Friday, May 20, 2022

SPGB Summer School: The Class Divide (2022)

Party News from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard



The richest 10% of people own more than 80% of global wealth, and the 10 richest men have six times more wealth than that of the poorest 3.1 billion people combined.

These vast inequalities in wealth reflect how society is split into two classes: the capitalist class who get their wealth through owning industries and corporations, and the working class who rely on wages or benefits to buy what is needed.

The Socialist Party’s weekend of talks and discussion looks at why capitalism is divided into classes and how the antagonism between them impacts on the way we live. What is ‘class consciousness’ and how does it develop? To what extent is it meaningful to say that there is a middle class? What classes were there before capitalism, in previous stages of history? And what could a future classless society be like?

Full residential cost (including accommodation and meals Friday evening to Sunday afternoon) is £100; the concessionary rate is £50. Book here or send a cheque (payable to the Socialist Party of Great Britain) with your contact details to Summer School, The Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN. Day visitors are welcome, but please book by e-mail in advance.

E-mail enquiries to spgbschool@yahoo.co.uk.

A Modern Money Tree? (2022)

Book Review from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The New Economics: A Manifesto by Steve Keen (Polity, 2022, 200 pages)

In the last part of the nineteenth century pro-capitalist economists, worried by the use Marx and others had made of the Classical Economist David Ricardo’s labour theory of value, sought to change the whole theoretical basis of economics. They also objected to the Classical Economists’ analysing society as divided into social classes (landlords, capitalists and workers) with conflicting interests.

What they came up with was that it was the utility to consumers that determined the exchange value of goods and services, not labour cost. Consumers were assumed to spend their income in such a way that the ‘marginal utility’ of each different item they bought (i.e ., the added satisfaction they get from one more unit of a good) was equal; the price of goods was the result of consumers all doing this and so would typically decline with every additional unit of consumption as consumers were willing to pay less for it. Similarly, labour and capital were considered as each contributing to production and being rewarded according to their ‘marginal productivity’, the theory being that workers will be hired up to the point when the marginal revenue of production is equal to the wage rate. The reward to capital was profits.

This ‘marginalist revolution’ ushered in Neoclassical Economics and became the dominant view amongst economists and is still taught in schools and universities all over the world. It is against this theory that Steve Keen’s The New Economics: A Manifesto (Polity, 2022, 200 pages), aimed at students about to study economics, is directed. Like all manifestos, it is a call to arms. Keen denounces neoclassical economics as a ‘disease’ and calls for its complete eradication.

Money creationism
But what does he propose to put in its place? As an advocate of so-called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), his main criticism is aimed at the Neoclassicals’ theory of money and banking. As it happens this is something they inherited from the Classical Economists – that banks are essentially financial intermediaries, borrowing money at one (or no) rate of interest and relending it at a higher rate; that banks do not ‘create’ money but merely redistribute it. Keen defends the contrary view that banks can and do create money.

This is partly a question of semantics about what is meant by ‘creating money’. Even Neoclassical textbooks define bank lending as doing this. So, when a bank makes a loan by definition it ‘creates’ money. The justification for this claim is that when a bank makes a loan it doesn’t hand over the cash but deposits money in the borrower’s account. But this is different from when a customer deposits money in their account, which is a liability of the bank to them (the bank owes it to them). A deposit made by a bank into a borrower’s account is the reverse (the borrower owes it to the bank). It is misleading to treat these two kinds of deposit as the same and to assimilate the second to the first.

Supporters of the view that banks have the power to create new money also point to the fact that a bank doesn’t necessarily have to have the money available at the time it makes a loan. This is true. However, when the borrowers actually spend the money it has to be covered. This may be from inbound income, but if there is a shortfall at the end of a trading day when banks settle up with each other, to cover this the bank has to borrow money on the money market from other banks or from the central bank.

Another confusion arises from the fact that governments, which do have the power to create money, don’t normally do this directly. They do so via the banking system, so creating the illusion that it is the banks rather than the government’s central bank that has created new money or, rather, new money-tokens.

The government money tree
MMT makes an additional claim that distinguishes it from other money-creationists. They are ‘Chartalists’ who hold that money did not evolve spontaneously out of trading but that it has always been the creation of a state. This runs contrary to the Classical view that money originated in commodity exchange when one commodity emerged as the ‘general equivalent’, ie, one that could be exchanged for all other commodities. This was Marx’s view too. Coins are issued by states and are (or were supposed to be) a guarantee of the weight of the money-commodity. Coins are indeed the creation of states but the money-commodity is not. Some coins did weigh the stated amount but others were, or came to be, tokens for this, as are all notes and, even more obviously, electronic money.

MMT argues that, because the state can create money-tokens at will, it does not need to tax or borrow to fund its spending. When it wants to spend it can simply arrange for new money-tokens to be created (or ‘printed’, as it is sometimes anachronistically put) and then spend this; this increases money in the hands of the general public, so stimulating the economy; some of this money can even come back to the state as taxes (if there still are any). Conclusion: the budget doesn’t need to be balanced and can be run at a permanent deficit.

There is nothing ‘modern’ about this theory. People have always wondered why, if something needs to be done, the government doesn’t simply create the money to do it. It is not as simple as that as new money-tokens are not new wealth but additional claims on existing wealth, so that if a government were to do this the result would be inflation causing a rise in all prices; even below the level of the full employment of resources the result, after an initial short-lived stimulation of economic activity, would be stagflation. No wonder some people think that MMT stands for Magic Money Tree.

MMT’s crisis theory
MMT is not quite that crude and Keen offers a theory of crises based on banks supposedly creating too much money by making too many loans and fuelling speculative bubbles, a purely monetary theory of crises. ‘Banks, debt and money’, he claims, are ‘the main factors that drive economic performance and also cause economic crises’ (p. 56). He quotes (p. 84) fellow-economist Hyman Minsky: ‘The tendency to transform doing well into a speculative investment boom is the basic instability in a capitalist economy.’ There is some truth in this; bank lending does expand in a boom but this is in response to the increased demand for loans from firms wanting to make hay while there is an expanding market, a view banks go along with as they, too, expect more profits to be made of which they will get a share as interest.

Contrary to what MMT teaches, increased bank lending comes from the demand side, not from the banks themselves. Despite Keen’s claim, banks seeking more interest from more lending is not what ‘drives economic performance’; what does is capitalist firms seeking profits. What causes a boom to bust is overproduction, in relation to its market, in some key industry, which means that the anticipated profits cannot be realised because not all that has been produced can be sold. Production is curtailed and this has a knock-on effect on the rest of the economy, including the banking sector.

Keen does not think that capitalism’s unstable path can be entirely eliminated, only that it can be dampened down considerably:
‘While financial instability cannot be wholly eliminated from capitalism…… the most egregious elements of irresponsible bank lending can be addressed by limitations on what banks can be allowed to lend’ (p.70).
What he proposes, to remedy this, is some reform to banking law and regulations that would ‘constrain or eliminate’ banks from ‘lending that finances asset price bubbles’ (plus a few pet reforms of his own which no government is likely to adopt).

This, he suggests, would be enough to allow another ‘Golden Age of Capitalism’, as from 1950 to 1973 when there was near full employment, low interest rates and only minor recessions.

Keen’s class analysis
That is not to say that Keen is presenting himself, as most bank reformers do, as a conservative out to save the capitalist system. He writes that ‘to acknowledge that capitalism is a class system is simply acknowledging a fact’ and that ‘with a class-based analysis, the consequences for different social classes of different economic policies must be confronted.’ (p. 142)

Earlier he had given an example of what he had in mind by class-based analysis when he described how a computer model of the business cycle he had devised worked. His model assumes that normally the share of profits in GDP is 12.9 percent, leaving ’87.1 per cent of GDP to be divided between workers and bankers, and it doesn’t matter to capitalists how that is allocated between them’ (p. 87). So he is positing a three-class system – capitalists, workers and bankers. Here is how his model presents the business cycle starting from the boom stage:
‘… [R]ising wage and interest costs ultimately mean that the profits expected by capitalists when the boom began are not realized. The increased share of output going to workers and bankers leaves less than capitalists had expected as profits. Investment falls, the rate of growth of the economy falters, and the boom gives way to a slump. The slump reverses the dynamic that the boom set in motion, but doesn’t quite reverse the impact of the boom on private debt… The recovery from the crisis thus leaves a residue of unpaid debt. The profit share of output ultimately returns to a level that once again sets off another period of euphoric expectations and high debt-financed investment, but this starts from a higher level of debt relative to GDP than before. With a higher level of debt, the larger share of income leaves a lower share for workers. So the workers pay the price for the higher debt in terms of a lower wages share of GDP…’ ( pp 87-8).
So, the class conflict in his analysis is between workers and bankers. But the loss to workers is built into his model because it assumes a constant share of profits in GDP. Since the bankers’ income (interest) has to come out of profits, the more interest capitalist firms pay on loans the less the capitalists retain as profits. It would perhaps have been more realistic to have assumed a constant share of wages in GDP. That would bring out that what would change throughout the business cycle would be the shares of the capitalists and the bankers, which would be irrelevant to workers as it doesn’t matter to them how that is allocated between them, especially as both interest and profits are just a division of the surplus value produced by the workers.

Keen’s model is a specious attempt to show that workers have an interest in reducing the income of bankers whereas doing that would benefit only the capitalists. He is in effect asking workers to take the side of the capitalists against the bankers. But why should they as both productive capitalists and bankers are just two sections of the same capitalist class?
Adam Buick

Material World: One World, One People (2022)

The Material World column from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard
‘Ubi bene, ibi patria’ 
‘Where it goes well with me, there is my country’
Millions of vulnerable and damaged people are making perilous, life-threatening journeys to seek a safe refuge.

It was only a matter of a few months ago that some countries were constructing razor-wire fences along their borders to keep out foreigners hoping to reach sanctuary in Europe. Refugees were dying on the frontier from exposure and hypothermia from extreme winter conditions. Many people showed little understanding or support for those asylum seekers and did not want to accept outsiders. Growing xenophobic attitudes have given rise to far-right populism. When the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, Nigel Farage spoke of an impending flood of its refugees: ‘You can now see a wave of people leaving Afghanistan, and we already have numbers we quite simply can’t cope with.’

Now, how different is the reception that desperate and vulnerable men, women and children are now receiving. Europe generously embraces Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion. Many humanitarian-minded individuals have rushed to do what they can to help Ukrainians, yet, forgetting or ignoring that refugees from elsewhere are still being pushed back or caged in detention camps.

Socialists share the sentiments of the environmentalist movement, Fridays For Future, when it explained, ‘While Ukrainians deserve immediate peace and all our support, so do the people from Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and all war-torn regions. Empathy, justice, and compassion should be for everyone. Refugees should not have to be white to be heard and seen.’ Fridays for Future went on to say ‘People only desire to live and exist safely. Let it become a door-opening moment where we demand justice for everyone independent of their nationality and skin colour.’

Millions of Ukrainians have joined the 84 million other people in need of security around the world (2021 UNHCR data). If they were all to form their own country, it would be the 17th largest on Earth, slightly bigger than Germany. If we were to add to those figures migrants forced by dire economic conditions to cross borders, the number is well over one billion people.

The population of the forcibly displaced is now more than double the number of Europeans driven from their homes by World War Two, six times the number of those displaced by the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, 100-fold more than the number of Vietnamese Boat People following the Vietnam War.

To put it another way, about one in every 95 people on this planet is involuntarily on the move. Add in those driven by economic imperatives and one out of every 30 people on Earth is now a refugee or a migrant.

In contrast to media perceptions it has not been the wealthy developed countries hosting refugees. In 2014, about nine million of the world’s displaced lived in low-income countries. Today, that number stands at an estimated 36 million and is forecast, by the Danish Refugee Council, to increase to 40 million by the end of 2023. The displacement crisis ‘disproportionally affects poorer countries and areas that already have enough on their plate,’ said the Council’s Charlotte Slente.

There are currently 5.7 million registered Syrian refugees stranded in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, 1.2 million Rohingya in the camps at Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh, 2.2 million Afghan refugees still in Iran and Pakistan, 2 million South Sudanese, 4 million displaced in Yemen while Honduras has 937,000 displaced people, the highest number in Central America.

Since 2015, a fifth of Venezuela’s population has left, one of the largest displacements in the world. On average, 2,000 Venezuelans crossed into Colombia every day in 2021 which now hosts 1.8 million Venezuelans.

Behind these numbers are people with personal stories of tragic loss and pain, all hoping for a chance at a better future. They think it is worth risking their lives if it leads to an opportunity of a decent life for them and their families.

However, we also witness a UK government passing draconian new nationality and borders legislation to restrict the rights of refugees and for those who endeavour to enter the country ‘unlawfully’, and they will be criminally prosecuted to add to all the other miseries that have already been inflicted upon them.

The UK government has now announced it intends to deport – or should that be ‘transport’? – those accused of ‘illegally’ arriving to claim asylum to Rwanda, in the middle of Africa, 4,500 miles away. How different from the humanitarian welcome being offered to Ukrainians fleeing war in what is now effectively becoming an unequal two-tier refugee policy.

Socialists do not hold with making a ‘league table’ of suffering and to differentiate between the more deserving or the less deserving for our charity and compassion. There should be no competition or contests for our concern. But in today’s world, such a conflict of interests exists when it comes to attitudes and policies in regard to refugees.

The World Socialist Movement’s position is that we are all equal worthy members of the human family and when it comes to looking after ‘our own’, none should be excluded and rejected, no exceptions nor special cases. Humanity is One. We are indivisible.
ALJO

How did we get stuck? (2022)

Book Review from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Dawn of Everything. A New History of Humanity. By David Graeber and David Wengrow. Penguin. 2022. 720 pages.

This is the last book written by the anthropologist David Graeber, in conjunction with the archaeologist David Wengrow. It aims to set out a new theory for the pre-history of humanity, and in particular, takes aim at theories of the ‘origin of inequality’. The authors claim to be bringing together facts and ideas that have been coming out of their respective disciplines, and bringing them together to see what the new picture is.

They take aim at unidirectional ideas of social evolution: such as band to tribe to kingdom to empire. They also claim to rebut any notion that scale and social complexity inevitably lead to domination. The central strand of their narrative is that the idea of a lapsarian fall from original equality itself stems from attempts to rebut critiques of European civilisation made by North Americans, for example, the Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia, who are reported as saying of the French in 1608: ‘you are always fighting and quarrelling among yourselves; we live peacefully. You are envious and all the time slandering each other; you are thieves and deceivers; you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread we share it with our neighbour.’ The authors argue it was through debates with American interlocutors that Europeans began to grapple with the notion of inequality in the first place.

Their argument runs that these critiques stung, to the extent that, by the mid 18th century, European writers had to recuperate them, and the strategy was to invent the idea of the noble savage: that free and equal societies were a sign of inferiority, where everyone is equally poor. The evolution of society and social complexity brings forth the differentiation and inequality, inevitably.

This book argues that, in fact, there is no basis for such an assumption. The authors cite the emerging archaeology from Ukraine and its environs to show how millennia before the first cities known to history, regular mega sites can be identified where thousands of humans would gather, and build together. They conjecture that these may have been seasonal gatherings (such as the evidence suggests happened at Stonehenge), bringing together people from vast areas.

The argument runs that people could cycle through different political structures, depending on the time of year, gathering in winter, in conditions where some would hold authority, to scatter in the summer to looser organisations. The authors present evidence within recorded history of some groups doing something like this, up to the point where people took up different names and identities within each season. They suggest that these ‘hospitality zones’ would have been the probable pre-condition for the emergence of the first cities

They note the absence of indicators of status and authority in Neolithic city formations (and the fact that it seems that the neighbouring tribes, in fact, developed aristocratic traits before the cities). They examine the notion of schismogenesis (something which people on the left would be quite familiar with) wherein groups of people define themselves in opposition to other groups. They note, for example, in North West America, some groups of foragers value wasteful and spectacular consumption, whereas their neighbours consciously espouse frugality.

They argue, that despite a similar mode of production, their cultures are different, because they oppose each other, although it is arguable that if one of those groups is using slaves, then that constitutes a different mode of production: but then, their central point stands that in that case it is still a conscious choice of the other tribe to not adopt slave taking as a way of living.

Likewise, they note that the invention agriculture, which in some people’s arguments leads to social stratification does not in fact seem to have in fact done so. They note that the agricultural revolution itself took thousands of years, with societies ‘play farming’: cultivating crops as part of a broader strategy of hunting and foraging, without becoming entirely dependent on their crops for survival. Agriculture remained a choice, and the relative social arrangements around it likewise for millennia. Agriculturalists and non-agriculturalists lived side by side in that time.

The authors discuss the operation of a ”baseline communism’ which applies in all societies; a feeling that if another person’s needs are great enough […] and the cost of meeting them is modest enough […] then of course any decent person would comply’. This baseline is moveable, and they note, for example, the rights and hospitality of the ‘baseline communism’ of North American tribes, compared to that of French colonists which formed part of the debates mentioned above. Human societies for millennia have thus oscillated around those freedoms and baseline levels of communism, producing many and varied social forms, not ‘in conditions of their own choosing’, without being stuck with them.

The question for Graeber and Wengrow is, then, how did we end up stuck in one of them? They analyse three forms of domination: control of information, violence and charisma. They present evidence from ancient cultures which demonstrates that early domination was usually a combination of two of these three factors, and it was only later that elites could combine all three. They note evidence of some tribes, for instance, where the king was known to be highly dangerous, and could order anyone put to death, but pretty much only if they were in the same room as him, and a few miles away he could be safely ignored.

They note that there have been many discoveries of palaeolithic burials with highly valuable grave goods inside, with the bodies posed. They note, however, many of those bodies exhibited unusual physical characteristics (being unusually tall, or short, or deformed). These individuals were in the first place seen as unusual within the tribe. They describe how in known societies, such as that of the Nuer, highly eccentric characters were tolerated and respected within the tribe, “when calamities or unprecedented events occurred […] it was among this penumbra [of unusual people] that everyone looked for a charismatic leader appropriate to the occasion’. Prominent people could emerge without becoming a permanent part of the social logic of those early cultures.

They look for the process of getting stuck in the notion of care surrounding these unique individuals. They note that chiefs had a duty of care for the sick, the orphaned, the widowed or anyone else who had no-one to look after them. They could ‘take refuge in the chief’s residence’, this would form the nucleus of a paternalistic relationship, also providing the chief with henchmen and people outside the normal social structures to do their will. They note the culmination, which seems to be ubiquitous in societies with monumental kingship, of a point at which all of those expected to care for a king are entombed with him: slaughtered at his death.

They have an entire chapter dedicated to claiming ‘the state has no origins’, in which they argue that many different forms of human society can exist, with differing degrees and modes of domination, and it is just as futile to look for an origin of the state as for the origin of inequality. They expressly argue that humans have the political skills and wisdom to imagine their own societies, and not simply react to their circumstances. They suggest a sort of ‘play kingship’ might well have prefigured the emergence of the real thing.

They note that signs of bureaucracy actually predate the existence of cities, and record keeping (in the form of clay tablets and seals) may in fact have been part of an active attempt to prevent new emerging technologies from creating social hierarchies. As with the principle of care, above, this system was ripe for subverting, and the abstraction and equalisation involved became a powerful tool for later rulers to subvert the village organisation and subsume it into an empire.

The overall thrust of this book is hopeful, it allows us to think about how vast cities of humans could have been run without a state or a ruling bureaucracy. They note that human communities in America, during the Hopewell civilization, were able to live without any signs of warfare: ‘for a period of about five centuries or more, human remains across the whole of Eastern North America display remarkably little evidence of traumatic injuries, scalping or other forms of interpersonal violence’. That such evidence exists both before and after this period shows how humans at that time were capable of abolishing war.

Likewise, as they note: ‘slavery was most likely abolished multiple times in history in multiple places’. The whole thrust of the book is that the unexplored myth that there was some fall from grace, that size complexity leads to domination are simply ideological presuppositions that rob ancient humanity of agency, and create a straightjacket around trying to think of new ways of running our world today.
Pik Smeet

Letter: Are we anti Latin American? (2022)

Letter to the Editors from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are we anti Latin American?

Dear Editors

In your last issue, reviewing ‘The Truth About Trotsky’, you state ‘In 1937 Leon Trotsky, from his exile in Central America…’. Well, he was not exiled in Central America, he was exiled in Mexico. Unless of course you did that intentionally placing Mexico outside North America, thus implying that only the two English speaking countries, USA and Canada belong to North America, therefore Mexico as a Spanish speaking should be in Central America.

The shape of the American continent, from Alaska to Cape Horn, is that of geographical giant with a thin isthmus in the middle linking North from South America. In that sense, even if it burns the writer reviewing the book on Trotsky, Mexico’s place is in the North of the continent.

This brings me to a pattern in your constant depiction of anything political and ideological pertaining Latin America. And is that of a veiled attitude of dismissal every time it is mentioned.

I find this quite offensive – Guzman in Peru ‘was not a Marxist’, ‘Allende in Chile apart from nationalizing the copper, did very little’. AMLO in Mexico, Lula in Brazil, etc, etc.

As a Chilean who came here after being in prison from 1974 to 1976, I cannot help but to think of the typical position of those pseudo Marxists who love criticizing everybody else, without ever themselves doing anything practical for Socialism.

Salvador Allende was the leader of the Popular Unity government 1970-1973 which in itself is an achievement. The first Marxist to be elected by the vote in the Western Hemisphere, he showed that Chile could be transformed. First of all, the nationalization of the banks was the first measure taken by the Popular Unity, copper the second. Many of the big industry, especially textiles, were passed over to the Social Property Area. It created the ‘comandos populares’, which encouraged the participation at the municipal/local level of the working class, the same can be said of the ‘cordones industriales’ where all the big industries surrounding Santiago had been taken or expropriated and were now ran by their workers.

The Agrarian Reform was also a total success. It nationalized the largest privately owned land measuring over 40 hectares. Thus, not only economically benefited the rural workers of the countryside who became syndicalized but also the indigenous population of Southern Chile who for centuries had been reclaiming back their land.

Allende’s government lasted only for three year, but were filled with advances and hopes for most Chileans. In the last local elections before the coup, the Popular Unity had increased their votes supporting the government but, as Kissinger said, the CIA had to push for military intervention before it was too late.

As you can see, this is not an essay or article but a rough letter pointing out that you cannot make swiping statements as you do. I’m planning to continue reading Socialist Standard because it’s worth it.
Nigel de Vere, 
Bromley


Reply:
We take your point that we should not have referred to Mexico as being in Central America. We can assure you that it was an honest mistake – based on a common practice that we should no doubt have questioned – but it was in no way an attempt to belittle any particular country or part of the world.

However, while we apologise for that, we can find no reason to apologise for references in past issues of the Socialist Standard with regard to political events and developments in the Spanish and Portuguese speaking parts of the American continents which you have found offensive. You mention Guzman in Peru, AMLO in Mexico, Lula in Brazil and, in particular, Allende in Chile, and you object to our not considering such people or movements as ‘Marxist’. You are particularly critical of the views we have expressed about Allende’s Chile. While we acknowledge and appreciate your personal opposition to the post-Allende Chilean dictatorship which led to your imprisonment and to your leaving your home country, we cannot accept that the reforms brought in by the Allende government, beneficial as they may have been for many Chileans, had anything to do with Marxism or socialism as we define those terms. They clearly had a lot to do with ‘reformism’, i.e. the attempt by ‘progressive’ governments to run the capitalist system in a more liveable, and often less oppressive, way for workers. And we do not question that this brought with it ‘advances and hopes for most Chileans’. But the kind of reforms you mention, for example nationalisation of banks and industry, in no way amount to the moneyless wageless society without buying and selling based on economic equality and free access for all to all goods and services, which is the basis of Marx’s prescription for a socialist form of society.

Of course nothing prevents those advocating or practising policies of reform from calling themselves Marxist or socialist (or others referring to them in that way, often pejoratively), but our contention is that what they represent is a particular way of running the capitalist system, not a fundamental transformation of that system, which is currently dominant in various forms in all countries. We would contend that nothing in Allende’s policies or practises (though they sadly cost him his life) represented or even pointed the way forward to the wholly democratic society of common ownership and voluntary association that is truly worthy of the name ‘Marxist’ or socialist.

Having outlined our disagreement with you on this point, we nevertheless consider it a credit to your open-mindedness that you say that you will continue to read our journal because ‘it’s worth it’. Needless to say that is something on which we do agree with you.
Editorial Committee.