SWP's back
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There’s some hyperbole.
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urban genie
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while there is demand for basic needs and the ability to deny people those things unless they pay then it will sustain itself.
If suddenly all people were able to feed, and clothe themselves and basic needs like water and heat/accomodation was so available it cannot be profitted from then it has a breath of life.
Also unfortuntley a lot human nature is still greedy and selfish.
If suddenly all people were able to feed, and clothe themselves and basic needs like water and heat/accomodation was so available it cannot be profitted from then it has a breath of life.
Also unfortuntley a lot human nature is still greedy and selfish.
GortonBlue62
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When I look at how I grew up and became aware of my surroundings (mid to late 60's) and on my street there were 3 corner shops - one at each end and one in the middle. And a Co-op down the hill where my mum did the shopping and collected the dividend stamps. It was early to mid 70's that the supermarkets arrived and the corner shops started to go one by one. Successful independent businesses began to be taken over by larger - but still local - businesses or entrepreneurs. Come Thatcher and regional businesses were then being taken over by national companies. And of course the wicked witch of Grantham flogged all that we as the people owned off to the highest bidder via share issues... Zoom on another decade or 3 and the national companies have been bought by the global companies.
So for capitalism to survive it has to keep evolving not only new products (think of vinyl to cassettes to CD to digital or Betamax to video to DVD to Blue Ray) but also in corporations getting bigger and bigger and cornering markets.
So once a corporation is global, where can they go? They can't gain any more ground. And once technology has ran out of new products to flog us (Apple spring to mind) or the public gets wise and refuses to follow the hype and advertising and doesn't bother buying the emperor's new clothes which these products are, then we will see a change in the capitalist system.
It's sheep we're up against
You have a very accurate user name.
You seem to think that capitalism is a system that has been devised and implemented and is controlled by someone. Capitalism is what you get when people are free to live their lives free from too much government intervention. We are free to start businesses, generate wealth, succeed, fail, live. We are also free to sit on our arses complaining that the world isn't fair.
If you look at the Sunday Times rich list in its first year (1989), over 80% of the wealthy were people who had inherited their money. If you look at the composition in the last few years (over 25 years later) the situation is reversed and over 80% now make their fortunes in their own lifetimes. What's changed? Margaret Thatcher's conservative governments revolutionised the prospects of the average Briton by setting them free. The world we live in now is unrecognizable from the world you grew up in any objective comparison is infinitely better.
Power to the people.
If I thought there was the slightest hint of merit in your argument then I’d debate it. But the banking sector is not remotely treated like a socialist recipient. Just you saying it is doesn’t make it so. I could say I believe Premier League football is treated like sticky toffee pudding, I doubt anyone would bother writing an essay to correct my error. They’d just say I was talking bollocks.
I really can't tell now if you just have a total lack of understanding of the subject or you're just completely delusional to come out with such an inaccurate statement.
I'd be here the rest of the night highlighting the State support the banking sector has received since 2007.
SWP's back
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Well I’ve got a degree in economics and I’m a chartered financial advisor and private client consultant. So your call because I obviously haven’t got a fucking clue how the banking sector operates.I really can't tell now if you just have a total lack of understanding of the subject or you're just completely delusional to come out with such an inaccurate statement.
I'd be here the rest of the night highlighting the State support the banking sector has received since 2007.
What are your credentials apart from publishing your IQ in your username?
How many months would you be here explaining how much the bank sector has added to GDP over the last 30 years do you think?
Chippy_boy
Well-Known Member
Pretty well spot on there Chippy.
All I'd add is that the aim of capitalism is to maximise profits and doing that comes at the expense of wages and exploitation of the workforce. We've seen the rise of the gig economy, with the inability of workers to secure a regular and reliable income stream and companies avoiding their basic responsibilities to pay taxes and NI for those workers then siphoning revenue to tax havens or countries with advantageous tax arrangements. We're heading back to the Victorian era and eventually the gap between rich and poor, which is extreme in the UK, will cause great social and political upheaval.
Indeed it will, eventually. Or at least it would, if we allow it to progress that far without changing the system.
So this is not something we should fear, it is something we will need to grasp. There's no reason in principle (and in the end) that when all work is performed by machines (I use the word "work" in the very broadest sense, and to include obviously things like manufacturing, but also distribution, r&d, business executive decision-making, customer service, service industries generally), that we cannot all be paid for the work that we as humans would otherwise have been doing. if the output is the same or greater, but no human effort is needed nor additional costs incurred, we can in theory pay people anyway.
The issue here is that we are in a global marketplace, so we in the UK - or any other country for that matter - cannot unilaterally decide to do this whilst other countries do not. It would simply make all our goods and services uncompetitive and lead to the demise of our economy and all our wealth with it. So this new paradigm where everyone is basically paid very well for doing nothing, needs the whole planet to be up to speed. Not only do we need levels of automation as yet not seen, we need this to be as advanced in for example Africa as it is in Japan.
This is going to take a century or two to come about imo.
Prestwich_Blue
Well-Known Member
It is to a degree. I don't think 7 year-olds will be going up chimneys anytime soon or that the mills will be re-opening. But the point was that some of the safeguards introduced to protect ordinary people by the Atlee government and since are being reversed. Inequality has and financial insecurity has increased measurably. Public utilities, rather than being not-for-profit, exist to serve shareholders rather than their customers. A fellow City fan was complaining that the off-peak train fare on the line they use has increased by over 40% in two years.There’s some hyperbole.
Like you, I'm a reasonably well-off professional who should, on all counts, be a Tory voter but I'm beginning to fear for society. We're facing a political situation very similar to the 1940's, when the public got fed up of austerity and going without, although that was largely due to the war rather than economic mismanagement. That's why Atlee got a landslide in the 1945 election and starts to explain why Corbyn, a man not fit to lick Atlee's boots, could yet end up in power. People want change and they're prepared to overlook his many faults in order to get that.
GortonBlue62
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Here's the story of Xiaogang village ...
During the 'Great Leap Forward', Fengyang County, along with much of the rest of the country, experienced a period of famine. A quarter of the county's population, 90,000 people, died of starvation. In Xiaogang village alone, 67 villagers died of starvation out of a population of 120 between 1958 and 1960.
In December 1978, eighteen of the local farmers, led by Yan Jingchang, met in the largest house in the village. They agreed to break the law at the time by signing a secret agreement to divide the land, local People's Commune into family plots. Each plot was to be worked by an individual family who would turn over some of what they grew to the government and the collective whilst at the same time agreeing that they could keep the surplus for themselves. The villagers also agreed that should one of them be caught and sentenced to death that the other villagers would raise their children until they were eighteen years old. At the time, the villagers were worried that another famine might strike the village after a particularly bad harvest and more people might die of hunger.
After this secret reform, Xiaogang village produced a harvest that was larger than the previous five years combined. Per capita income in the village increase from 22 yuan to 400 yuan with grain output increasing to 90,000 kg in 1979. This attracted significant attention from surrounding villages and before long the government in Beijing had found out. The villagers were fortunate in that at the time China had just changed leadership afterMao Zedong had died. The new leadership under Deng Xiaoping was looking for ways to reform China's economy and the discovery of Xiaogang's innovation was held up as a model to other villages across the country. This led to the abandonment of collectivised farming across China and a large increase in agricultural production. The secret signing of the contract in Xiaogang is widely regarded as the beginning of the period of rapid economic growth and industrialisation that mainland China has experienced in the thirty years since.
... and it's the reason why capitalism will survive all other systems.
Capitalism is not a top down Utopian system imposed by an elite (like socialism, facism, communism, Marxism etc) it's a system that goes hand in hand with freedom and liberal democracy.
Is it perfect. Is it fuck. Don't equate the appalling behaviour of companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, etc with the real deal.
Capitalism makes your life better and will continue to raise living standards across the world for decades to come.
During the 'Great Leap Forward', Fengyang County, along with much of the rest of the country, experienced a period of famine. A quarter of the county's population, 90,000 people, died of starvation. In Xiaogang village alone, 67 villagers died of starvation out of a population of 120 between 1958 and 1960.
In December 1978, eighteen of the local farmers, led by Yan Jingchang, met in the largest house in the village. They agreed to break the law at the time by signing a secret agreement to divide the land, local People's Commune into family plots. Each plot was to be worked by an individual family who would turn over some of what they grew to the government and the collective whilst at the same time agreeing that they could keep the surplus for themselves. The villagers also agreed that should one of them be caught and sentenced to death that the other villagers would raise their children until they were eighteen years old. At the time, the villagers were worried that another famine might strike the village after a particularly bad harvest and more people might die of hunger.
After this secret reform, Xiaogang village produced a harvest that was larger than the previous five years combined. Per capita income in the village increase from 22 yuan to 400 yuan with grain output increasing to 90,000 kg in 1979. This attracted significant attention from surrounding villages and before long the government in Beijing had found out. The villagers were fortunate in that at the time China had just changed leadership afterMao Zedong had died. The new leadership under Deng Xiaoping was looking for ways to reform China's economy and the discovery of Xiaogang's innovation was held up as a model to other villages across the country. This led to the abandonment of collectivised farming across China and a large increase in agricultural production. The secret signing of the contract in Xiaogang is widely regarded as the beginning of the period of rapid economic growth and industrialisation that mainland China has experienced in the thirty years since.
... and it's the reason why capitalism will survive all other systems.
Capitalism is not a top down Utopian system imposed by an elite (like socialism, facism, communism, Marxism etc) it's a system that goes hand in hand with freedom and liberal democracy.
Is it perfect. Is it fuck. Don't equate the appalling behaviour of companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, etc with the real deal.
Capitalism makes your life better and will continue to raise living standards across the world for decades to come.
Well I’ve got a degree in economics and I’m a chartered financial advisor and private client consultant. So your call because I obviously haven’t got a fucking clue how the banking sector operates.
What are your credentials apart from publishing your IQ in your username?
How many months would you be here explaining how much the bank sector has added to GDP over the last 30 years do you think?
This just gets better and better... a Financial Adviser who doesn't recognise or understand how the banking sector have received State support in the last 10 years.
Chippy_boy
Well-Known Member
You're on a sticky wicket mate, honestly. SWP may be many things, but a financial numpty, he is not.This just gets better and better... a Financial Adviser who doesn't recognise or understand how the banking sector have received State support in the last 10 years.