Comments on: Great Britain: What is it and where is it going? Part 2

By: Fritz

Fritz — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 04:04:09 +0000

Sorry made a mistake – this was the address on the often dubious rumormill but here correct:
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?noframes;read=133649
original “last interview Joerg Haider’s” in German:
http://www.kleinezeitung.at/nachrichten/politik/haider/1575885/index.do

By: Fritz

Fritz — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 03:55:25 +0000

Thanks – very interesting study in todays situation.
Don’t know much about economy myself, but maybe good thinking: Ellen Brown: webofdebt.com ?
The “Venetians” possibly had gained part of their capital from the plunder of Constantinopel?

I’ve got two additional cases that are not so much known in Anglo countries:

In 1999, he Social Democrat leader and minister of finance Lafontaine only had demanded a limitation of international speculation. In 1999. It followed a storm of outrage in the financial papers from London to New York – he left office overnight, jumped into his car and drove home without explanation.
Also here in the article on WSWS.org
He was assumed to be the last leading social democrat in Europe to defend a policy of social checks and balances. In fact in this regard he was only to a very limited degree a “left”, …
However in opposition to the business wing of the SPD, Lafontaine advocated a programme of state measures to counter the negative social effects of globalisation and an unrestrained market–both on a German and also European level…..
Shortly after taking office in autumn of last year his notions met with stiff international resistance. In particular Dominique Strauss-Kahn, French economics minister, a man who supposedly stood close to Lafontaine politically, swept aside the latter’s proposals for exchange rate zones for the most important world currencies at the first German-French summit meeting–to the evident approval of the assembled bankers…..
The British press built him up as a bogey man and on the front page of the tabloid Sun he was described as “the most dangerous man in Europe”.
At the most recent meeting of the G-7 in Bonn, US finance minister Robert Rubin made unmistakably clear that the mightiest economic power in the world would not tolerate any attempts to restrain the free movement of capital: whoever wants stable currencies, he instructed Lafontaine, must not attempt to manipulate the markets but rather….

Jörg Haider
has demanded to try financiers, who have become criminal in courts for economic misconduct. – from a last interview:
Q. “Highly-paid managers caused the misery. Is there sufficient cause to prosecute them for their irresponsibility?
HAIDER: “Those who thoughtlessly dealt with entrusted money must reap the consequences. We need stricter oversight, a change of the criminal law, and a special courtyard for economic crimes. Those who earned gigantic sums of money are not poor. Their criminal responsibility must be established, then they must be locked up. (correct translation His country Kärnten (Carentia) is in good shape and despite the lies and defamation of the world-press, 25 000 people or more who payed respect at the obsequies in Klagenfurt, held on to the honor of the beloved Landeshauptmann.

By: inthesenewtimes

inthesenewtimes — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 19:31:21 +0000

What do you mean niqnaq, “unexamined and unexplained”. I have examined the issue in some depth and as for explaining it- well, this is an article not a thesis or a book. In my view Marx obscured the fundamental nature of what was happening by explaining away colonialism and financial parasitism as being merely the prelude to the industrial revolution, as the genesis of industrial capital. I recommend you read the chapter in question, chapter 31,with an open and critical mind, not like a believer reading the testaments. This is the most important section in the whole book, but to my mind it is completely contradictory, even dishonest. The reason for this is that Marx, I suspect, is trying to get some inconvenient truths out of the way. Read it yourself and tell me if you really think there is anything in it to justify Marx’s put down of Cobbett.

By: smeddum

smeddum — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 18:33:59 +0000

I think Marx looks at a model of capitalism. He does go into the abstract categories of capitalism in great detail. Considering for an example http://econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Marx/mrxCpC19.html.
I found this paragraph interesting from volume 1 Capital.
‘At their birth the great banks, decorated with national titles, were only associations of private speculators, who placed themselves by the side of governments, and thanks to the privileges they received, were in a position to advance money to the state…the bank of England began with lending its money to the government at 8%; at the same time it was empowered by parliament to coin money out of the same capital, by lending it again to the public in the form of bank notes. It was not long ere this credit money, made by the bank itself, became the coin in which the Bank of England made its loans to the state, and paid, on account of the state, the interest on the public debt. It was not enough that the bank gave with one hand and took back with the other; it remained, even whilst receiving, the eternal creditor of the nation down to the last shilling advanced.’
Even after this I was always under the impression that Marx thought that financial capital served industrial capital. It might be a failure of understanding of mine but I think Marx brought in commodities as the primary unit of capitalism because he primarily sought to define industrial capitalism in a period just at near the end of the industrial revolution.
I think we have to look at the details closely and it is not enough to defend Marx on the grounds that he had a better understanding of the social relations of production than anyone and perhaps everyone who will come into existence.
As to Cailean’s “rosy picture”, I find that a bit trite, immediate practical measures are by implication not ideal. We are looking for a pragmatic solution whose main merit, is that is a desperate remedy for quickly worsening conditions and are born out of necessity . The ideal alternative is communism now, but that is all I have seen from the left. This surely is not on our immediate agenda. Marx in the Communist manifesto calls for the centralization of credit to the state as one of the steps toward communism. The modern left would ding his ears with charges of reformism.

By: niqnaq

niqnaq — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 17:04:41 +0000

Cailean, I really enjoy your writing, and I think I can see where you are coming from, but it is unfair to Marx, to criticise his account of the process of organising the methodical extraction of surplus value, by pretending to find an unexamined or unexplained contradiction between industrial and financial capitalism in it, when in fact he analyses this contradiction in fantastic detail. I think this is because you want to paint a rosy picture, like Friedrich List’s, of the possibility of the resurgence of national industrial economies, purged of globalist finance, but I don’t think you can claim to have improved on Marx, yet.