Yep. Bang on the money.

I look forward to your editorial supporting the tea party.

Hahahahahahahahahaha – that’s why the speakers at various rallies and events this weekend are all usual suspects – Pilger, Milne, Lucas, German, Seymour, Callinicos.
One or two of the names were unfamiliar to me though – perhaps they were the missing free marketeers??

Well, quite. And this is why I think Labour have a golden opportunity here to capture a genuine ‘centre ground’ based on the idea that we need a healthy mixed economy in which bankers and multinationals don’t thrive at the expense of workers and SMEs.

You, of course, start from the assumption that everyone who opposes the protest movements supports the excrescences of executive pay, bank bailouts, etc. A Manichaean choice.

Back in the real world, the libertarians who oppose the protests oppose bank bailouts too. The working class who oppose the protests do so because (a) they’re fed up with middle class Gap Yah types, and (b) the protests, as they were designed to do, hog the limelight for middle class Gap Yah types showing off rather than for things like, I dunno, jobs. These people don’t feel the need to defend bankers.

I look forward to your editorial supporting the tea party.

If everyones takes a deep breath and sets tribal loyalities aside, we might see that the two movements do indeed have common ground.

(Obviously this only works if we interpret “the tea party” to mean the grass roots activists who started the whole thing off, rather than the lunatic Christian fundamentalists and Fox Newsians who have hijacked the movement.)

Well said Sunny. People don’t complain that Steve Jobs was rich; he obviously did something for it. By contrast micro trading is just stealing wealth other people have created.

The left needs to start lecturing the city on the virtues of capitalism.

Sunny, I think this is a useful starting point for what is actually an important debate, and links more than is obvious at first to the ‘debate’ between you and Owen Jones in recent days.

While I agree with much of your analysis, I’m not sure I agree with your starting premise: that “the#occupy protesters are more ‘pro-capitalist’ than their critics” who, if they theorise why they are there, “come to the issue through a different prism [to the Marxist prism]: that of Perfect Competition.”

I suspect that many of the people involving themselves in #occupy are currently still pretty open-minded about their overall position, and that if pressed won’t have taken sides on the essential issue of whether they support a) a pluralist, non-corporate system which gets as close to possible Perfect Competition while accepting it doesn’t happen in real life; b) a system which recognises that any attempt at Perfect Competion is doomed to failure by built-in assymetries in capital and labour, and therefore needs to be superseded by a democratically planned economy (leaving aside the negative connotations that the term ‘planned economy’ brings).

If and as the #occupy movement develops, therefore, there is a real ‘battle for hearts and minds’ over this essential intellectual choice (and of course there are many shades between an beyond my simple alternatives). At the moment, history is not on the Left’s side. The most obviously comparable movement, the student movement of ’68, is assessed in the following way by David Harvey:

Any political movement that holds individual freedoms to be sacrosanct is vulnerable to incorporation into the neoliberal fold…. The worldwide political upheavals of 1968, for example, were strongly inflected with the desire for greater personal freedoms…..

“Values of individual freedom and social justice are not, however, necessarily compatible. Pursuit of social justice presupposes social solidarities and a willingness to submerge individual wants, needs and desires in the cause of some more general struggle for, say, social equality or environmental justice. The objectives of social justice and individual freedom were uneasily fused in the movement of ’68. The tension was most evident in the fraught relationship between the traditional left (organised labour and political parties espousing social solidarities) and the student movement desirous of individual liberties…..

…….

While it is not impossible to bridge such differences, it is not hard to see how a wedge might be driven between them. Neoliberal rhetoric, with its foundational emphasis on individual freedoms, has the power to split of libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism and eventually narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social justice through the conquest of state power.’ (A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p41, available on Google Books).”

This astute analysis (though I disagree with Harvey’s position that an effective pursuit of social justice requires the sumberging on individual desires) provides the challenge for the ‘organised Left’ (who must first grapply with what a post-Hayek ‘freedom’ actually is) as much as for the #occupy movement.

Labour theory of value.
Free-market anti-capitalism.

9 – would be interesting to know how many of them are of that persuasion. Judging by the placards and posters, very few.
A pity that left-libertarianism isn’t more widely known in this country as they have a genuinely interesting and fairly original perspective.

Agree with 5. Many people who have a basic understanding of economics are opposed to the system we have now where 2/3rds of our economy are dominated by just two sectors, the state and the banks. Theyve both become too big to fail and are so reliant on each other that they seem to have no over choice but to keep bailin eachother out.

None of this is capitalism, none of this is what made Britain the economic superpower we used to be. We need to completely rebalance to our economy towards a more diverse range of sectors; manufacturing, engineering, design etc.

Unfortunately although I’m sure many of the occupy protesters understand this they seem to be “dominated by the usual group of trots” to quote sunny. This is why they don’t have public support, they are against the system people want to return to.

“Of course – Perfect Competition does not exist in reality… But it is the ‘perfect model’ to which capitalists should, in theory, aspire to.”

What is this, Sunny? You dismiss an idea as utopian, and then implore us to work towards it!

Sunny, your “Perfect Competition” framework is fine for argument’s sake, but not only does it not exist, I can’t see that it would ever exist. In order to achieve it, there would need to be such a measure of governance over business, fiscal and economic activity that there could be no notion of “free” markets, and that doesn’t sound much like capitalism to me.

@6 Although the symobology of the Boston Tea party has been used time and again for right wing tax protests, the Tea Part as we know it today effectively began with Rick Santelli’s (CNBC Business News Editor) broadcast from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange trading floor. That is to say, a member of the 1%, surrounded by the 1%, talking on a channel largely aimed at the 1% wanted to start a protest.

It may well have gained popularity among the rank and file of the most conservative of republican voters, especially as “the cause” was propagandized so enthusiastically on Fox. However, it is hard to see it, even in its most early beginnings, as anything other than an astroturf front organisation for the interests of the richest 1% of the US (who provided the seed funding for it).

I like the thrust of the piece, here are some minor comments.

For example, one may have firms who compete away excess profits, and come close to this perfect ideal, that employ workers who are making out like bandits, if the workers have the bargaining power to capture rents, like footballer or bankers.

Also, perfect competition is th text book sense has some technical characteristics, such as firms being able to sell as much as they like at the prevailing price, different firms selling perfect substitutes etc., and of course most firms have some monopoly power, some pricing power, and that’s not really a flaw we aspire to be rid of but an inescapable consequence of firms producing goods that are not perfect substitutes for oth firms goods. That’s fine. You can still hope for healthy competition between firms with some pricing power. Infact I think you could say the default model for macroeconomics is imperfect competition, not perfect competition.

@9 The labour theory of value is utterly wrong. If I were to put ten years labour into making a toothpick that wouldn’t make the toothpick valuable.

@6 Larry – perhaps but the problem is that I don’t see much understanding amongst the occupy lot that crony capitalism depends on state power, in fact they appear to want more of it.

Indeed Sunny.

Interestingly, there was a piece by Jeremy Lefroy MP on Conservative Home about how to reform the system yesterday – the comments, many by serious Conservative supporters and kippers are well worth reading. This one by Cleethorpes Rock seems to sum up the opinion of many pretty damned well, so I took the liberty of reposting it here so that people on the left might get an idea of where some on the right are coming from.

Cleethorpes Rock said…
This sounds like the same old stuff to me.

More women on boards
Looking at pay differentials
Long term not short term blah blah.

It doesn’t alter the fundamental problem in the current crony-capitalist/corporatist system, which is that we do not have FREE ENTERPRISE in this country.

- Big firms are given the direct numbers of individual ministers so they can call the shots.
- Big firms benefit from the planning system while small shops have their parking spaces taxed.
- Useless banks are bailed out by the poor via QE. Thicko chinless bond traders who bought Greek Debt that even Del and Rodney Trotter wouldn’t touch have their malinvestments underwritten by the taxes and savings of cleaners and carers
- Greedy banks learn, Pavlov-style that when they refuse to lend to businesses, the bell rings and £75bn of free money lands in their accounts. What do you think that encourages?

All of this happens against a backdrop of people’s living standards falling and wages being squeezed. I would normally be the first to call for the water cannon to be brought into St Paul’s, but I’ve been to see this protest and I can tell you, those people are just fed up like the rest of us. They might have pretty disparate and woolly ideas about the causes of the crisis, but there is a very real sense that the system, whether it’s energy bills, chiselling banks, corrupt politicians or greedy lawyers, just isn’t working for regular people.

I’d be more impressed with Jeremy Lefroy if he came out against QE, if he wanted to end bailouts, if he wanted to make mis-sold loans to the poor unenforcable, if he wanted to expose the privileged access that top company bosses get to government, if he wanted to stop giving large firms preferential treatment over family businesses, if he wanted to stop cleaners paying more tax than their bosses by scrapping income tax for NMW workers, if he wanted to stop using inflation to benefit the undeserving rich at the expense of the poor, if he wanted to rule out the Robin Hood raid on pensions, if he wanted to introduce financial education in schools so that we can have a society of 60 million regulators…..

If he wanted some of that, rather than sounding like he’s vomited up a Will Hutton book, then I might be interested.

I think that many on both the left and right have more in common than they realise.

“They may not know it or say it, but the #occupy protesters are more ‘pro-capitalist’ than their critics. Now, you may see and describe capitalism through the Marxist prism of capital and labour. But economics students come to the issue through a different prism: that of Perfect Competition. For this exercise I use that framework.”

Or to put it more bluntly:

1) They may not know that their position is ‘pro-capitalist’ but it is.
2) They may not know that because they disagree with how I’m going to use the term ‘capitalist’. But I’m going to recognise then completely ignore this because it’s inconvenient for my argument.
3) There’s a notion in economics which is convenient for making my argument which I’m going to use instead, presenting it as how ‘economics students come to the issue’, as if all both academic economics and economics students were a homogenous mass, presumably because this too is convenient for my argument.

Basically this is a clumsy, contrived and sensationalist way to make a perfectly valid point. Exactly why you felt the need to make it in this way is beyond me – a new drive to bring tabloid values to Lib Con? Or just not feeling confident articulating a mainstream left-liberal argument unless it’s couched as a penetrating polemic against those further to the left than you? I fear it’s a slippery slope between where you are now and becoming Dan Hodges….

10
Totally agree with you Richard, the French Imo are in the forefront of left libertarianism.
Sunny, this is rubbish, what you are suggesting is that the Occupy movements are only asking that capitalists play by the rules, the problem is that they have been. Perfect competition does not exist and even if it did, it is the winner that takes it all.
The Monopolies Commission isn’t there for no reason.
@18 just about sums the OP.

So Marxism is Capitalism though a Marxist prism, yes and black is white through a black prism.
You have in the past been justifiably nervous about associating with smelly loons who would otherwise be stopping the City. I would stick to that rather than trying to pretend they are not lazy self indulgent latter day hippies . Let them try living without banks and the rest for a year and see how quickly they come running back for their hot housed lives amidst the plenty capitalism has brought

The Mainstream Media attacks against the protesters only reveals their true colours. The MSM are the propaganda arm of the elites. Why does Murdoch keep loss making newspapers? if only to push the interests of the elites.

Free market capitalism is a myth. A rigged casino is a much more honest description. Enron showed how the energy markets where rigged in the interests of the rich and powerfull. The bank bailouts showed how the rich elites play ‘ heads I win, tails you lose’. But the elites control the political process. The biggest lobbyist in Washington are the financial service providers. Here even the labour party was taken over by the elite puppets. Blair now makes a good living from doing the elites bidding.

This is the new gilded age. It will not end well.

Ask the occupy crowd if they support the NHS or state education and then you will see they do not support what you assert.

Crony Capitalism or Crony Socialism, both stink.

19 ” the capitalists have played by the rules”

The idiocy of the right wing capitalst in all its glory.

2 The tea party is fake grass root astro turf outfit funded by corporations and heavily promoted by Fox news. The very fact that they now support the wall sreet elites tells you all need to know about their fakeness.

is that the Occupy movements are only asking that capitalists play by the rules, the problem is that they have been.

Prior to the 80s, when wages at the bottom were growing and society was more equal, did we live in a socialist utopia of some sort?

I don’t make apologies for the sort of capitalism we have now. But its not capitalism as envisaged by Adam Smith… or even Hayek I’d say. It’s is corporatism. There is a difference. You may not like it, but it’s there – at least theoretically.

Mark Carrigan: 2) They may not know that because they disagree with how I’m going to use the term ‘capitalist’. But I’m going to recognise then completely ignore this because it’s inconvenient for my argument.

The same goes for my critics. Much as you hate it – there isn’t just one way of looking at the world.

3) There’s a notion in economics
central to economics actually – try studying it. Might help.

s if all both academic economics and economics students were a homogenous mass
Are you on drugs? How is this even an argument? Discussing perfect competition and what it entails is central to the economics curriculum. Poor rebuttal. At least Paul Cotterill above tried to engage with the substance of what I said.

Btw Sunny, have you been reading this, or maybe this perhaps?

… and have you noticed that when those on the political right point out to socialists that their system has been tried and produced the mess that was the old Soviet block the response is always the same – “that wasn’t really socialism”, but when those on the on the free market political right say they want a real capitalist system, those on the left claim that we already have it?

Funny that.

Taibbi is the king. For those who haven’t read his seriously devastating material, this is a good start

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in-jail-20110216

But socialism came out of the failure of the free market capitalism 19th century style. It is the wingnuts who want to go back to a failed system.

25
Eh, capitalism now is not what was envisaged by Adam Smith, well maybe that’s something to do with the fact that Smith was writing about 18th century society, technology, communications systems and transport.
Prior to the 80s we had an economic system which was congruent with the welfare state, which envisaged unemployment to be minimal, we have since lost, more or less, the entire foundation it was built on. Are you seriously suggesting that we now re-nationalize everything, we can barely carry the banks, and not only that, it’s not what Smith envisaged is it?
Don’t know where you were in the 80s, I was fighting for the survival of part of the system you seem to hold so dear, shame the Labour Party wasn’t there to support us. But never mind, maybe this time!

After the second world war capitalism in the West had to give ground to the people because of the elites fear of communism. Capitalists were just going to have to put up with fact that the we would have healthcare systems ,and welfare systems paid for out of taxation. And there was nothing they could do about it. But once Communism collapsed ,capital had billions of new workers to both exploit, and to play the western worker off against.

It was no surprise to see the usual pro Thatcher people pushing for corporations to move to China. This, we were told would lead to the end of unelected dictators in China. China would become more Western we were told. The real agenda was not to change China but to change the west. The western worker would now find that if he did not STFU and do what he was told, his job would move to China. The elites almost by stealth have recreated the 19 th century. The worker in China just like in 19 th century England has no vote. The elites get richer and the worker does what he is told. In the west we still have the vote but if we do anything with it, capital will move to the military dictatorship where the worker knows to keep his mouth shut and where unions are not allowed.

The end of history? No, just history repeating itself. The elites hate democracy, and always will do so.

@16 – And you don’t understand the use of the Labour theory of Value then. It’s not for modern artists, and indeed they’d struggle under it.

“The same goes for my critics. Much as you hate it – there isn’t just one way of looking at the world.”

No it doesn’t! And I don’t hate to admit it – I freely admit it and find it fascinating! Particularly as it plays itself out in political debate. I assume you do too and that’s what I took to be the point you were trying to address. I 90% agree with the point you’re making and I think it’s an under-discussed one. My criticism was that you had made it (and later it seems defended it) in such a sensationalist and hyperbolic way that it was very hard for anyone to engage with the point because you’d framed it in a way that was seemingly determined to piss off and belittle the people you were making it to. Just to repeat: I think you made a perfectly valid point, my criticism was about the utterly dubious way you made it.

“Discussing perfect competition and what it entails is central to the economics curriculum. Poor rebuttal.”

It’s not a rebuttal. I said you implied a homogeneity in economics and amongst economics students. Just because something is common to economic curricula (manifestly true) doesn’t mean that it always has been, that it’s representative of university programmes worldwide or (crucially) that it’s indicative of the spread of thought within academic economics or over its history. Apologies if my initial comment was ruder than it was intended but all I objected to was you presenting it is as, effectively, ‘what economists everywhere think’ (i.e. invoking cultural authority for it) when it’s a concept which, as I understand it, is central to orthodox economics (even there in a contested way) but not uniform across heterodox approaches and certainly not within the intellectual history of the field. I’m not saying blog articles have to include rigorous digressions in the history of ideas but come on, Sunny, there’s a limit. This is the line that really bugged me:

“Now, you may see and describe capitalism through the Marxist prism of capital and labour. But economics students”

Again sorry if my comment sounded much ruder than I intended it to but I’m a bit stunned by your reaction. My issue with the above quote was the facile way you counterpose Marxist understandings of the economy to how ‘economics students’, as an undifferentiated mass, ‘approach the issue’ through a ‘different prism’. The fact your response to this is to tell me to ‘study economics’ kind of makes it hard to take you seriously… just to repeat: I largely agree with your point and I think it’s an important issue. I don’t “hate” that there is “more than one way of looking at the world”. I didn’t criticise your article because I’m desperately trying to protect activist orthodoxies against your searing critique. I criticised it because, though I’m a huge fan of your site & much of your writing, I thought it was shit. Plus I genuinely didn’t understand why you decided to make these arguments in the way you did and the sheer tetchiness of your subsequent responses has left me with more knowledge of the weird battle lines you have drawn in your head that I wanted to be honest.

I’m also still a bit stunned you came out with the response “are you on drugs?”. It makes you sound like a teenage bulletin board troll.

There’s a certain point at which the struggle to lede with the “shocking” counter-intuitive conclusion wins out over the desire to write anything even vaguely cohesive, isn’t there?

Your Overton Window is tiny, and broken.

^^^ a much more succinct version of what i was trying to say ^^^

Albeit I think the issue itself is a really interesting & important one. I don’t think the #occupy movement *is* anti-capitalist, at least in terms of the emerging discourse – should this be considered a problem for those on the left and, if so, why?

What’s a bit more worrying is the invocation of the Mises-esque argument (whose work Harry Cole & co are apparently getting into and the hard core free-market think tanks have long been into) that “it’s their right-wing critics who, under the guise of defending capitalism, are shilling for big business and vested interests”. The really extreme end of free-market thinkers have been making this argument for a long time and, surprisingly enough, it leads to policy prescriptions to the right of the present government rather than anything the left would like.

Sunny you are having real trouble understanding the complexity of this movement and seem determined to pigeonhole it one way or the other.

For one, the ‘Capitalism is Crisis’ banner at the front of the camp was removed precisely because not all people there identify as anti-capitalist. Secondly, much of the debate in the camp is about whether corporatism is more to blame than capitalism, so I don’t know why you insist on painting all occupiers as a confused bunch of idiots. Some of us are anti-capitalist, some are not. Some think corporatism is the logical conclusion of capitalism, while others are fans of capitalism and think corporatism is to blame and is an entirely different beast.

This is why we have published articles like the one I’m linking to below in The Occupied Times, a publication which doesn’t have a problem with complexity or a desire to pigeonhole the movement!

http://theoccupiedtimes.co.uk/?p=207

I’m vehemently opposed to all the Occupys. Why? Because they are doing nothing. Many of them, in fact – like Occupy Oakland (in California) – are costing a fortune to cash-strapped cities. Extra police aren’t free. And there’s no way you can have a couple hundred people gather in downtown Oakland without extra police, it’s a crime ridden city.

I am so sick of Occupiers saying how important they are, that “the message” is the most important thing. NO IT ISN’T. People are out of work, near homeless many of them. Hungry, forced to give up pets for lack of funds, kids going without dentist or dr for lack of funds. Occupy is doing NOTHING to help them. They’ve had 2 months & have not come up with one single idea, not one recall demand for some of the greedy electeds who got us into this mess, not one demand for new legislation to reinstate regulations that would (or at least COULD) prevent this in the future. In NY they are literally eating gourmet food & doing yoga classes!! GEE, I WISH I COULD DO THAT! The worst is that when I question them, they get angry & say I don’t get it, that I should get my fat a$$ from behind a computer & come down and help – I’m not exaggerating, one woman on Facebook told me I should march because I’m so fat it’d do me good. Actually, what’s REALLY the worst is the people yelling at me are well to do! I looked up one woman – she has a home in California & one in Seattle and she & her husband travel the world judging wine! Another is a retired judge! They are doing more to ruin any chance for overhaul than any conservative official ever could.

@37 – The police have to be around for corporatists to intimidate the Occupy movements, right.

Solution – don’t be a corporatist. Gee!

@36 – And some people there are Left-Libertarians, some of them my friends. I literally drew the short straw this time, sadly (someone has to remain clear for posting bail when the police go in)

The flaw here is simply that Sunny has got his names mixed up. The basic concept is actually true, just not the words he’s used to describe it all.

Capitalism is a description of a method of ownership of productive assets. The capitalists own the capital. Socialism can also be regarded as a method of ownership of those assets, mutualism similarly, we also use the phrase “state capitalism” to describe when it’s the State which owns them.

None of this really has anything to do with markets, markets are a method of exchange. Perfect competition is a description of one particular state of a market economy.

Capitalism and markets are describing two entirely different things. So you cannot say that those who support markets, or perfect competition, are more capitalist than others.

You can have, for example, capitalism without markets: the USSR was in fact that. State capitalism without markets. The capital was owned by the State and there were no (except at a very low level) markets. You can most certainly have market mutualism, John Lewis, the Co-Op, show us that. Market socialism was what Yugoslavia tried and it was less awful than the USSR’s state capitalism without markets.

So to say that because you’re pro-market you are thus more capitalist is meaningless: markets or not, capitalism or not, are two entirely different questions. One is about how goods and services are exchanged, the other about who owns the productive assets.

So in this sense Sunny has it entirely wrong.

However, if we clean up his language a bit there’s room for agreement.

A system in which the owners of capital (whoever they are, capitalists, mutuals, some form of socialism etc) are protected from the competition which markets bring is usually referred to as Corporatism. Especially when that protection is sought and granted through access to political power (one subset of this is crony capiitalism, where capitalists own the assets but are granted monopolies to protect them from the markets. But this is a subset of Corporatism, we have also seen systems where it is labour which is protected from that competition, see the Miners’ Union as just one example).

Please note that here that the “corporation” in Corporatism does not refer to large companies, but to any combination of people, any “Corporation” which can be a class, a union, a company, a race, any group of people, who are legally and economically provileged and protected from competition.

So if we change the language a bit, say that instead of being pro-capitalist, people are in fact being anti-Corporatist, they want the legal and political privileges removed from certain economic actors that protect them from competition, then Sunny’s right, as in correct.

And there’s concordance right across the political spectrum about this too. The large banks, the too big to fail ones, do indeed need that protection removed from them (not an overnight process as the fact that they are indeed too big to fail is something of a problem). But then so do many other areas of the economy need to be cleaned out. We don’t have union closed shops any more but that was Corporatism too. The ever mounting piles of regulation which large companies can deal with but small companies can’t is Corporatism, the legal privileging of one set of economic actors against competition by others. The Free Schools movement is an attempt to remove the privileges against competition of the state education sector. NHS reform ditto for medical providers.

Let’s get rid of Corporatism, let’s bring back competitive markets: sure, I’m with you all the way. However, I’m not all that sure that y’all are going to like truly doing away with it. For it isn’t just thebig banks which are currently legally so protected.

@39 – Protect the assets, not the management. Any bank which need a bail-out automatically, at the least, has it’s management sacked for *gross incompetence*.

“The ever mounting piles of regulation”

lol. We’re still a VERY low regulation system in the UK.

“The Free Schools movement is an attempt to remove the privileges”

It’s funding specifically for middle class and rich kids at the expense of poorer ones. That private schools are converting is a dead give-away what the game really is! It’s not corporatism to ensure proper educational standards for kids – all schools in receipt of any form of state funding should follow the national curriculum and only hire qualified teachers*

(*there need to be new rules for experts doing short-term teaching in schools in their specialist area, but we’re talking 1+ year experts on hourly-paid contracts, with proper supervision of the kids!)

And as to the abolition of the NHS, it’s no surprise you’re cheering it on. Public health is going to go down the drain with remarkable speed, and people will end up paying your buddies to sort out anything except A&E work in short order!

@ 32 – “It’s not for modern artists, and indeed they’d struggle under it”

It’s not for anyone, it doesn’t work. Value can only be determined by what people are willing to exchange for something, there is no escaping this.

An interesting article but one that characteristically misses the plot. I think everyone is agreed that what we have got is not what anyone wants.(except the 1%) However, there are realities to grapple with unfortunately. One major one is of course, the issue of wealth and the power that goes along with it. Add to that an international offshore finance system which,having started in Britain,is now worldwide allowing wealth to be dispersed out of nation state control.
Things are as they are for a reason and I can sympathise with those who want to go back to the 50′s (maybe do away with plate glass too) but the economic realities are now that Britain is not a predominantly industrial nation but is instead substantially supported by funny money created out of a loss to someone else.
Moreover, I am not sure sure whether someone who is gambling at a casino can be rightly termed a Capitalist. Similarly gambling on the stock exchange is not locally likely to throw up class conflicts in their traditional Capitalist/anticapitalist format. That is why I am not surprised that the occupy movement has taken ‘lefty’s’ like Sunny aback slightly. He is in good company too as many will note from Millibands grudging oratory yesterday. But that observation lends itself to the question of really whether Capitalist parties really can and will bite the hands that regularly feed them or indeed whether class ‘discourse’ will ultimately be resolved along the usual democratic lines.

Value can only be determined by what people are willing to exchange for something, there is no escaping this.

In that case you want to get in touch with the BoE so they can put you on the back of the £20 note.

@ Tim, 40.

Thanks for the precise definitions of the terms that are often lazily thrown around.

So, we now have something that we can agree on, namely that the system we have at present is unfairly rigged to benefit a small group of people to the detriment of everybody else.

Now that we have established this, can we PLEASE start making life as difficult as we can for those who are involved in this market rigging, rather than squabbling with each other?

39
I’m certainly in agreement with you, capitalism is capitalism, you can’t be half or a quarter capitalist just as you can’t be half vegeterian.
Central planning is also central planning, whoever owns the means of production and it appears that this is where the ‘interpretation’ of the Occupy’s wants are leading.
I can’t blame you for defending markets, it was highly predictable or even advocating some intervention and it was a foregone conclusion that you would blame corporatism for the failures.
What is mind boggling is the notion that if we swing back to the period prior to the 80s then everything will be OK, as if the environment now has any resemblance to that period, either locally or globally.

“capitalism is capitalism, you can’t be half or a quarter capitalist just as you can’t be half vegeterian.”

Yes you can. Both Swenden and Mexico are capitalist countries. They both have extremely different ways of life, different types of social policy, and different economic and social problems to address.

Sunny

They are bailed out when they go under and are able to rig the market in their favour.

Who exactly are the ‘they’?

People frequently demonise ‘the banks’, but who precisely are the villains here?

Is it:

* The owners of the banks (shareholders, pension funds and (in the case of the bailed-out ones) the State?

* The staff (or senior directors) of the banks? (many of whom have lost their jobs – all in the case of Lehman’s).

It’s important to be clear, for instance, upon whom you (plus the occupiers & the Archbish) want the Robin Hood Tax to fall….. out of whose pocket you expect the tax to be paid.

If the owners of the banks are to pay the RHT, we should be clear that it is going to look a bit daft to impose a hefty tax on ourselves. What’s the point in taking money from publicly owned banks to give to the Exchequer?

The sums the RHT is supposed to raise are too big for staff or directors to pay.

So, isn’t more likely than not that any such tax will, in the end, be paid for by the customers of banks?

The one sector we can be sure that “we’re all in it together” is banking. The public are owners and customers and depositors. It’s our money, and we will be taxing ourselves.

There is no “they”. They are us.

@ 45 steveb

“I’m certainly in agreement with you, capitalism is capitalism, you can’t be half or a quarter capitalist just as you can’t be half vegeterian.”

Of course you can. I wouldn’t put a precise percentage on it, but you could call me a partial capitalist as I believe in a system that combines private capital with state welfare and certain institutions being publically owned to ensure equal access. Come to that, you could have called me a partial vegetarian back when I used to eschew meat but allowed myself turkey on Christmas day.

@48

Not everything in a Capitalist country is capitalist. There are lots of modes of ideological production which arise within complex historical societies. Take the fuedal system in Britain.The monarchy for example maintains a deferential system of patronage which still operates at the seat of government/land distribution and so on. Moreover, does a banking system, which used to operate to aid the circulation of capital constitute a mode of production in itself. This is what, I believe, anyone wanting to change the current situation should be asking themselves.

46
Yes but they are still capitalist, nearly all capitalist countries have varying and downright different policies.
48 The term ‘capitalism’ refers to private ownership of the means of production and is true even if some parts of the economy are ‘owned’ by the state/tax payer. The capitalist system in the UK is one driven by markets which also generates a particular ideological stance and culture, and, as we have seen with institutions should as the NHS, which are counter-ideological to the market, it will always be
in danger of being attacked by ‘the market culture’ especially when the market dips or there is a recession.
Having a sense of being something in one thing but the reality is you cannot be half a vegetarian. or half a capitalist.

@ 50

Even if you define capitalism as private ownership of the means of production, you can still have a state that allows MORE private ownership of the means of production. The problem with defining capitalism in your terms is that it includes pretty much every state in the modern world.

51
But all states in the modern world are capitalist, it isn’t my personal definition it just happens to be the way it is.

@41 – Yes, and the economy’s doing just fine. For you.

steve maclean – you miss the point entirely. I’ve said repeatedly in my piece that people camping have different value systems. It’s their critics, who want to put them in the ‘anti-capitalist’ camp, that I’m criticising.

Mark Carrigan: ) in such a sensationalist and hyperbolic way that it was very hard for anyone to engage with the point

Really? Paul Cotterill seems to have done it quite well above. Lots of other people too. It seems some people can get touchy about language and spend all their time obsessing over that than discussing the point.

You could have aksed me to clarify stuff; I would have.

My issue with the above quote was the facile way you counterpose Marxist understandings of the economy to how ‘economics students’, as an undifferentiated mass, ‘approach the issue’ through a ‘different prism’.

Ok – how would you have phrased it?

I don’t really like to spend tons of paragraphs explaining every concept. I came to the subject with my own-preconceptions and I pointed them out. I admitted other people see things differently.

Tim Worstall also makes some good points about my mangling of definitions. Fair enough.

But really, I wanted to make a quick point about the critics of the protest movement, rather than pass judgement on the people taking part. You can’t even write a quick blog post on this site without everything trying to interpret things in a million different ways…

I couldn’t let this pass:

“Perfect Competition is basically what what most economics aspires to.”

This was somewhat true about 40 years ago. It is now the epic strawman used by the Left to dismiss “Economics” as a study of subject, and hobbles progressive thought in this country. “Most economics” aspires to trying to explain the world; utilitarian assumptions about “rational man” etc is now taught as history.

have a listen….it’s funny

The MP & the Banker

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liXu-lzLGfE