Trotsky's support of the Gold Standard

books.google.com/books?id=1O63BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA128&lpg=PA128&dq=trotsky gold standard&source=bl&ots=F8MJ7Nv-L4&sig=MsErwNhVu1R_99ew1mzAY--mURg&hl=nl&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj4r5e96pffAhUzOn0KHfqCB0wQ6AEwBXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=trotsky gold standard&f=false

Trotsky wanted the Gold Standard until Communism is reached.

Was he right or wrong? IIRC the reason that the USSR fell was because they had their currency tied to the oil, not the massive deficit spending that Reagan did.

Attached: AnCap Communism.png (1200x800, 57.87K)

It is a good idea but it relies other countries to play your game. The USSR relying on the gold standard was causing the Holodomor because the British rejected the gold-backed currency and demanded grain instead. If there was a new Breton Woods and the gold standard is made global again it's definitely worth it.

shouldn't currency be backed by something society always benefits from, like electricity or something?

Lol who says this?

Their "currency" was tied to what the government decided the price of goods should be. You weren't allowed to buy other currencies with it. They got foreign reserves by selling oil but what does that have to do with the collapse? It wasn't a small island dependent on imports.

The USSR collapsed because powerful people wanted it to, and people didn't fight to keep it alive because it sucked and they weren't aware of how bad things were gonna get.

Then developing cheap renewable power would create massive inflation lol.

Why set your currency to anything?

He was both right and wrong. He was wrong because gold as the money commodity is merely an expression of abstract labor power, however, under socialism concrete labor power can be expressed directly without the intermediary that’s necessary under capitalism.

He was right in the sense that as long as you have capitalism you need a money commodity and, of course, as long as the capitalist world exists you might have to trade with this world. So, a gold backed for currency is not a bad idea for foreign exchange but it is superfluous domestically

Pegging your currency on anything is fucking retarded. It greatly hinders your ability as a society to manoeuvre capital and labour within a monetary market system.

the benefit of tying your currency to the value of some commodity is that gives everyone a common measure to use. this is why capitalist countries originally used commodity-money that was redeemable for X quantity of gold or silver. It connected paper money and bank notes to the "real world" of commodity production.

pretty much this.

I'd argue that the US dollar is still tied to gold, but not in a fixed relationship. We can still observe banks hoarding gold.
If money wasn't tied to anything it wouldn't have any value and inflation wouldn't be a thing.

It's short sighted.

Trotskyism really is just pic related social democracy. Like I get what Colonel Sanders was going for there. A far less divided wealth gap via a finite currency pool keeping everyone roughly middle class and circular flow of demand and commerce. There's just two problems

1: Capital does not exist in a vacuum and trade will go on internationally

2: America is proof you don't need the government to instate a fiat currency that can fluctuate on the global market and be an elaborate trust fund. That's the natural end result of capitalism. Gold turned into bank notes, bank notes turned into digits.

Attached: 596d4e431ac3e.jpeg (500x358, 48.77K)