My "readers' pick" comment (73 recommend): [Henwood:]"Raising the incomes of the bottom 90 percent of the population through higher wages and public spending initiatives -- stifled since Reagan starting putting the squeeze on them -- could change that. But the stockholding class has resisted that, and they have a lot of political power."
And just where do they get that power? As Marx pointed out, every day the working class goes off to work and generates "surplus value" from their superfluously-long working day. Yes, "superfluous" was Marx's word for the exploitive long hours. But don't just take Marx's word for it. Thorstein Veblen pointed out nearly 100 years ago in "The Engineers and the Price System" that business enterprises sabotaged production in order to maximize their profits. Veblen used the word "sabotage." And Michal Kalecki pointed out 70 years ago in "The Political Aspects of Full Employment" that financiers and industrialists oppose full-employment government spending because it undermines the myth of "investor confidence" as the harbinger of prosperity. And now we have Thomas Piketty tell us that "r>g" -- that is the rate of return on capital is greater than the economic growth rate. But, hey, Marx, Veblen and Kalecki told us WHY that would happen. Isn't it about time we looked into what they wrote? On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 5:53 AM, Doug Henwood <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Mar 31, 2014, at 6:31 PM, Charlie <[email protected]> wrote: > > > It reads like the theory that wages squeezed profits, causing the 1973 > > recession and subsequent stagflation. Now, after the capitalists have > > pushed the pendulum hard to the right, the need is to restore workers' > > consumption. The implication is that capitalism has a sweet spot in the > > middle, somehow combining adequate exploitation hence healthy profits > > with reasonably good times for workers. > > > > Is this not the implied theory? > > I was writing for the NYT, not Workers Vanguard. > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > -- Cheers, Tom Walker (Sandwichman)
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