Archive for Breadth

How Labour and the Trade Unions Destroyed the Construction Industry’s Marxist Utopia

February 6, 2012 jonathanbishop 2 comments

Pre-2007 many workers in the construction industry of which I was part were de-facto Marxists – they were self-employed and could decide when they worked and when they didn’t, and how much they were willing to work for and which they wouldn’t.

But then at the request of the trade unions, the Labour Government forced nearly all these workers to become employed by the private firms. In effect, they were working against the Marxist ideal of the workers controlling their own lives without being dictated to by business owners, by forcing them onto employment contracts that meant private business owners had more say over their working terms and conditions than before! Whereas before they could take a holiday whenever they wanted, now they had to do it whenever it was best for the firm. They may have had more employment rights, but this was at the sacrifice of other perks, like having allowable expenses and paying a flat 20% tax. So, a Labour Government in effect, in order to please the unions and get a few more bucks for the tax man, took the dreams of its party’s founders, of an end to domination of people’s lives by big capitalist firms, and replaced it with further domination by capitalist firms by taking away the rights of workers to withdraw their labour on their terms without having to ballot a trade union for the right to do so.

Any Marxist sympathisers who would rather willingly work for someone else’s private firm than set up their own on either a self-employed or sole-shareholder limited company basis therefore, is too much talk and not enough action. How exactly do they expect capitalism and the state to fall if they are each day of their working lives sucking their metaphorical teet?!

Any socialist who willingly works for a private firm that they or their family don’t own are capitalist sell-outs also. If they truly believed in their ideology they would do what I have done:

Take control of the means of production, distribution and exchange by becoming self-employed and the sole shareholder of their own firm, while co-operating with others through mutually owned co-operatives.

It seems to me on most issues, the people who claim to believe that the workers should own the means of production, distribution an exchange, are all too happy  for the status quo of a government, trade union, and big business oligopoly to continue rather than take the risk of going it alone as Marx envisaged.

Bestowal, Boundlessness, Breadth, The Official Weblog of Jonathan Bishop

Why fiscal union won’t work in the Eurozone

November 13, 2011 jonathanbishop No comments

Every man and his dog old premier are now patting the Eurozone leaders on the back for coming up with the idea of ‘fiscal union’ for the Eurozone. This was something that was opposed under both Thatcher and Blair, even with strong pressure from the rest of the EU.

Having fiscal union makes no sense at all. Fiscal union basically means that all the ways in which the government can influence demand and inflation, such as taxes, interest rates, money supply, are the same across the whole of the EU.

The reason we are in the crisis we are in is because countries like Greece, not only being economically unstable, suffered high inflation when joining the Eurozone, and the single interest rate meant it’s economy was growing and contracting at a different rate to the rest of the Eurozone due to lack of ability of its government to influence money supply because it couldn’t keep to the ‘growth and stability pact’.

I think that the single interest rate is however important – it sets a ‘base-line’ for which all the EU counties and their inter-country regions can work towards in order to converge their local economies with the rest of the EU over the long-term.

I believe, as I have for nearly 10 years that fiscal policy needs to be set at a regional level and not a national one, so certainly not at a supranational EU-wide level.

One just needs to look at the UK to see why this should be the case. Because fiscal policy in the UK is based around what is good for the South East of England, then this is making it difficult for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to grow their economies. If however the economies of these countries were run on the basis that their local tax policies were for the purpose of adjusting taxes to take account of the single interest rate, then there would be greater economic convergence over a longer period which would bring economic benefits to the regions in terms of equal prosperity in terms of wages, lifestyles and goods prices.

A policy moving towards harmonisation of fiscal policy for the whole of the Eurozone without first achieving economic convergence will only make problems worse. This is because a single fiscal policy could only ever work if each part of the Eurozone economy was fully converged. As we know the economies in Greece, Germany, France and Italy are so different that centralising fiscal union rather than decentralising it further will only make matters worse.

Breadth, Economic, Law, Socio-legal, The Official Weblog of Jonathan Bishop