that only *source materials* (low-level) from the earth. Valuation *would* be according to a simple balance of supply and demand, but -- since the extraction methods for these materials has become so efficient and productive -- there's always *far more* supply than demand, hence our Marxist 'overproduction'. Note that the government must enforce price supports for things like food, housing, etc., to keep prices artificially high or else the markets would be swamped with enough for everyone, rendering the entire exchange-based practice into oblivion.

All finance, too, is removed from the productive process since it's concerned with manipulations of value over time. Finance, insurance, and real estate (F.I.R.E.), and marketing and advertising, are all *draws* on already-existing value -- costs of capital -- and lend nothing to *increasing* that capital value through the labor-exploitative process.

Speculative bubbles inflating prices on underlying *non-productive* economic activities shows the basic *inanity* of it all, by the yardstick of materialism -- it's just a glorified casino at that point since the underlying basis is arbitrary and could be *any* dynamic that's non-static.

Lenina Rosenweg

7th August 2011, 21:58

ckaihatsu

7th August 2011, 22:14

I disagree. Just as I disagree with the notion that "fictitious capital" has "offset" the "crisis" of "global capitalism" in the past.

Value, the aggrandizement of surplus labor time as surplus value, really exists. The accumulation of capital, its expanded reproduction, actually occurs, and its just that real aggrandizement, real expansion that drives capital up against the inside of the cage of its own making.

Fictitious capital, derivatives, etc. are just that-- derivative; the cause for the predicament of capital is in its organization of labor, in its real exchanges with labor power.

Okay, fair 'nuff.

I wasn't saying that the crisis of capitalism is *due* to its (derived) Ponzi-scheme-like dynamic, since I called into question the geopolitical norms for the relative scales of national debt for respective countries. (The decided time to end *any* sustained Ponzi scheme is ultimately a *political* decision, so we can validly discuss a time-frame for the ending of the *capitalist* Ponzi scheme, and what kind of organization of labor would succeed it.)

S.Artesian

7th August 2011, 22:40

What accounts for the "financialization" of the US economy and the increased power of finance capital? Isn't there currently a need for "devalorization" of capital? What about the billions that "disappeared" in 2007-2008?

Corporate profitability is at a high level currently but this can only be obtained though increasing squeezing of the working class.The constraints are much narrower. Is this ultimately from an over accumulation of capital?

I pretty much have little or no idea what I'm talking about here, just wish I knew more.

1. Recovery from the 2001-2003 recession was based, in part, on US industries' draconian restriction on capital spending which had powered the 1993-2000 expansion and led to massive overproduction; and in part on wage controls, keeping the wage bill below its 2000-2001 peak. US industries were not tapping bank credit lines. The banks then took to increasing their exposure to consumer loans-- most importantly housing in residential mortgages and housing again in loans to construction companies building homes. Mortgage securitization, long present, then took off as the "logical" extension of increased leverage in the housing and construction market. Good book on the mortgage securitization is All the Devils are Here.

2. There certainly is a need for realizing the non-performing debt and writing it off, but if that occurs, the commercial banks will have to admit their bankruptcy, even after TARP, etc. I estimate that there is still $2 trillion in non-performing residential mortgage debt being carried on bank books-- this after US banks have written off about $1 trillion in non-performing debt. These amounts do not include the non-performing loans made to construction companies building residential and commercial structures. Such loans were the dominant reason for the collapse of regional banks in the US in 2010.

Nor does this amount account for the $1.4 trillion in commerical real estate loans [including commercial mortgage backed securities] coming due in 2014.

3. 2010 was a banner year for corporate profits, like getting back behind the wheel drunk is a banner year for hit and run drivers. The percentage of GDP going to profits in the US recovered to approach its 2006 level, and the 1951 high. Except by the 3/4, profit margins began to erode for companies like 3M and P &G, despite the layoffs and the boost to productivity by these layoffs.

Internationally, similar patterns emerged. In that canary-industry in the capitalist world market coal mine, semiconductor fabrication, margins also began to erode, as overproduction and increased output overtook the drastic reduction in raw capacity imposed during 2008 and 2009. The price of a 1 Gigabyte D-RAM chip was $2.72 in May 2010. It had fallen to $1.90 by November 2010. Last quarter, the price for a 1 Gig D-RAM chip was .84. Right 84 cents-- 30% of what it was a year ago.

S.Artesian

7th August 2011, 22:50

According to my understanding, there's no transformative process of value taking place with activities that only *source materials* (low-level) from the earth. Valuation *would* be according to a simple balance of supply and demand, but -- since the extraction methods for these materials has become so efficient and productive -- there's always *far more* supply than demand, hence our Marxist 'overproduction'. Note that the government must enforce price supports for things like food, housing, etc., to keep prices artificially high or else the markets would be swamped with enough for everyone, rendering the entire exchange-based practice into oblivion.

I think your understanding is wrong. First and foremost, Marx defined "productive" labor as that labor from which surplus value can be extracted. Consequently, no matter how small the portion of wage-labor involved in food production, mining, etc. it is productive labor, very productive labor as the amount of surplus labor-time aggrandized as surplus value is quite high relative to the total labor-time consumed.

The surplus-value however is not so high relative to the total capital investment, and the total capital expenditure in such production.

Marx's analysis of overproduction is not an analysis of supply outstripping demand, although such imbalances can certainly occur. His analysis of overproduction is at core an analysis of overaccumulation of the means of production as capital where the amount of surplus value as a proportion of the total investment in production, and in the need to increase value through production, is insufficient to satisfy that requirement.

Speculative bubbles inflating prices on underlying *non-productive* economic activities shows the basic *inanity* of it all, by the yardstick of materialism -- it's just a glorified casino at that point since the underlying basis is arbitrary and could be *any* dynamic that's non-static.

Speculative bubbles, as is the case with all price deviations serve only to distribute the available profit, they don't create it. However, such mechanisms are not simply "inane" or "insane" or "casino-like." They mark the inability of capital to maintain expanded reproduction, to "float" so to speak, all past value through sufficient extraction and sufficient rates of new value to carry the old values.

Lenina Rosenweg

7th August 2011, 23:54

Both posts are very useful. Thanks.

re: your blog, it was "The Mamas and The Papas"

ckaihatsu

8th August 2011, 00:32

How are food and raw materials "unproductive"? :confused:

First and foremost, Marx defined "productive" labor as that labor from which surplus value can be extracted.

Yes, but I was addressing valuations of *capital*, in response to DNZ's inquiry.

S.Artesian

8th August 2011, 01:04

Yes, but I was addressing valuations of *capital*, in response to DNZ's inquiry.

What do you mean "by valuations of capital"? I've never heard the phrase before, and certainly not in the context of your original statement:

Instead we now have the financial floating craps game taking action over boring *non-productive* sectors like food, raw materials, and national debt

How exactly can you include food and raw materials in the "non-productive" sector along with debt instruments?

That a portion of money gets fed into markets to speculate on the prices of these commodities does not make the production of all commodities "non-productive."

Agricultural production is quite profitable in the US, on the whole, which means for the few-- larger units of production, with price supports down to less than half of what they were a few years ago.

As for "price supports for housing....," no that's not what the US govt does or did through its GSE's FNMA or FMAC... to keep prices high. These agencies, and the FHA, buy mortgages from the original issuers, that supposedly meet certain credit requirements, and then guarantee payment of the mortgages. The GSE's do this by securitizing the mortgages [yes FNMA was the original MBS issuer] and selling bonds backed by the revenue stream from payment of the underlying mortgage loans.

This makes housing affordable, in theory, for the population, and while in theory there is a subsidizing affect as FNMA plays off an implicit "government guarantee" to pay lower coupons on its debt, this is certainly not a case of keeping prices "artificially high." And while we're at it, neither are farm subsidy support payments.

90% of all mortgages issued in the US in the last 3 years have been GSE mortgages-- FNMA, FMAC, or FHA mortgages. The private market for mortgages collapsed along with mortgage backed securities and has not recovered. Yet with the GSE's essentially bankrupting themselves in the last 5 years, prices for US homes continue downward with construction and sales of new housing at historic lows, at rates less than 1/3 of the rate in 2005. Existing home sales are down by 1/2.

We certainly have had overproduction, but not underconsumption.

ckaihatsu

8th August 2011, 02:30

What do you mean "by valuations of capital"? I've never heard the phrase before, and certainly not in the context of your original statement:

Capital. I mean capital, after the process of labor exploitation.

Instead we now have the financial floating craps game taking action over boring *non-productive* sectors like food, raw materials, and national debt

How exactly can you include food and raw materials in the "non-productive" sector along with debt instruments?

It's as I just explained it in post #106.

That a portion of money gets fed into markets to speculate on the prices of these commodities does not make the production of all commodities "non-productive."

Yes, for sourcing natural / raw materials -- (the so-called "commodities" markets) -- it's non-productive because there is no *stepped-up increase* of (capital) value, through the process of exploiting labor, involved in just *sourcing* natural / raw materials like food, copper, lumber, etc.

Yes, there can be profits, due to the exploitation of labor, and/or financial gains may be realized, due to (speculative) movements in the markets, but the financial process here is not producing any *new* capital value per product inputs, as would be the case with manufacturing -- it's exploiting labor and/or just shifting capital value quantities around. (And exploiting labor to source raw materials *without* the use of capital is called *slavery*.)

Agricultural production is quite profitable in the US, on the whole, which means for the few-- larger units of production, with price supports down to less than half of what they were a few years ago.

Okay, yes, it's exploiting labor, and, yes, it's sourcing food, but it's not productive *economic activity*.

As for "price supports for housing....," no that's not what the US govt does or did through its GSE's FNMA or FMAC... to keep prices high. These agencies, and the FHA, buy mortgages from the original issuers, that supposedly meet certain credit requirements, and then guarantee payment of the mortgages. The GSE's do this by securitizing the mortgages [yes FNMA was the original MBS issuer] and selling bonds backed by the revenue stream from payment of the underlying mortgage loans.

This makes housing affordable, in theory, for the population, and while in theory there is a subsidizing affect as FNMA plays off an implicit "government guarantee" to pay lower coupons on its debt, this is certainly not a case of keeping prices "artificially high." And while we're at it, neither are farm subsidy support payments.

You're describing an underwriting of risk from public funds, like TARP. This allows investors / traders to risk more money, driving up prices to artificial heights.

90% of all mortgages issued in the US in the last 3 years have been GSE mortgages-- FNMA, FMAC, or FHA mortgages. The private market for mortgages collapsed along with mortgage backed securities and has not recovered. Yet with the GSE's essentially bankrupting themselves in the last 5 years, prices for US homes continue downward with construction and sales of new housing at historic lows, at rates less than 1/3 of the rate in 2005. Existing home sales are down by 1/2.

We certainly have had overproduction, but not underconsumption.

Yes, this is the sick and twisted reality of capitalism -- overproduction leading to underconsumption since so much value is externalized away from potential transactions, into "sinkholes" of private non-performing accumulations. So while there's plenty of liquidity generally the economy is paradoxically in a state of *deflation* (over-valuation) from a lack of encouraging economic growth to drive risk-taking and optimistic investment. The lack of economic movement means that motion can only be maintained -- straight into profits and more non-performing private accumulations -- by stealing from public funds, no matter the cost to societal well-being.

(One way of visualizing this is as ponds on a field after a rain -- yes, the availability of general liquidity may swell the ponds, but that doesn't guarantee a flowing of liquidity *among* the ponds.)

Ilyich

8th August 2011, 02:36

I'd imagine if the USD collapses, a rise in radical politics will come up. The Tea Party is little better than fascists, and if they come to any more power than they currently have, I am getting the hell out of this country. The good side of that, however, is that when they're done fucking things up more, I'm sure Socialism will come.

Perhaps that is true, but I would still be cautious with that assumption. A saying of the German Communist Party in the 1930's was "After the Nazis, us." What we see in the United States today mirrors Germany then: a financial crisis marked by unemployment and inflation (though not nearly as severe), followed by the rise of the reactionary right. We should Analyse the mistakes of the German left that lead to the Reich and avoid them.

S.Artesian

8th August 2011, 02:56

Yes, for sourcing natural / raw materials -- (the so-called "commodities" markets) -- it's non-productive because there is no *stepped-up increase* of (capital) value, through the process of exploiting labor, involved in just *sourcing* natural / raw materials like food, copper, lumber, etc.

No markets "step up" or "increase value." Markets only distribute the total socially available surplus value according to the socially necessary time of production. That doesn't change the distinction between productive labor, i.e. agriculture, raw material extraction, industrial processing, etc. utilizing wage-labor, and unproductive labor that does not yield a surplus value.

(And exploiting labor to source raw materials *without* the use of capital is called *slavery*.)

WTF? How can you exploit labor to "source raw materials without the use of capital"? Even slave production made use of capital-- merchants capital, commercial capital, and finance capital. What slave production did not make use of was wage-labor. Exactly where in the markets of the US do you find that going on right now-- commodity production without wage-labor?

Okay, yes, it's exploiting labor, and, yes, it's sourcing food, but it's not *productive* economic activity.

Of course it's productive activity. It's no different than the production of coal, steel, toothbrushes, hula hoops, DRAM chips, etc.

ckaihatsu

8th August 2011, 03:29

Yes, for sourcing natural / raw materials -- (the so-called "commodities" markets) -- it's non-productive because there is no *stepped-up increase* of (capital) value, through the process of exploiting labor, involved in just *sourcing* natural / raw materials like food, copper, lumber, etc.

No markets "step up" or "increase value."

The process of labor value extraction adds resulting capital / financial values to the markets. But not all economic activity enables capital to realize *productive* economic activity, as I've mentioned.

Markets only distribute the total socially available surplus value according to the socially necessary time of production.

Yes.

That doesn't change the distinction between productive labor, i.e. agriculture, raw material extraction, industrial processing, etc. utilizing wage-labor, and unproductive labor that does not yield a surplus value.

I was talking about productive *economic activity*, *not* productive (or non-productive) labor.

WTF? How can you exploit labor to "source raw materials without the use of capital"?

Sounds like an invitation to me...! What's your address?

x D

Even slave production made use of capital-- merchants capital, commercial capital, and finance capital.

No you're mixing the slavery mode of production with mercantilism and full-fledged imperialist capitalism.

What slave production did not make use of was wage-labor. Exactly where in the markets of the US do you find that going on right now-- commodity production without wage-labor?

I never claimed that slavery production is taking place in the U.S.

Of course it's productive activity. It's no different than the production of coal, steel, toothbrushes, hula hoops, DRAM chips, etc.

I meant to say productive *economic activity*, and I certainly didn't mean 'production', which is what you're describing here.

S.Artesian

8th August 2011, 03:49

If anyone knows what ckaihatsu is talking about, please let me know.

RED DAVE

8th August 2011, 04:15

^^^ "Workers state capitalism" may be a long-term oxymoron, but is quite sensible in the immediate term.Reasonable for a Stalinist maybe. For the rest of us: a contradiction by definition.

What you are implying by such a formulation, which is not surprising, is a condition where the working class would decide to forcibly extract surplus value from itself. Since can only be done by a mechanism capable of wielding force over the working class, which cannot be the class itself, because if it were, there would be no need for force, we are already well on our way to stalinism.

And, returning to the point from which this began, there is no still no revolutionary-progressive way to interpret "workers bureaucracy."

RED DAVE

Lenina Rosenweg

8th August 2011, 04:33

I think ckaihatsu may mean is that he feels food and raw material distribution as mediated though the commodity markets enables the reproduction of capital but does not create a net increase in value.

Agriculture is certainly productive-it allows the maintenance and reproduction of the most important commodity of all, labor power but the recent rise in food prices has enriched a few without increasing value. Value/price may be way out of kilter but that does not negate value.

boring *non-productive* sectors like food, raw materials

According to my understanding, there's no transformative process of value taking place with activities that only *source materials* (low-level) from the earth. Valuation *would* be according to a simple balance of supply and demand, but -- since the extraction methods for these materials has become so efficient and productive -- there's always *far more* supply than demand, hence our Marxist 'overproduction'. Note that the government must enforce price supports for things like food, housing, etc., to keep prices artificially high or else the markets would be swamped with enough for everyone, rendering the entire exchange-based practice into oblivion.

I don't really understand agriculture but in raw material and mineral extraction value is certainly created.In agricultural profitability may have to be propped up but looking at in in the context of capitalism as a totality value is certainly created.

Lenina Rosenweg

8th August 2011, 04:39

^^^ "Workers state capitalism" may be a long-term oxymoron, but is quite sensible in the immediate term.

The concept of a "worker's state" is a bit problematic, as pointed out by Lenin in State and Revolution. Elements of capitalism may be retained for a short time after the working class takes power but this can be problematic as well. The NEP did not end well. Most likely the transition from capitalism to socialism will be brutal. The class enemy, as shown in Spain, Russia, Chile and many other places does not believe in compromise. It will be a fight to the death.
There will not be room for in between stages, workers will take the means of productive and "socialist reconstruction"(although I hate that term) will be the order of the day.

ckaihatsu

8th August 2011, 07:23

[7] Syndicalism-Socialism-Communism Transition Diagram

http://postimage.org/image/1bufa71ms/

S.Artesian

8th August 2011, 15:00

WSJ Online report shows why the credit-downgrade, in and of itself, is not the issue:

NEW YORK—The U.S. rating downgrade barely put a dent on the allure of Treasurys as a safe haven. Bond prices rallied as the news added to worries about the global economic outlook, pushing investors out of risky assets and seeking safety in U.S. government debt.
The price move underlines the dilemma confronting global investors from the Chinese central bank to pension funds and Japanese housewives: There are few alternative safe-haven assets out there that can match the depth and liquidity of the Treasury market, which has more than $9.3 trillion debt outstanding.

ckaihatsu

8th August 2011, 23:04

End the Wars! Tax the Rich!

Economic Commentary
End the Wars! Tax the Rich!

By Masao Suzuki

San José, CA - The recent federal debt limit deal passed by the House and Senate and signed into law by president Obama promises at least $2.1 trillion in spending cuts and lower interest payments over the next ten years. This deal did not include any savings from ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or from restoring higher taxes for the rich. It was a victory for the Tea Party-backed Republicans and benefits the rich and Wall Street. At the same time programs serving poor and working people will be the target for cuts and the deal opens the door for cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost more than $1.5 trillion over the next ten years. The Bush tax cuts for the rich will cost about $600 billion dollars over the same period of time. Ending the wars and restoring the taxes on the rich would save more than $2 trillion, and, including savings from lower interest payments, would save about $2.6 trillion, more than the recent debt limit deal.

Let’s be clear. The real issue is not the deficit, it is about keeping taxes low for the rich and continuing to fund our present and future wars, while cutting programs that serve poor and working people. Social Security and Medicare did not cause the federal debt. In fact ever since the FICA payroll tax that pays for Social Security and Medicare was raised in the 1980s, these two programs have run surpluses and have helped to pay for the wars and tax cuts for the rich.

Half of all workers have no private pension plans, so Social Security is their only guarantee of income security when they retire. For more than a quarter of seniors who are lower-income, Social Security provides over 90% of their retirement income. About 40% of seniors have no private health insurance, and would suffer the most from any cuts in the Medicare.

Unfortunately, the fact is that the vast majority of politicians in Washington D.C. are more beholden to Wall Street and/or the Tea Party than they are to the interests of poor and working people and seniors. What is needed to be build a mass movement for economic justice that can unite workers, both union and non-union, and oppressed nationality communities, especially African Americans, Chicanos, and Latinos, who have the least income and wealth are who are hit hardest by cuts in government services. Students and youth and seniors are especially vulnerable to these cuts. We need to demand that the politicians bring our troops home now, end the Bush tax cuts for the rich, and protect Social Security, Medicare, and other government programs.

End the Wars!

Tax the Rich!

No cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and other programs for poor and working people!

Read more News and Views from the Peoples Struggle at http://www.fightbacknews.org. You can write to us at [email protected]

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Die Neue Zeit

10th August 2011, 14:46

Elements of capitalism may be retained for a short time after the working class takes power but this can be problematic as well. The NEP did not end well. Most likely the transition from capitalism to socialism will be brutal. The class enemy, as shown in Spain, Russia, Chile and many other places does not believe in compromise. It will be a fight to the death.
There will not be room for in between stages, workers will take the means of productive and "socialist reconstruction"(although I hate that term) will be the order of the day.

What I meant by worker-based state capitalism are things like nationalization tax (medium enterprises that for some reason aren't seized by the state or by worker syndicates should be subject to this), wage-based food production replacing all petty food production by hook or by crook (sovkhozy vs. kolkhozy), retention of sovereign wealth funds for foreign investment where it is aligned with the new polity interests (despite what I wrote about these as being state-based speculation), etc.

ckaihatsu

10th August 2011, 19:06

retention of sovereign wealth funds for foreign investment where it is aligned with the new polity interests (despite what I wrote about these as being state-based speculation), etc.

Uh, *this* part sounds more than a little problematic for a context of transitioning to socialism / communism.

Would you mind explaining your reasoning here?

S.Artesian

10th August 2011, 20:14

Uh, *this* part sounds more than a little problematic for a context of transitioning to socialism / communism.

Would you mind explaining your reasoning here?

Wait a fucking minute-- the other thread was spiked because people started going off topic. Every fucking time this DNZ steps into a thread, the thread becomes about him and his latest crackpot attempts at "triangulation" between capitalism and socialism, between proletarian revolution, and Stalinist-social dem suppressions of the revolution.

So if anybody wants to query Der Alte Kacke about his latest hallucinations, start a separate fucking thread. DO NOT BRING IT INTO THIS ONE.

Die Neue Zeit

11th August 2011, 01:49

Uh, *this* part sounds more than a little problematic for a context of transitioning to socialism / communism.

Would you mind explaining your reasoning here?

Income generated from ownership in sovereign wealth funds is used by the state for other areas of fiscal policy (budgets and such) or monetary policy. It helps close deficit gaps and build upon budget surpluses.

ckaihatsu

11th August 2011, 02:13

Income generated from ownership in sovereign wealth funds is used by the state for other areas of fiscal policy (budgets and such) or monetary policy. It helps close deficit gaps and build upon budget surpluses.

Uh, and just what would that income be based on...???

If it's *interest* payments, then *that's capitalism*. That's not moving in the direction of a workers-controlled *political* economy, but is rather relying on the market mechanism.

[S]tart a separate fucking thread. DO NOT BRING IT INTO THIS ONE.

Sorry to "interrupt" your discussion here, but if there's a matter of administrative policy here I'd rather hear it from a RevLeft admin.

Die Neue Zeit

11th August 2011, 02:42

Uh, and just what would that income be based on...???

If it's *interest* payments, then *that's capitalism*. That's not moving in the direction of a workers-controlled *political* economy, but is rather relying on the market mechanism.

Comrade, I stated the possibility of this in the very early transitional period, when things like market socialism (Lange, not Deng) might - just might - be the order of the day.

ckaihatsu

11th August 2011, 02:54

Comrade, I stated the possibility of this in the very early transitional period, when things like market socialism (Lange, not Deng) might - just might - be the order of the day.

Sorry, I can't countenance 'market socialism' -- that's where I draw the line. I also think it's a contradiction of terms.

Centralization-Abstraction Diagram of Political Forms

http://postimage.org/image/35ru6ztic/

Die Neue Zeit

11th August 2011, 02:55

I said *might - just might* for a reason. I'm not discounting anything.

Lenina Rosenweg

11th August 2011, 02:58

With all due respect to everyone on this thread, I think my OP -the US "debt downgrade" and near future prospects for the US economy, is extremely important and interesting. Its an area I want to learn as much about as I can. I haven't posted much because I don't have much to say but I am reading the posts and learning. If we can continue this thread and keep it "on task" that would be great.

Paul Cockshott

12th August 2011, 08:37

Because if Hewlett-Packard in the US does transactions with HP in Malaysia or Mexico, the dollars used in that exchange do not "belong" to Mexico or Malaysia, but are deposited with regional banks, commercial banks, financial institutions that have to transfer those dollars to central banks in return for the local currency. Thus the "foreign reserves" that everyone thinks belong to China, or Singapore, or Mexico derived from these exchanges do NOT belong to those countries, and actually belong to the US mother corporations, and such deposits must be held in securities that are liquid and broad enough to absorb the cash. The only market that fits that requirement is the market for US Treasury securities.

Nobody knows how much corporate cash US corporations hold overseas. Inside the US, the amount held by non-financial corporations is about $1.8 trillion, including cash-type securities [usually T-bills]. I think S&P or Moody's or one of those clown rating agencies that can't add and subtract right, estimates corporate cash held oversees at over $500 billion, which I think, given the known amounts held by certain corporations-- Apple, Intel, Coca-Cola, Cisco-- is way too low.

Given the importance of international corporations to the total revenue base of the largest non-financial US corporations I would estimate [and this is obviously guessing on my part] the cash held overseas to be at least equal to the $1.8 trillion in the US.

I think the "balance of payments" has precisely zero to do with this as a "cause" of the debt downgrade.

Certainly, other countries can seize those dollar reserves, just as they could seize the plants on their territory. That however risks war.... or revolution.
I am not sure this is convincing, it sounds like special pleading for the USA. It is true that the deposits of US subsidiaries in Mexico do not belong to the Mexican government, but neither do any other deposits in Mexican banks other than those of government companies. But if the deposits of US subsidiaries do not belong to the Mexican govt nor do the assets belong to the US government, so it is unclear what justification you have for offsetting these against the trade deficit.

The trade balance measures the flows of embodied value between countries, what the US trade deficit indicates is that the US is consuming more value than it produces, This basic reality is not changed by saying that US shareholders have an indirect claim on some assets in Mexican, German or Chinese banks.

In time of war, it is just possible that the US government could legislate to confiscate overseas assets held by US firms and liquidise these to pay for war, but that of course would only work for those assets in neutral countries. Other than those extreme circumstances, the hypothetical ownership of these assets by US shareholders has little significance.

S.Artesian

12th August 2011, 12:19

Paul Cockshott

12th August 2011, 15:09

That's a pip, "special pleading"--

Not convincing? Hewlett-Packard in the US exports X value to Hewlett-Packard in Malaysia that processes X value into X + Y value and reexports X + Y value to HP in the US which then adds another and probably much smaller increment of value making in X + Y +Z value, which it then realizes in the markets either in the US or Canada or Britain, and you think that embodies a flow of value among countries? That the "US is consuming more value than it produces"?

.
The value Y in your example is created by labour in Malaysia and thus, in the system of national accounts, is part of net value created in Malaysia. If the value embodied in the products of US labour exported from the US is less than the value of the products of foreign labour imported, then the US is consuming more value than it produces. This is what was traditionally called US economic imperialism by communists.

S.Artesian

12th August 2011, 15:45

The value Y in your example is created by labour in Malaysia and thus, in the system of national accounts, is part of net value created in Malaysia. If the value embodied in the products of US labour exported from the US is less than the value of the products of foreign labour imported, then the US is consuming more value than it produces. This is what was traditionally called US economic imperialism by communists.

But of course the "labor" doesn't belong to Malaysia, the labor is expropriated as value in Malaysia by capital, by US capital, so what you like to misrepresent as a gap between consumption of value and production of value in the US has literally nothing to do with US as the United States and everything to do with the US bourgeoisie.

What counts is the expropriation of the labor as value through the production of commodities. That is what creates the wealth for the bourgeoisie, and that wealth is, not to put too fine a point on it , all that matters. That's why it's called "the bottom line."

Your analysis that the "US" consumes more value that the "US" produces is, as I said before, nothing but mercantilism all dressed up and not really in any new clothing.

Whom does the value enrich? Who owns the value? The "US"? Malaysia? Of course not, value accrues to class not to nation.

Has it been classically called US economic imperialism? By "communist"? Really? That's the determining characteristic of imperialism? I guess that means prior to the US running of a trade deficit [the US ran 1973 I think] there was no US imperialism?

What communists have defined it as such? Not Lenin. Not Luxemburg.

So let's look at this regarding specific countries, because the overall trade deficit of the US is made up of its trades with specific countries. It simply doesn't occur in abstraction. From the US Statistical Abstract 2011, merchandise trade in goods and services:

The US ran trade deficits with the following countries in 2009 [partial list].

Austria, Denmark, Canada, Ecuador, Germany, France, Finland, Ireland, Japan, Norway, Nigeria, China, Malaysia:.

The US ran trade surpluses with the following countries in 2009 [partial list]

Australia, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Hong Kong, Netherlands, Panama, Philippines, Singapore.

So now tell me does your measure provide any way of determining with which countries the US has an imperial/colony relationship?

Paul Cockshott

12th August 2011, 18:51

But of course the "labor" doesn't belong to Malaysia, the labor is expropriated as value in Malaysia by capital, by US capital, so what you like to misrepresent as a gap between consumption of value and production of value in the US has literally nothing to do with US as the United States and everything to do with the US bourgeoisie.
The whole system of national accounts is based on recording the value produced within the boundaries of states, and trade deficits and surpluses measure the net flow
of value over the boundaries of states. If the USA or the UK run a persistent trade deficit it means that the rest of the world is subsidising aggregate consumption within the USA or the UK. Now that aggregate consumption is unevenly divided between social classes, and some of the aggregate consumption is done by the state itself.
But it is not true that the only people affected by such flows are the capitalist class.

The deficit is associated with an overvaluation of the dollar and if the dollar were devalued enough to bring trade into balance, all social classes would notice the rise in the cost of imported goods.

What counts is the expropriation of the labor as value through the production of commodities. That is what creates the wealth for the bourgeoisie, and that wealth is, not to put too fine a point on it , all that matters. That's why it's called "the bottom line."

If you are only considering the economy from the standpoint of the rentier class that may be true, but it is not all that matters to other classes.

Your analysis that the "US" consumes more value that the "US" produces is, as I said before, nothing but mercantilism all dressed up and not really in any new clothing.

No it is not mercantilism, it is based on the Smithian critique of mercantilism. The mercantilist position is that it is beneficial to run a trade surplus, I am following the classical economists in saying the opposite.

Whom does the value enrich? Who owns the value? The "US"? Malaysia? Of course not, value accrues to class not to nation.

Has it been classically called US economic imperialism? By "communist"? Really? That's the determining characteristic of imperialism? I guess that means prior to the US running of a trade deficit [the US ran 1973 I think] there was no US imperialism?

What communists have defined it as such? Not Lenin. Not Luxemburg.
Lenin took over Hobsons critique of the parasitical character of the British Empire, that parisitism was expressed by the constant trade deficit run by Britain in the period.
That meant that the rest of the world was transferring value to Britain, and Britain was consuming some of the surplus produced elsewhere.

So let's look at this regarding specific countries, because the overall trade deficit of the US is made up of its trades with specific countries. It simply doesn't occur in abstraction. From the US Statistical Abstract 2011, merchandise trade in goods and services:

The US ran trade deficits with the following countries in 2009 [partial list].

Austria, Denmark, Canada, Ecuador, Germany, France, Finland, Ireland, Japan, Norway, Nigeria, China, Malaysia:.

The US ran trade surpluses with the following countries in 2009 [partial list]

Australia, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Hong Kong, Netherlands, Panama, Philippines, Singapore.

So now tell me does your measure provide any way of determining with which countries the US has an imperial/colony relationship?

This means that the countries in the first list are subsidising the US, whilst hose in the latter list are net recipients of value from the US. What makes the US at present a parasitic imperialist state is the fact that taken in balance it is a net consumer of the surplus produced elsewhere.

S.Artesian

12th August 2011, 19:26

The whole system of national accounts is based on recording the value produced within the boundaries of states, and trade deficits and surpluses measure the net flow
of value over the boundaries of states. If the USA or the UK run a persistent trade deficit it means that the rest of the world is subsidising aggregate consumption within the USA or the UK. Now that aggregate consumption is unevenly divided between social classes, and some of the aggregate consumption is done by the state itself.
But it is not true that the only people affected by such flows are the capitalist class.

But what communists define imperialism based on national accounts? What communists define imperialism based on trade deficits?

All you are doing is repeating your argument in different formats. "There's a trade deficit. A trade deficit means the country is consuming more value than it produces. Therefore the consuming country is being subsidized. Therefore it is imperialist." That's not an accurate given the record of trade deficits and surpluses.

The deficit is associated with an overvaluation of the dollar and if the dollar were devalued enough to bring trade into balance, all social classes would notice the rise in the cost of imported goods.
And that proves what regarding imperialism? Is Germany not imperialist because it runs a surplus in its merchandise trade?

If you are only considering the economy from the standpoint of the rentier class that may be true, but it is not all that matters to other classes.
No, what matter is if it matters to the working classes. And in that regard this notion of "imperialism" based on trade deficits, based on "nations" subsidizing other "nations" is an absurdity, and irrelevance.

Lenin took over Hobsons critique of the parasitical character of the British Empire, that parisitism was expressed by the constant trade deficit run by Britain in the period.Lenin's argument in his Imperialism.. is not based on the notion of trade deficits. I don't happen to think Lenin's analysis is very good, but it's not determined by trade balances.

This means that the countries in the first list are subsidising the US, whilst hose in the latter list are net recipients of value from the US. What makes the US at present a parasitic imperialist state is the fact that taken in balance it is a net consumer of the surplus produced elsewhere."They" are not subsidizing the "US"-- "they" bourgeoisie may be subsidizing the US bourgeoisie, and one of those ways might be through the devaluation of the dollar you think would establish a "balance," but again all you are really doing is exercising a tautology [as you do in your characterization of the fSU as socialist].

1. "Trade deficit" is imperialism"

2. Trade deficit means Nation A is consuming more than "it" produces.

3. Consuming more than producing is parasitism.

4. Parsitism is imperialism because it stems from a trade deficit.

And regarding Hobson-- he never was a communist. I asked you to tell me what communists proposed this theory of imperialism. Hobson was a partisan of the "underconsumption" school of analysis. He advocated a world government. He joined the ILP, but he never was a communist. He was in favor of reform, not revolution.

None of that's here nor there if we want to discuss Hobson's theory of imperialism, but please don't pass him off as a communist.

This means that the countries in the first list are subsidising the US, whilst hose in the latter list are net recipients of value from the US. What makes the US at present a parasitic imperialist state is the fact that taken in balance it is a net consumer of the surplus produced elsewhere.

OK, now you've introduced another modifier "parasitic" imperialism, so what? prior to 1973 US imperialism was "non-parasitic"? That's supposed to be a materialist analysis, "parasitic vs. non-parasitic"? What a load of junk.

Paul Cockshott

12th August 2011, 22:35

But what communists define imperialism based on national accounts? What communists define imperialism based on trade deficits?

Chapter 8 of Lenins imperialism deals with the parasitic character of British Imperialism where a class of rentiers lived off revenue obtained in other countries. The revenue was the monetary or accounting image of a real flow of embodied value in the form of imports from other countries that were paid for out of 'invisibles', ie, monetary transfers into Britiain for which no visible exports were delivered in return.

It is true that Lenin does not cite trade statistics or national income statistics but remember that these did not exist in their modern form until the late 1940s, the first British ones were published in 1948, and writing from Switzerland, it is unlikely that Lenin had access to the board of trade statistics that were then published.

Marxist econnomists have always been keen to make use of the best economic statistics available to them - just consider Lenin's assiduous use of Zemstvo figures in his Development of Capitalism in Russia. Now that we have national income statistics and I/O tables their use is pretty standard by Marxist economists. The standard handbook on how to use these from a marxist perspective is Shaik and Tonak 'Measuring the Wealth of Nations'.

.

And that proves what regarding imperialism? Is Germany not imperialist because it runs a surplus in its merchandise trade?
It is pretty clear that German imperialism was defeated in 1945 and that neither German state that succeeded it was imperialist in any way up to about 5 years ago. After that there has been a minor and subsidiary move towards military imperialism to the extent that it has provided troops in a relatively low combat profile to help the US in Afghanistan. But in its economic role it is definitely not the sort of parasitic state that the US and UK are, nor is military intervention and domination built into is foreign policy stance.

No, what matter is if it matters to the working classes. And in that regard this notion of "imperialism" based on trade deficits, based on "nations" subsidizing other "nations" is an absurdity, and irrelevance.
What do you think is involved in one country exploiting another: an unrequited transfer of value to the exploiting country. That will involve a trade deficit.

Lenin's argument in his Imperialism.. is not based on the notion of trade deficits. I don't happen to think Lenin's analysis is very good, but it's not determined by trade balances.

"They" are not subsidizing the "US"-- "they" bourgeoisie may be subsidizing the US bourgeoisie, and one of those ways might be through the devaluation of the dollar you think would establish a "balance," but again all you are really doing is exercising a tautology [as you do in your characterization of the fSU as socialist].

1. "Trade deficit" is imperialism"

No that is not quite right, the point is that parasitic imperial powers run trade deficits, but trade deficits can occur under other circumstances - in a country that is rapidly industrialising with the industrial investment being in part financed by capital inflows that are invested in means of production.

2. Trade deficit means Nation A is consuming more than "it" produces.
that is clearly right

3. Consuming more than producing is parasitism.
yes

4. Parsitism is imperialism because it stems from a trade deficit.

OK, now you've introduced another modifier "parasitic" imperialism, so what? prior to 1973 US imperialism was "non-parasitic"? That's supposed to be a materialist analysis, "parasitic vs. non-parasitic"? What a load of junk.
The emphasis on the Parasitic nature of imperiallism has an old pedigree Lenin repeatedly emphasises it

The description of “British imperialism” in Schulze-Gaevernitz’s book reveals the same parasitical traits. The national income of Great Britain approximately doubled from 1865 to 1898, while the income “from abroad” increased ninefold in the same period. While the “merit” of imperialism is that it “trains the Negro to habits of industry” (you cannot manage without coercion ... ), the “danger” of imperialism lies in that “Europe will shift the burden of physical toil—first agricultural and mining, then the rougher work in industry—on to the coloured races, and itself be content with the role of rentier, and in this way, perhaps, pave the way for the economic, and later, the political emancipation of the coloured races”.
An increasing proportion of land in England is being taken out of cultivation and used for sport, for the diversion of the rich. As far as Scotland—the most aristocratic place for hunting and other sports—is concerned, it is said that “it lives on its past and on Mr. Carnegie” (the American multimillionaire). On horse racing and fox hunting alone England annually spends £14,000,000 (nearly 130 million rubles). The number of rentiers in England is about one million. The percentage of the productively employed population to the total population is declining:

...
One of the special features of imperialism connected with the facts I am describing, is the decline in emigration from imperialist countries and the increase in immigration into these countries from the more backward countries where lower wages are paid. As Hobson observes, emigration from Great Britain has been declining since 1884. In that year the number of emigrants was 242,000, while in 1900, the number was 169,000. Emigration from Germany reached the highest point between 1881 and 1890, with a total of 1,453,000 emigrants. In the course of the following two decades, it fell to 544,000 and to 341,000. On the other hand, there was an increase in the number of workers entering Germany from Austria, Italy, Russia and other countries. According to the 1907 census, there were 1,342,294 foreigners in Germany, of whom 440,800 were industrial workers and 257,329 agricultural workers. [10] In France, the workers employed in the mining industry are, “in great part”, foreigners: Poles, Italians and Spaniards. [11] In the United States, immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe are engaged in the most poorly paid jobs, while American workers provide the highest percentage of overseers or of the better-paid workers. [12] Imperialism has the tendency to create privileged sections also among the workers, and to detach them from the broad masses of the proletariat.
It must be observed that in Great Britain the tendency of imperialism to split the workers, to strengthen opportunism among them and to cause temporary decay in the working-class movement, revealed itself much earlier than the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries; for two important distinguishing features of imperialism were already observed in Great Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century—vast colonial possessions and a monopolist position in the world market. Marx and Engels traced this connection between opportunism in the working-class movement and the imperialist features of British capitalism systematically, during the course of several decades. For example, on October 7, 1858, Engels wrote to Marx: “The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.”[15] Almost a quarter of a century later, in a letter dated August 11, 1881, Engels speaks of the “worst English trade unions which allow themselves to be led by men sold to, or at least paid by, the middle class”. In a letter to Kautsky, dated September 12, 1882, Engels wrote: “You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general. There is no workers’ party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the colonies.” [13] (Engels expressed similar ideas in the press in his preface to the second edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England, which appeared in 1892.)
This clearly shows the causes and effects. The causes are: (1) exploitation of the whole world by this country; (2) its monopolist position in the world market; (3) its colonial monopoly. The effects are: (1) a section of the British proletariat becomes bourgeois; (2) a section of the proletariat allows itself to be led by men bought by, or at least paid by, the bourgeoisie.

In America and Britain today we see these features taken to an even greater extreeme in terms of the decline in the productively employed population, the reliance on labour imports from more backward areas.

One of the unique features of modern US imperialism since the abolition of the gold standard though has been the way its control of the worlds reserve currency gives it the ability to exploit the rest of the world via seigneurage - the issue of money. In recent years, this, rather than inflows of interest payments has been of increasing importance.

Die Neue Zeit

13th August 2011, 01:06

Lenin took over Hobsons critique of the parasitical character of the British Empire, that parisitism was expressed by the constant trade deficit run by Britain in the period.
That meant that the rest of the world was transferring value to Britain, and Britain was consuming some of the surplus produced elsewhere.

FYI, Kautsky went uncredited for saying the same stuff from a more Marxist take that Hobson would write shortly after. Kautsky outlined imperialism even before Hobson.

S.Artesian

13th August 2011, 03:31

Lenin's Imperialism is hardly a rigorous analysis of the movement of value in the world economy. I can go chapter and verse about it, but rather than do that here's the link to where I went to some chapters and some verses.

http://thewolfatthedoor.blogspot.com/2004/11/imperialism-reconsidered-reposted_16.html

Your argument is completely on the validity of national account figures based on activities within a defined state boundary while capitalism has clearly and for more than a century moved beyond those boundaries.

In the US deficit with China, the entire value of every Iphone or Ipod brought into the United States counts as the value imported from China. No such total value is imported from China, however. The value added by China is approximately $5 to every I phone.

No, I do not agree that "whole nations" exploit other "whole nations" in the current configuration of world capitalism. All of Britain did not exploit all of Argentina in the 19th century, nor in the 20th century, nor even in the 1930s.

All of the United States and all of Brazil did not and do not exploit all of Bolivia in the exchange for oil and gas.

I'm sure you would like it to be that way, so you wouldn't have to deal with that little thing called class, so you could be perhaps more comfortable with supporting this or that national bourgeoisie, but that's not how value operates.

But you have failed to answer the question-- besides naming the communists who thought that trade deficits equaled imperialism-- what was the US between 1898 say and 1973, when it wasn't running trade deficits? Non-imperialist?

And how can you make an abstraction that says the US is parasitically imperialist now because in general it runs an overall deficit, when you have claimed that the whole basis for accurate accounting requires looking at economic activity contained within specific state boundaries? So is the US not imperialist, or not "parasitically" imperialist in its relation with the Dominican Republic, with Canada, with Brazil?

Jose Gracchus

13th August 2011, 03:51

Cockshott's bastardization of how exploitation works is a pretty interesting window into the mind of a "kill whitey, support the Third World Bonapartes or bureaucracy" Monthly Review under-consumptionist. If only we could have "healthy" "non-parasitic" capitalism at home...and someday we'll move on to classless socialism...oh wait, I forgot you find that "utopian".

Paul Cockshott

13th August 2011, 14:14

It is worth remembering what the topic of this thread is: the US deficit. It is impossible to discuss this sensibly outside of an analysis of the national accounts. The budget deficit is the shortfall of tax revenue over expenditure, and that revenue can only be raised within the borders of the nation state.
Within this accounting framework the following relation necessarily holds:
Budget deficit = trade defict + financial surplus of corporate sector + net savings of the propertied class - net borrowing of employees
This accounting relation necessarily holds true.
The budget deficit can only be reduced by reducing the sum of
trade defict + financial surplus of corporate sector + net savings of the propertied class
or by increasing the indebtedness of employees.
Given the low credit rating of employees after the crash, this implies that the budget deficit can only effectively be countered by taxes on companies or the propertied classes, or by a reduction in the trade deficit. The trade deficit is one of the three main net contributors to the budget deficit.

It is an illusion to think that cuts in public expenditure will reduce the budget deficit unless they are such as to reduce the trade deficit -- ie, cuts in overseas millitary operations, or unless the cuts in expenditure so reduce the overall level of national income that the ability of corporations and capitalists to run a financial surplus is impeded.

S.Artesian

13th August 2011, 18:22

It's worth remembering that this concern by sections of the bourgeoisie regarding budget deficits is bullshit. That's what requires remembering. They have no concern with budget deficits other than the ability to use it to panic and frighten some, and to beat and impoverish others.

Those around at the time might remember the "Reagan Revolution" that promised to end deficits, get government spending under control blahblahblah.. and what happened? Well it was a convenient ideology to obscure what occurred in practice-- which was no elimination of deficits, and no reduction in overall government spending.

It was a convenient mask over the real transfer of wealth that occurred from the poorer sectors of society to the wealthier. It was a justification for increasing poverty.

It is impossible to sensibly discuss deficits separate and apart from this class struggle.

Some years ago, I did an interesting exercise: I took the US trade deficit for the years 2002-2006, adjusted it for related party trading, and then took the resulting adjusted number [a deficit to be sure] and then compared it to the increase in totals paid for imported oil over that period. Strangely enough, the adjusted deficit was pretty close to equal to the increased amount paid for imported oil. Imagine that.

Now I certainly haven't repeated that exercise in a while, and I didn't go back and check any other blocks of time since 1973, but if anybody else wants to do it-- the US Statistical Abstract will give you numbers on related party trading, and the US Energy Information Agency has the numbers on the costs of imported oil.

Of course, I have a special fondness for the price of oil as the marker for capitalism over the last 38 years, so maybe it's just me with that crazy belief that the price of oil has been the conduit, the pipeline so to speak, for transferring revenues, wealth, and value into the hands of the US bourgeoisie.

Die Neue Zeit

13th August 2011, 18:25

^^^ And yet you can't acknowledge the classical term and implications to describe your last sentence: economic rent.

S.Artesian

13th August 2011, 18:50

^^^ And yet you can't acknowledge the classical term and implications to describe your last sentence: economic rent.

I knew you would jump on that. I was counting on it. So for those interested in my views on oil, rent etc. , please feel free to read my take on it in Insurgent Notes 4 http://insurgentnotes.com (http://insurgentnotes.com/) or in The Wolf Report [personally I hate the formatting in IN]

http://thewolfatthedoor.blogspot.com/2011/08/of-forests-and-trees-2.html

It's a long read, I know. Might be of some interest though to those who find the "oil rent" argument too pat, too glib, too..........Ricardian.

Die Neue Zeit

13th August 2011, 19:14

You just had to end your article with yet another obsessive jab at Dr. Michael Hudson, didn't you?

S.Artesian

13th August 2011, 21:11

You just had to end your article with yet another obsessive jab at Dr. Michael Hudson, didn't you?

Hey, has anyone ever told you that besides being a complete jerk, you're a waste of space and time? Because you are.

That reference to Michael Hudson is the only reference I've ever made to Hudson in any piece I've ever written off this board. And I only included it because it was sent to me by a friend asking for my take on it, so I thought it would a logical conclusion to what I was writing.

The only things I have written about Hudson on this board were in threads specifically concerned with Hudson.

So.... that hardly qualifies as an obsession. In this, as in so many other things, you are just a poseur.

Die Neue Zeit

14th August 2011, 16:16

Here then, courtesy of Dr. Hudson, is the problem with rent-theorizing. It precludes the recognition, and apprehension, of capitalism as value-producing, as requiring a specific organization of labor for the reproduction of a value. There is no accumulation, no valorization, no reproduction. There is only rent and renters, loot and looters, theft and thieves, rip off artists, swindlers, accruing monopoly rights to "public domain."

There is no Marx, only Proudhon. Property is theft.

[...]

Accumulation beats the hell out of rent every day of the week, and twice on Sundays.

Except you forgot:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02c.htm

M. Proudhon talks of nothing but modern monopoly engendered by competition. But we all know that competition was engendered by feudal monopoly. Thus competition was originally the opposite of monopoly and not monopoly the opposite of competition. So that modern monopoly is not a simple antithesis, it is on the contrary the true synthesis.

Thesis: Feudal monopoly, before competition.

Antithesis: Competition.

Synthesis: Modern monopoly, which is the negation of feudal monopoly, in so far as it implies the system of competition, and the negation of competition in so far as it is monopoly.

Thus modern monopoly, bourgeois monopoly, is synthetic monopoly, the negation of the negation, the unity of opposites. It is monopoly in the pure, normal, rational state.

M. Proudhon is in contradiction with his own philosophy when he turns bourgeois monopoly into monopoly in the crude, primitive, contradictory, spasmodic state.

Who go into Capital to try to criticize Hudson when Bourgeois Monopoly already existed much earlier?

S.Artesian

14th August 2011, 16:37

^^^ You're not even making a little bit of sense. Marx is saying that bourgeois monopoly and bourgeois competition are both products of capitalism-- each contains the other. One of some intelligence would therefore be able to conclude that the law of value expressed through competition is not abolished, suppressed, overcome or nullified by bourgeois monopoly.

And from that, if we do a bit of investigation we'll be able to see how relatively trivial rent is in the scheme of accumulation.

But hey, keep on with your inaccurate characterizations of "obsession," and your reproduction of inapplicable quotations, and all the other detritus you use to clutter discussions.