125 years ago, on March 14th 1883, Karl Marx died. Marx was a
revolutionary above all else. His most celebrated scientific discovery
explains how the working class is exploited under capitalism. Where does profit come from? This is the
central mystery of economics, a mystery that was solved by Marx in his
most famous work, Capital.
The nineteenth century was an era of price
stability. It was also the age of the gold standard. Inflation can have many
triggers, but it always involves an increase in money emissions at some point
in order to give expression to higher prices. It is difficult to increase the
money supply quickly if you have to mine precious metals, so runaway inflation
just didn’t happen back then. The government can’t really control inflation.
Now it’s back!
In a bizarre but brilliant turn of editorial line, BBC’s
Newsnight has launched an apparently socialist documentary series on China. At
least, that was how it appeared on the basis of Paul Mason’s excellent report
on Wednesday 26th March, to be followed up the following week.
At a meeting in London on 13th March a couple of
hecklers were attacking John McDonnell for being a member of the Labour Party.
Veteran trade unionist Harry Whittaker answered them in his typically
forthright Scottish manner. He said: “What would a working man do if he had
spent years building himself a house only to find it had become infested by
rats? Would he give up his home and move elsewhere, leaving the house
completely in the control of the rats? Of course not! He would never give in to
the rats; he would fight them and he would not rest until he had rid his house
of the last vestige of this verminous infestation. And this is exactly the same
course of action which the true socialist must take with the House of
Labour."
We
need to take over the banks to bring order out of chaos and growth out of
stagnation. In future months we will be urged for the need to nationalise
loss-making financial institutions. We are not just interested in nurturing
losses. Those who incurred the losses can look after them – and that’s not us.
We need to take over the lot. We need to separate the fat cats from their wads.
We need to run the banks in our interests as part of a socialist plan. We need
to run them under democratic workers’ control and management. And we need to
start organising ourselves to do this now.
Imagine you have a known terrorist in your custody. He holds
the information that could be used to disarm a bomb. With this information you
can save the lives of thousands, perhaps millions of innocent people. But he
will not give you the information. What do you do?
World stock markets are still reeling from yet another shock to the
system brought on by the so-called credit crunch that has enveloped capitalist
financial markets since last summer. The latest shock was the biggest yet. Late on Sunday night, 16 March, the US
Federal Reserve Bank announced that Bear Stearns, America’s fifth-largest investment
bank, was bust.
The Chinese have a saying and curse – may you live in
interesting times. The financial crisis and credit crunch are certainly
interesting times. But how do these complex shenanigans impact on the real
economy?
We are experiencing a crisis in what is called the monoline
business in the USA where banks are set to
write down more than $200 billion of their assets. Kissing goodbye to all that
money brings a banking collapse so much closer. $2.4 trillion in loan
guarantees have been called into question.
After the Easter 1916
uprising the actual class conditions that motivated the likes of James Connolly
and the trade unionists who set up the Irish Citizen’s Army to battle capitalism
were written out of history. Radical ideas were demonised and Connolly’s Marxism
was airbrushed from history.
The outstanding
leader of the Easter 1916 uprising was James Connolly. There have been many
attempts to portray him simply as an Irish nationalist. But Connolly was, first
and foremost, a militant workers’ leader and a Marxist. He alone in the annals
of the British and Irish Labour Movement succeeded in developing the ideas of
Marxism. (Written in 2001 on the 85th anniversary of the uprising.) Read the article here.
For the interest of
our readers we publish a speech delivered by Paul Little (of the IRSP Ard Comhairle) on Sunday, 23rd March, at the Republican
Socialist Plot, Milltown Cemetery, Belfast.
He explains that the aim of the IRSP is “to oust imperialism, oust capitalism
in all its guises and end the occupation and exploitation of the Irish working class.”