Greenspan versus Marx
Posted on Thursday 26 January, 2012
Filed Under Anti-capitalism, Theory |
14 Comments
A LOT of people on the free market right have a simplistic two-word explanation for why the world economy is currently close to the edge of a frighteningly steep cliff: Alan Greenspan.
Throw those Marxist and Keynesian textbooks out the window, people. We are where we are because the former chairman of the Federal Reserve responded to the dot com crash with a cheap money policy that fed the real estate bubble that triggered the credit crunch.
One of his predecessors in that office remarked that the job of a central banker is to take away the punch bowl before the party gets going. The charge is that Greenspan topped it up with a healthy slug of Havana Club Añejo 7 Años. Or more likely, nasty capitalist Bacardi, I guess.
The million pound benefit cap
Posted on Wednesday 25 January, 2012
Filed Under Economics, Politics |
12 Comments
I DID realise that Asda sold shedloads of baked beans and breakfast cereal, but until this morning I did not know that the UK wing of Wal-Mart had moved into the market for economic indicators as well.
But thanks to Retail Week, I am now aware of something called the Asda Income Tracker, which measures discretionary spending after all the big bills are paid.
The combined effects of inflation and unemployment means that the average UK family is 7.2% worse off than a year ago, somehow getting by on just £160 a week. There are big regional variations within that figure; in Northern Ireland families have to last that long on an astonishingly low £74.
So when Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, speaks of ‘the longest period over which real wages have failed to rise since the 1920s’, he is being disingenuous. Real wages are not just stagnating, they are falling sharply.
Welfare Reform Bill: why won’t anybody say it’s just plain wrong?
Posted on Monday 23 January, 2012
Filed Under Welfare State |
38 Comments
SO MANY of London’s £1m-plus houses are occupied by workshy immigrant families of ten that swathes of Maida Vale have been transformed into one vast welfare ghetto, with Afsoomali emerging as the dominant tongue on street after street.
And huge numbers of City Boys aren’t that fussed about losing their jobs in investment banking because, let’s face it, most of them are better off on the sick.
As abuses such as these so conclusively underline, the case for reform Britain’s archaic benefit system is open and shut. How else can it be that not a single mainstream politician has managed to come out and state openly that Iain Duncan Smith’s call for a £26,000 benefit cap is entirely unjustified?
Popular capitalism, unpopular socialism
Posted on Friday 20 January, 2012
Filed Under The left |
79 Comments
NEVER mind popular capitalism for a minute; let’s talk a bit about unpopular socialism first. Some readers might be surprised to read that proposition as the opening line of a blog post by a lifelong lefty. But in Britain at least, the truth is support for socialism of any stripe is so low it barely registers in opinion polls.
Even more to the point, socialism remains a dirty word even though aspects of capitalism are being questioned to a degree not witnessed for decades. But note the use of the word ‘aspects’ here. Whatever the popular disgust at bankers’ bonuses, the system itself is not widely questioned.
The vast bulk of the population do not buy into the Marxist analysis that the minority class at the top of society sustains itself by the exploitation of the labour power of the majority.
They accept that current economic arrangements are at bottom essentially just, even if they have strangely gone awry in the last few years. They see nothing wrong that a bit of deft regulation will not fix.
Don’t count on McCluskey to make the break
Posted on Wednesday 18 January, 2012
Filed Under Labour Party, The left, Trade Unions |
25 Comments
LEEDS United defender Norman Hunter, renowned for his perhaps overly robust approach to defence, famous advised young footballers to ‘get your retaliation in first’.
The wisecrack metamorphosed into something of a New Labour catchphrase in the mid 1990s, with the line slightly altered to ‘get your betrayal in first’.
Recent statements from both Ed Balls and Ed Miliband suggest that the spirit of the player who gloried in the nickname Bite Yer Legs is alive and – forgive the pun – kicking.
Hence the recent rows over the Labour Party’s sudden shift of direction, which has seen the leadership drop an anyway mild flirtation with social democracy and explicitly adopt neoliberal prescriptions for Britain’s economic crisis.
It is difficult to fault Unite general secretary Len McCluskey’s recent article in the Guardian, which takes Ed Miliband and Ed Balls to task for some of their recent statements, which accept the need for an austerity programme that encompasses a public sector pay freeze.
What is Ed Miliband’s elevator pitch?
Posted on Friday 13 January, 2012
Filed Under Labour Party |
72 Comments
THERE is no alternative. It’s the economy, stupid. Third Way. Big Society. Encapsulate your outlook into a pithy slogan of as few words as possible, or risk having someone encapsulate it for you.
That these designations are typically vacuous and point to little of substance matters not. Fail to play the game, and posterity will forever associate you with traffic cones hotlines.
Yet Ed Miliband – raised in a household where the finer points of political sociology will presumably have been routine conversation over the cornflakes – has yet to offer us a boiled-down manifesto.
The result is that even those of us who are well disposed towards the Labour leader remain at a loss to define his message.
Scottish independence: which partner gets the record collection?
Posted on Wednesday 11 January, 2012
Filed Under Politics |
28 Comments
NOT many books make such an impression that you can still remember the broad outline of their arguments three decades after reading them. But the second edition of Tom Nairn’s ‘The Break Up of Britain’, published in 1982, was the work that has shaped my thinking on nationalism within the British Isles ever since.
If Scotland goes its own way, a permanent Tory fiefdom would result in England and Wales. But Europe would gain another country with a social democratic centre of political gravity. Let the Scots decide their own future.
Nairn’s volume still sits on my shelves, and I guess I will have to dust it off in the weeks ahead, as the issues it raises attain new salience. What was 30 years ago an abstract proposition of the type I loved to debate with other lefties in the student union bar has emerged as a strong possibility, and not too far down the line at that.
The latest deliberations over a referendum on Scottish independence have been presented by several commentators as some sort of political poker contest between Cameron and Salmond. It looks increasingly likely that the Scottish National Party leader will take the pot after cleverly bluffing a mid-pocket pair.
You want to quote Gramsci, Lord Glasman?
Posted on Tuesday 10 January, 2012
Filed Under Labour Party |
11 Comments
THERE are no two ways to interpret the intentions behind Lord Glasman’s ‘no strategy, no narrative, little energy’ attack on Ed Miliband.
This soundbite was crafted, in both content and timing in a slack news period, to inflict the maximum damage possible on the leader of the opposition.
Instantly following up this overt display with of lese-majesty with a statement insisting that the words had been ‘taken out of context’ and that Lord G is ‘totally supportive of Ed’ only serves to ramp up the hypocrisy meter to overload levels.
This man knew damn well what he was doing. The technique of making strong comments to a small circulation publication, in the expectation that they will be lapped up by the nationals and the broadcasters, is long established. If this is Glasman’s idea of total support, I’d hate to see the bloke deliberately stick the boot in.
British Marxists, Jews and world war two: response to Colin Shindler
Posted on Sunday 8 January, 2012
Filed Under History, The left |
129 Comments
SOAS professor Colin Shindler can’t quite bring himself openly to state that British Marxists would have collaborated with the Wehrmacht had Germany invaded Britain in 1940. So he implies it instead, resorting to the transparently shoddy device of putting a question mark after each de facto accusation contained in his essay for the Jewish Chronicle last week.
His basic thesis – doubtless to be expanded in the book he publishes next month – is that despite over-representation of Jews in revolutionary movements in the first half of the last century, the left would have prevaricated in the fight against fascism and was at best indifferent to the fate of European Jewry.
A letter to Occupy London
Posted on Sunday 8 January, 2012
Filed Under Anti-capitalism |
1 Comment
BEING the wrong side of 50, I was secretly quite chuffed when The Occupied Times of London, a publication produced at the St Paul’s and Finsbury Square camps by the Indy Media team, asked me to write a piece for them. You can read my contribution here.
