There
is no truly independent country in the world, because international
capitalism has made sure of this, and our own experience here in
Britain, especially since 1964, should have brought it home to us.
The past few years should have shown us just how independent Britain
is, when foreign "bankers" tell the British government how
to spend money, and how it must not spend money, in order to keep the
international capitalist class happy. Workers have no country and a
post-capitalist, wage-slavery free world to win.
Independence
for Scotland therefore is a myth put about by the Scottish National
Party, which further confuses the Scottish section of the working
class and blinds them from the real struggle – the class struggle.
The outcome of the class struggle is the abolition of capitalism and
an end to poverty, insecurity and the ever-present threat of war.
The
SNP is just another capitalist supporting political party, as
politically dishonest as Labour and Conservatives and Lib-Dems and
Greens or UKIP. Don't
follow leaders. Leadership is capitalist principle.
How
about getting rid of leaders and opting for working towards socialism
as capitalism can not be reformed without war (by deed or proxy) and
poverty (relative or absolute)?
Don't
settle for crumbs take over the bakehouse as we, the 95 percent,
produce all of the wealth. Abolish capitalism and its iniquitous
wages system. Marshall
Sahlins, perceptively observed:
"The world's most primitive
people have few possessions but they are not poor. Poverty is not a
certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between
means and ends; above all, it is a relation between people. Poverty
is a social status. As such, it is the invention of civilization"
(Stone Age Economics).
In
truth, the majority is impoverished. It is impoverished insofar as it
has no other option than to sell its working abilities to those who
monopolise the means of living and whose conspicuous wealth must
irresistibly provide the very yardstick by which that poverty will be
starkly exposed. This may not be the poverty of material destitution.
But if the measure of a human being consists in the accumulation of
material possessions to which he or she may claim the, by that token,
we are demeaned. And, ultimately, it is in this devaluation of our
human worth—not simply in the fact of material inequality but in
the meaning this society attaches to it—that we may glimpse the
very essence of this poverty. The basic income is not a solution, but
another form of subsistence ration, effectively relative poverty,
while wealth surpluses torrent upwards to an economically dominant
capitalist parasite class.
Supporters
of capitalism, especially the Von Mises school, may not be able to
conceive of production without money and prices, but we socialists
can. The definitive answer to your the "economic calculation
problem" is a (largely) self-regulating system of stock control
in which calculations are made in kind rather than in terms of a
common unit like money.
And let us address those currency cranks who
believe we can create money by a stroke of the keyboard. Surely,
the recent banking crisis has exploded the myth about banks being
able to create credit, i.e. money to lend out at interest, by a mere
stroke of the pen but apparently not.
Financial
crises always spark interest in critics of the system. They see the
problems of capitalism—like its vulnerability to crises—as
primarily financial in origin. The whole point of production under
capitalism is not the satisfaction of needs, but the accumulation of
money. In other words, it’s impossible to separate the economic
world into a good productive side and a bad financial side; the two
are inseparable.
The
monetary surpluses generated in production—the profits of
capitalist businesses—accumulate over time and demand some sort of
outlet: bank deposits, bonds, stocks, whatever. It’s going to be
that way until we replace capitalism with something radically
different. What we need to ask is why people today tend to blame
banks rather than capitalism as a whole.
No
bank can lend more than it has, either as deposits or what it has
itself borrowed. The idea that money is created through fractional
reserve banking is more of a metaphor.
No
point in the socialist case arouses such controversy as that of the
abolition of money and wages. Marx identified money as one of the two
main manifestations of human alienation (the other was the state) and
looked forward to its abolition in a communist society where human
values would apply: where the standard by which something would be
considered ‘valuable’ would be human welfare.
Marx
also fully endorsed the slogan “Abolition of the Wages System!” a
system which he regarded as a form of slavery. Money is just a means
of saying ‘This is mine, not yours’.
Money
in various limited forms existed for hundreds of years before the
advent of capitalism but because it is an indispensable element in
the workings of capitalism its general usage expanded universally
with the development of that system. For a start, it is the device
whereby capitalism separates the worker from the fruits of his or
their labour; an indispensable part of the process whereby a minority
class of capitalists ration the consumption of the great majority who
as workers of one sort or another produce all the real wealth of
society.
Marx
saw money as having two basic functions: (1) a medium of exchange or
circulation, i.e. the means through which articles produced for sale
get bought and sold; and (2) a measure of value, i.e. a common unit
in which the value of articles produced for sale can be expressed as
a price, and is thus a standard by which they can be compared.
Marx
also identified two kinds of paper token money: tokens that were
convertible on demand into a fixed amount of the money-commodity and
tokens which were not. The former created no problem. The latter,
however, could create a problem if they were issued in a greater
amount than the amount of the money-commodity that would otherwise
circulate. In this case, if they circulated alongside gold or silver,
the value of the tokens would depreciate, i.e. they would buy less
than their face-value. If they were the only currency (as is the case
today) this would result in a rise in the general price level, i.e.
in a change in the standard of price.
An
inconvertible paper currency has to be managed by the government or
some state institution such as a central bank which, to avoid
depreciation or inflation, has to calculate the correct amount to
issue. In Marx’s day the case where the only currency was paper
token money was a hypothetical one which he only discussed in
passing.
"Paper
coin, that forgery
Of the title-deeds which we
Hold to
something of the worth
Of the inheritance of earth."
Shelley
Wee Matt