SPGB Meetings (2009)

Party News from the January 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Notes:

• Zeitgeist Addendum was reviewed the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard.
• A video recording of the debate between Adam Buick and Hillel Ticktin is available on YouTube. (A warning: it's in 10 parts.)

Cooking the Books: Mises is Irrelevant (2016)

The Cooking the Books column from the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 'Weekly Worker' (28 April) carried an interesting article by the Trotskyoid Hillel Ticktin which, unusually for someone from his political background, gave a good description of socialism which (also unusually) he called socialism:

‘A distinguishing mark of socialism is that distribution would operate according to need, rather than input … people will be able to walk into a distribution point and pick up what they need.’‘In a socialist society you would expect workers to work in the way that they judge is correct. Since a worker’s incentive under socialism is not money, they work as best they can in order that they not only fulfil what they are doing for the collectivity, but for themselves. You would expect that they would work as well as they can, without any need for discipline from outside.’

Curiously though, at one point he says ‘von Mises was right’. Mises, the arch-advocate of the dystopia of a free market capitalism, argued that in a socialist society, with common ownership and no free market in means of production, rational economic calculation would be impossible and that such a society would not last for long but would eventually break down in economic chaos. This was a circular argument in that he defined rational economic calculation as calculation based on prices set by the free play of market forces.

Ticktin was accepting Mises’s argument that in a situation where productive capacity is not enough to satisfy people’s needs, calculation in some general unit of account such as money or labour-time would be necessary. He speculates that Marx’s ‘period of the revolutionary transformation’ of capitalist into communist society during which he says this would have to be the case could last ‘let us say anything between 10 and 50 years.’

Ten years is one thing but fifty is another. Maybe in Marx’s day, in 1875, any such period might have been nearer to the fifty end. Today, however, in view of the tremendous development of the forces of production since then, even ten years seems on the long side for a period in which to re-orient production so as meet people’s needs, especially as, unlike Mises’s followers, Ticktin rejects that humans needs are infinite:

‘The bourgeois concept of the human being having infinite needs is ridiculous, but it is the basis of bourgeois economics. … In fact there is a limited amount that needs to be produced for a given society and consequently under socialism we will be able to identify the limited areas in which increased production is needed.’

Also, Ticktin accepts that there is an enormous amount of wasted production under capitalism whereas in socialism:

‘Obviously there will be no such thing as finance, and whole sections of economic activity will no longer exist because they are completely wasteful and unnecessary. There will be no arms production, no advertising and, of course, no City of London – you can go through the different wasteful forms that will cease to exist. It is quite clear that the standard of living could very quickly be raised if such waste is removed.’

So, once this waste is ‘very quickly’ removed, we would already have a situation of relative abundance and so should be able to move equally quickly to socialism and free access to available goods and services.

So, why would we need to go to the trouble – and waste – of setting up a vast bureaucracy to measure the labour-time content of everything with a view to reducing it to a minimum and an individual’s input to production with a view to calculating their entitlement to goods and services, when the supposed need for this is not going to last for long? Even Mises conceded that socialism could continue for a while without having recourse to his ‘rational economic calculation’.

New Interventions (1998)

Book Review from the March 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

New Interventions, Vol 8 , No 2, Winter 1997-98, PO Box 485 Coventry, CV5 6ZP. £2.

This issue of a Trotskyoid journal is devoted to a reappraisal of Bolshevism on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. But, instead of the expected praise of the Bolsheviks and a call for the 1917 experience to be repeated in this country, most of the contributors expressed doubts about whether the Bolsheviks did the right thing in 1917 and the years that followed.

Veteran Trotskyist Harry Ratner writes that Russia remained a genuine soviet regime (a workers' democracy) for only "a few weeks" after November 1917 (he says October 1917--Trotskyists still use the old Julian calendar). After that, the Bolsheviks established their own dictatorship. He wonders if it might not have been better if some sort of broad front democratic government had been allowed to emerge from the elections to the Constituent Assembly, and asks:

"So were Kautsky and the Mensheviks right to oppose the October Revolution from the start, as an attempt prematurely to go beyond the 'bourgeois' stage of the Russian revolution? Were they right to declare a socialist working-class revolution in a backward Russia premature and doomed to failure because the conditions for socialism were not ripe-both as regards the economic base and the social and cultural level of the working class? On the face of it, subsequent history would seem to justify them".

His reply is even more surprising:

"All one can say is that the 'workers' state' that was born in October 1917 was premature and infected from infancy. Unfortunately, as it degenerated, it infected the working-class movement internationally, and proved an obstacle on the road to socialism. My old comrade, the late Alex Acheson, who joined the movement in the 1930s and remained a committed Trotskyist till his death last year, once told me: 'It might have been better if the October Revolution had never occurred'".

Another contributor, Hillel Ticktin, editor of Critique, tackles the question "What if the Left Opposition had Taken Power?". After beginning with the preposterous statement that "the Russian Revolution is possibly the most important event so far in human history", his conclusion is that they too would have established a dictatorship that would have "had nothing to do with socialism" but would not have been as bad as Stalin's. He asks himself the same questions as Harry Ratner: "Do we wait until we have a revolution that is totally democratic?", "Are those who argue that in 1917 the means of production were not yet sufficiently developed then correct?". His answer is not very clear, especially not to the first one.

Al Richardson, editor of Revolutionary History, says that even "workers' state" is "a term that does not appear in Marx at all, to my knowledge". Only Ian Birchall of the SWP claims the mantle of true Bolshevism. It is his party that seems to him to "come nearest to being a legitimate successor to the essential spirit of Bolshevism". He's right. That's why they should be opposed.

Two other articles, one by a Socialist Party member on "Why the Russian Revolution Wasn't a Proletarian Revolution", the other by Alastair Mitchell on "1917 and All That", have no time at all for Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks.

The same issue also contains a lengthy reply by another Socialist Party member to an ignorant criticism of the Socialist Party in the previous issue by Ted Crawford who supplies an equally ignorant (in all senses of the word) reply.

Of course it wasn't just Kautsky, Martov and the Mensheviks who warned that conditions in Russia in 1917 weren't ripe for a socialist revolution there. We did too. In fact anyone who had read and understood Marx knew this. We know people don't like being told "we told you so". So we shall resist the temptation.

Adam Buick

Cooking the Books: Has Money Gone? (2012)

The Cooking the Books column from the May 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

In an article “The decline of money” (Weekly Worker, 9 March) Hillel Ticktin argues that money did not exist in the USSR, does not exist in China and that fiat money issued by governments even in the West isn’t really money.

Marx saw money as having two basic functions: (1) a medium of exchange or circulation, i.e. the means through which articles produced for sale get bought and sold; and (2) a measure of value, i.e. a common unit in which the value of articles produced for sale can be expressed as a price, and is thus a standard by which they can be compared.

“The natural form of money”, Ticktin writes, “would be a commodity that could itself be produced with labour-power and would therefore have its own value.” This was certainly the typical form of money in Marx’s day and the form he discussed the most. This money-commodity (usually gold or silver) does not have to circulate itself and be used for payments. It can be replaced in circulation by tokens, including paper ones issued by the government.

Marx identified two kinds of paper token money: tokens that were convertible on demand into a fixed amount of the money-commodity and tokens which were not. The former created no problem. The latter, however, could create a problem if they were issued in a greater amount than the amount of the money-commodity that would otherwise circulate. In this case, if they circulated alongside gold or silver, the value of the tokens would depreciate, i.e. they would buy less than their face-value. If they were the only currency (as is the case today) this would result in a rise in the general price level, i.e. in a change in the standard of price.

An inconvertible paper currency has to be managed by the government or some state institution such as a central bank which, to avoid depreciation or inflation, has to calculate the correct amount to issue. In Marx’s day the case where the only currency was paper token money was a hypothetical one which he only discussed in passing. He was rather sceptical that it would work, on the grounds that it would not be possible in practice for a government to get the amount right and so there would be no stable standard of price.

Marx scepticism proved to be misplaced. He was right that there was likely to be a changing standard of price, but not that capitalism would be unable to cope with this. It has, and in fact this has become the norm, with most governments aiming at a price level rising at 2-3 percent a year.

The difference between a money-commodity and paper money, says Ticktin, is “that paper money is issued by governments and controlled by governments. It is effectively a nationalised form of money. It is not a spontaneous form, as with gold.” That is so, but Ticktin goes on to claim that “this nationalised form means that money is not really money as we understood it. One cannot say that £1 is equal to so much abstract labour. It is decided by governments and whomsoever is actually dealing with the money supply.”

It may not be the form of money Marx knew, but it is still money. It is still the medium of exchange and still a measure of value and standard of price even if a changing one. Ticktin is concerned that this “nationalised money” is controlled by ruling class technocrats instead of democratically in the interests of the working class. As if it could be.

We want, like Marx, a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources and production directly to meet people’s needs instead of for sale and profit and where money would therefore be redundant.

Did Trotsky Point the Way to Socialism? (2009)

Two part video of a debate between Adam Buick of The Socialist Party and Hillel Ticktin, editor of the Critique Journal, from January of this year.

The debate took place in Hillhead Public Library in Glasgow on the question of 'Did Trotsky Point the Way to Socialism? Ticktin was arguing in the affirmative with Buick taking the opposing view:

Part 1

Part 2

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (79)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 79th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1426 friends!

Recent blogs:

Let’s make a real socialist revolution

What is Poverty?

The problem that never went away

Coming Events:

Saturday 10 January, 6pm
DID YOU ENJOY YOUR CHRISTMAS?
Speaker: Jim Lawrie
Socialist Party Head Office, 52 Clapham High St, London SW4 (nearest tube: Clapham North)

Tuesday 20 January, 8pm
WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THAILAND?
Chiswick Town Hall, Heathfield Terrace, W4.(nearest tube: Chiswick Park)

Wednesday 21 January, 8.30pm
BANKS, BOOM AND BURST.
Speaker: Vic Vanni
Community Central Halls, 304 Maryhill Road, Glasgow.

Saturday 24 January, 3pm to 5pm.
PUBLIC DEBATE: DID TROTSKY POINT THE WAY TO SOCIALISM?
Yes: Hillel Ticktin, editor of Critique; No: Adam Buick, Socialist Party.
Hillhead Public Library, Byres Road, Glasgow. (next to Hillhead subway)

Saturday 24 January, 12 noon to 4pm
EAST ANGLIAN REGIONAL BRANCH MEETING
12pm informal chat, 1pm meal, 2pm to 4pm Discussion
The Conservertory, back room of Rosary Tavern, Rosary Road, Norwich.

Monday 26 January, 8.30pm
‘IS A WORLD OF ABUNDANCE FEASIBLE?’
Unicorn, Church Street, Manchester City Centre.

Saturday 31 January, 6pm
Film: ZEITGEIST ADDENDUM
Socialist Party Head Office, 52 Clapham High St, London SW4.

Quote for the week:

"The first duty of society is to give each of its members the possibility of fulfilling his destiny. When it becomes incapable of performing this duty it must be transformed." Alexis Carrel (1873 - 1944), Reflections on Life, 1965.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain