"How long will it be before the period from 1996 to 2007 is looked back on as the Howard Golden Age?"
Posted by plerdsus, Saturday, 23 February 2008 11:42:34 AM

When hell freezes over??

(Excellent article, will come back to it, other fish to dissect).

Passy: regarding the 'tendency of the rate of profit to fall': I think this is hard-wired into the logic of capitalism... But as I said - improvements in technology see material living standards get better even despite a move into 'hyper-exploitation.' Wage earner funds, or citizen economic funds - could see justice for workers even in the face of this phenomenon - where capital share for workers is substituted for wage share.

Apart from this, there is still a significant Marxian legacy... On the one hand: the dialectical materialism associated with 'the later Marx' does not allow enough for free will, and is too simple schematicaly. Class struggle is an important 'historical engine' - but history is more complex that Marx's scheme allows for... And Marx's idea of 'false consciousness' assumes a 'correct' set of values for workers... Workers can fail see understand their objective interests - but ethics are broader than the quesiton of interest.

Marx is still 'spot on' in identifying the tendency towards monopoly in a 'pure' capitalist market. And 'commodity fetishism' remains in the sense that many consumers fail to indentify the labour from which consumables come.

Yes, Passy, of course rents would go up if negative gearing were abolished. You have neglected the all important question that needs to be asked - Why? The reason is investors stop buying rental units and the scarcity of rental units drives rent up.

Rent fixing does not work either - you can see multiple examples of that around the world. When rents are fixed with no corresponding fixing of investment (purchase) costs and maintenance (labor and parts) costs then investors are not going to buy rental units. Investors are not going to do repairs because they can not get their money back. Trades people are not going to be happy about a wage freeze, parts retailers are not going to be happy about a price freeze, factory workers making repair parts are not going to be happy about labor cost freeze. Where do you stop?

And your completely ludicrous proposition that hotels/motels should take in the homeless each night in unoccupied rooms.
I made the mistake once of staying in a hotel that had rooms contracted to the homeless - never again.

It seems that the simple reason the far left never is able to get much traction with the general electorate is the half thought out crackpot ideas being tabeled.
While their heart may be in the right place their mind has left them.

taxation is looting made customary, and sanctified by ignorance.

you want social justice?

1. erase taxation.

2. support social spending by a flat percentage collected by computer of all, thats a-l-l transactions. (electronic money can now replace cash)

3. ensure all subjects have an adequate income by putting all to work, by paying parents to raise children, by providing free health care, by providing free schooling. give the ill, aged, or defective a pension sufficient to live on.

labor's problem comes from trying to talk like 'left' while walking 'right'. capitalist societies have no solution to supporting the weak, the young, the ill- they are designed to profit from them. either break out of that mold or fail at the expressed objective.

labor can't break out, they will fail, but as long as they win elections, their pain will be tolerable.

Tristan says: “improvements in technology see material living standards get better even despite a move into 'hyper-exploitation.' Wage earner funds, or citizen economic funds - could see justice for workers even in the face of this phenomenon - where capital share for workers is substituted for wage share.”

While technological change may improve living standards (it may not also) it helps causes the rate of profit to fall and the consequences of that can be ultimately disastrous. The idea of a capital share for workers also won’t work since the surplus value workers create is expropriated and turned into profit, interest and so forth. Taking some of that back from the capitalist class, if that were effective, would see them respond with a capital strike, which the working class would need to address through the expropriation of the expropriators.

Tristan then makes some points about Marx’s ideas being too schematic and denying free will.

I don’t see a distinction between the so called early and late Marx, but that is a debate for another time and place. Marx didn’t see workers as deterministic figures indulging in some sort of historical role play. He saw them as both affected by and affecting history. Some lines from Marx and Engels from the Communist Manifesto have a real kernel of truth.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

Certainly Marx drew upon historical developments and trends to posit a view of the future. But for him and Engels: “… the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.”

This is not a deterministic formulation at all.

More generally I would suggest (if he has not already done so) that Tristan read something like "The revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx" by Alex Callinicos for a different view of Marx’s ideas. It is a primer true but gives a good introduction to those ideas and their relevance

Passy “On how to deal with a housing shortage, most hotels and motels achieve an average occupancy rate of around 70% from memory. That's an awful lot of spare rooms that we as a society could mandate the owners to make available to the homeless without cost. There are also a lot of Eastern Suburbs and North Shore houses with empty bedrooms. Same deal.”

So “we as a society” could mandate?

I thought that is why we elected politicians, to mandate for us.

However I do not think any politician is going to get elected on a manifesto of “government expropriation of vacant hotel rooms”

The same applies to private housing.

I live alone in my three bedroom house.

My partner lives alone in her three bedroom house.

I can assure you, no one who is presently “homeless” will “want to live with me. I value my privacy and anyone “mandated” to live in my house against my will, will soon find “the gutter” a more accommodating option.

“The revolutionary side of his ideas actually flows naturally from his analysis”

But the analysis was flawed, hence the expected outcomes remain “unpredicted”.

Unpredicted outcomes might work in some arcane theoretical model of social revolution or evolution or when playing “sim city” but it don’t work in real life.

“I don't think increased productivity is going to save our bacon because it only increases the tendency of the rate of profit to decline”

It has worked pretty well since before the industrial revolution.

The continued development of the “consumer society” and its export from developed nations in to less developed nations is ensuring the “increased productivity” is utilized into the manufacture of more and more value-adding products, invented and created by the capitalist system, without decline in the rate of profit.

If “rate of profit” declined, the value of shares would, likewise decline. Whilst shares are regularly changing and are volatile, relative to other investment option, the long term, ongoing trend is “onward and upward”.

plerdsus “Howard Golden Age"

Howards legacy of turning around the economic health of Australia will be immortalized