Liam redux

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From wage suppression to jobs crisis

Here’s a real multi-media treat. It’s the video of a talk given by economist Özlem Onaran at a Socialist Resistance meeting earlier this week. Özlem  predicts that we are heading for a severe double dip recession and offers some alternatives. She has kindly provided the slides of her notes which you can flip through. I’d…

Liam
1–2 minutes

Here’s a real multi-media treat. It’s the video of a talk given by economist Özlem Onaran at a Socialist Resistance meeting earlier this week. Özlem  predicts that we are heading for a severe double dip recession and offers some alternatives.

She has kindly provided the slides of her notes which you can flip through.

I’d like to dedicate this post to Will Brown who occasionally posted pieces on this site and died recently. I think he would have approved of the content. My sympathy to his friends and family.

 

15 responses to “From wage suppression to jobs crisis”

  1. prianikoff Avatar
    prianikoff

    Re-reading this post and the debate on it might be useful too:-

    http://liammacuaid.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/the-british-working-class-and-the-recession-from-resignation-to-resistance/

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  2. David Ellis Avatar
    David Ellis

    I’m sorry but there is absolutely nothing transitional about taxation policy. In fact raising more taxes will simply remove money from circulation to pay off the deficit and deepen thereby the recession. Since when have Marxists ever talked of taxing the rich, of legitimizing the rule of the rich, of creating a dependency culture of the poor on the rich? Surely we point out that taxation is the state’s share of the profits stolen from labour by the capitalists and then used to consolidate and finance the repressive rule of those same capitalists. THat the capitalists need us but we no longer need them and not the other way around.

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  3. David Ellis Avatar
    David Ellis

    Let me know when you are ready to take me off moderation Liam and I’ll be back to comment. Until then, bon voyage.

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  4. prianikoff Avatar
    prianikoff

    “Since when have Marxists ever talked of taxing the rich”

    You’re having a laugh, shirley?

    Communist Manifesto Chapter 2

    “…in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable…..
    2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax….”

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  5. David Ellis Avatar
    David Ellis

    `You’re having a laugh, shirley?’

    He thinks he is the new Bernard Manning and is just as deliberately provocative.

    I may have overstated the case for effect but a `heavy progressive or graduated income tax’ is something we more or less already have and will not doubt carry forward to early socialism. I think the problem with Ozlem’s presentation is that instead of that general demand we have here an attempt to write a budget for capitalism based on various taxation measures (not income taxes) during this, capitalism’s biggest and most generalised crisis yet and no doubt its last. I do not believe this approach to be transitional or even minimal under these circumstances. Even the Blairites adopted some of them. The taxes proposed will be used to pay off the deficit and will not address the immediate concerns of workers facing job, welfare, service and wage cuts and imminent eviction. It may be `fair’ but it won’t help them as they sink beneath the waves.

    Just a tiny bit down the page is this:

    `5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. ‘

    No talk of taxing bonuses or windfall taxes which in this case are a diversion. If this was done bankers wouldn’t have bonuses or share and speculation income to tax as the revenue of providing financial services would directly accrue to the state.

    But I am happy to simply discuss the matter and am not interested in a tit for tat exchange of wind ups with the unpleasant Prianikoff.

    If I am still on moderation this will be my last post until you let me know that I am off it.

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  6. prianikoff Avatar
    prianikoff

    “Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.”

    Yeah, I’ve consistently supported that demand that too.
    I don’t see the similarity with Bernard Manning; I’m much thinner, way better looking and I don’t tell racist jokes.
    I think the one he told after the Queen Mother’s death was quite funny though:-
    “The Royal Corgis were happy ..as they’d no longer get blamed for pissing on the settee”

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  7. raphie Avatar
    raphie

    I agrre with Ozlem and have come to the same conclusion independently. I will send you presentation I did for Birmingham SR.

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  8. Pete Shield Avatar
    Pete Shield

    Very good presentation- thanks for posting this Liam

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  9. Liam Avatar
    Liam

    David – I’ve taken you off the moderation list and you know how to avoid going back on it.

    Listening to Ozlem’s talk the demand that struck me as difficult to raise in Britain is the call for a default on the debt. While it’s correct in a formal sense it’s normally associated with states that are in a much worse position than Britain is.

    It would be a difficult propaganda point to make.

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  10. raphie Avatar
    raphie

    problem with a default is that pensiosn funds hold 33% of it and the bank of england – effectivley us 28%. This could be written off with a replacement for our current retirement provision with free: housing, utilities, transport, basic food and culture.

    30% held by overseas central banks means that a default could lead to us being boycotted on financial markets. In a transition to socialism we would still have to interact with world markets.

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  11. David Ellis Avatar
    David Ellis

    Thank you Liam.

    You and raphie are right about defaulting on the state debt I think. But when it comes to the toxic debts being held by the banks both private banks and those temporarily under government protection, these should be sold off on the international money markets at their true value, probably about 5p in the £1, to those who think they can get blood out of a stone. They should not be allowed to count as capital assets any more because as long as they are credit will never flow again and defending them is destroying the currency and causing stagflation.

    The primary programmatic demand of the moment is as Marx would have it:

    `Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.’

    The toxic debts must be repudiated or sold at their true value. Yes this would mean the end of Britain as a centre of imperialist finance but it would along with other socialist measures save the real economy. Interest rates are pegged at historic lows and therefore recovery cannot take place. The slightest rise in interest rates would wipe out what is left of the financial sector and with it the state. At the moment the Bank of England is printing money to lend to the banks and itself and they are using it to buy stocks and shares and accumulate more of the wealth in giant monopolies further destroying economic activity. This is masking the bankruptcy of the state, the banks and the pension funds but at the cost of stored up hyper-inflation. The bankers, finance capital, have imposed a global Versailles affecting every country on the planet. Ireland by contrast to the counterfeiters of britain wiping out wages and saving with their funny money is having to pay extortionate interest rates just to raise the money to run the government for 12 more months. This happened to Russia in the 90s when in the end they were paying 100% interest on government bonds before people realised there was not tax being collected to make good on these bonds and the bubble crashed to the floor taking the entire remnants of the old economy with it.

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  12. robm Avatar
    robm

    Video of Raphie’s talk in Birmingham will be uploaded tomorrow, hopefully, to the birminghamresist.wordpress.com site.

    Incidentally, i raised the question of defaulting on the debt at that meeting- ‘cos I’m a bit ultra-left sometimes.

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  13. David Ellis Avatar
    David Ellis

    Here is a very good piece from David Harvey about the limits of capitalist accumulation. It should help answer all those metaphysicians who think that capitalism could, in theory, go on forever and makes a pretty good case I think for this being capitalism’s terminal crisis. Yes, of course capitalism will need to be overthrown consciously via a political decision taken by the working class but failure to do so does not mean that capitalism can simply move on to the next period of growth and boom with no consequences. It literally is socialism or barbarism this time and whilst Trotsky called it in 1940 he did also suggest that if capitalism wasn’t overthrown at that point then America would become the dominant global power (mind you even that was at the expense of losing half the planet to Stalinism). There is no such envisagable alternative this time and so to treat this crisis that we are now just entering as anything but the decisive one would be absolutely wrong:

    http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/harvey270910.html

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  14. Johhny Avatar
    Johhny

    Capitalism is going to be overthrown but what will take its place?

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  15. David Ellis Avatar
    David Ellis

    Johny: Socialism my friend, socialism. As Marx said way back when, the objective conditions for socialism were already ripe even in the late 1800s though the system still had some life in it. By the 1930s Trotsky was saying that the conditions were not just ripe but beginning to smell a bit. The socialisation of the means of production has become today a matter of life and death. Needless to say if we fail to achieve our goals this time we may well have missed the boat altogether and a long period of economic decline and social barbarism pock marked war and genocide will ensue possibly ending in the very conditions needed to sustain human life themselves disappearing. So overly ripe are the conditions in the imperialist heartlands that the demand that the productive work be shared by halving hours is not simply a `nice’ idea but an urgent economic necessity. No longer can society afford to have workers attending for 40 hours a week and doing what could be done in 20 any more than it can afford to create thousands of pointless Keynesian jobs whereby, as the old Soviet joke had it, `they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work’. This sort of anarchy is the product of the private or privileged appropriation of the social surplus created by workers by a tiny minority. It is destroying the very fabric of society as fewer and fewer workers work longer and longer hours and later and later into their lives whilst millions languish on the dole and a few feckless and yet incessantly moralising billionaires laud it over the lot of us. No, socialism is not just a nice idea, it literally is `socialism or barbarism’.

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