People are angry at the banks. They blame them for causing the crisis. They blame them for having to be bailed out and then still paying their top people obscene bonuses. They see them as producing nothing, just making money out of shuffling money around.
Some of these criticisms are justified. Some are not. Banks...
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Author Archive
Who bailed out the bankers?
Post-modern guru
Goodbye Mr Socialism. Radical Politics in the 21st Century. Antonio Negri with Raf Scelsi. Serpents Tail Press, London, 2008
The Italian intellectual, Toni Negri, who was once sentenced to jail in Italy for giving a theoretical defense of urban terrorism, is highly regarded in some circles. The blurb on the back of this book...
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Banks, money and thin air
An urban myth is circulating on the internet that banks have been creating money out of thin air.
Those who have seen the cult film Zeitgeist and its sequel Zeitgeist Addendum, popular amongst conspiracy theorists and others suspicious of governments and banks, will have heard recounted the argument that banks can somehow create money out...
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The return of Karl Marx
From the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard
Marx is again enjoying something of a revival. After his views on the globalising tendencies of capitalism, it is now his theory of crises that is attracting interest and being discussed in the media. Unfortunately not always accurately. For instance, in an article headlined “BANKING CRISIS...
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“You can bring a horse to water but . . .”
However much “liquidity” is supplied to banks or however much they are “recapitalized” or however low the bank rate falls, unless banks think that the capitalist firms they lend most of their money to, directly or indirectly, are going to make a profit in which they can share they’re not going to lend. As...
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Obama wins
So the next President of the USA will be Barack Obama. Of course as socialists we know that he is a capitalist politician, the representative of a capitalist party, who will form a capitalist administration to govern the most powerful capitalist country in the world.
And that, as a left-of-centre politician getting support with hints...
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The end of “neoliberalism”?
“Let us”, President Sarkozy of France told the UN on 23 September, “rebuild together a regulated capitalism in which whole swathes of financial activity are not left to the sole judgment of market operators, in which banks do their job, which is to finance economic development rather than engage in speculation.”
This would normally be...
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Marx or Keynes again
It is not just Marx whose ideas are now been looked at again. So are those of Keynes. While the German Finance Minister, Peer Steinbrück, of the Social Democratic Party, has said that “certain parts of Marx’s thinking are really not so bad” (Times, 20 October) his British counterpart, Labourite Alistair Darling said (typically)...
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Will Belgium survive?
Belgium is a patently artificial state inhabited by people speaking two different languages. It survived for many years with one of them (French) as the dominant language because it was the language of the ruling class. Now that this has ceased to be the case, and Dutch (Flemish) has also become a language of...
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How Capitalism Works (part 5)
AN ENTERPRISE’S RATE OF PROFIT is ihe ratio of the amount of profits it makes, say in a year, to the money-value of its assets at the beginning of that year. The average rate of profit of the whole economy is the ratio of total profit to total capital.The rate of profit would tend...
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