This is hardly new. It has been around since at least the time of A.W. Phillips' study in the mid-50s in the UK that showed empirically a negative relationship between the unemployment rate and the rate of increase of wages, obviously reflecting the balance of power between workers and management at the bargaining table. That got turned into the "Phillips Curve" in 1958 by Samuelson and Solow, who replaced the rate of increase of wages with the inflation rate.
Such a mechanism can easily be seen to drive business cycles. Thus, in 1967 Richard Goodwin publishe a model using the mathematics of predator-prey models from ecology that showed business cycles being driven by oscillations along a Phillips Curve type relationship. Later theorists have shown that his model can generate chaotic dynamics.
And of course Marx well understood that capitalists want to have a reserve army of the unemployed out there to keep workers in line... Barkley Rosser On Thu, 19 Nov 1998 12:11:08 -0500 Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com> wrote:
> >The idea is that periods of rapid accumulation strengthen the working
> >class to the point where it is able to threaten profits--and continued
> >accumulation--through demands for higher wages as well as resistance on
> >the shopfloor, etc.-- what Doug glosses as "an attitude problem among the
> >workers." One of the main exponents of the idea that this is what's
> >responsible for the slowdown since 1973 is Andrew Glyn; if you want to get
> >a better handle on this stuff you could do a lot worse than pick up his
> >book Capitalism Since 1945.
> >
> >Josh
>
> It's also something that Dave Laibman, of "Science and Society", has
> argued. I heard him last year at the Brecht Forum speaking on his new book
> "CAPITALIST MACRODYNAMICS A SYSTEMATIC INTRODUCTION". He said that the
> problem for capitalism is that the working class has become too powerful in
> recent years, not the bourgeoisie. I had the feeling that he, like most
> value theorists, was arguing more from an abstract model than real life.
>
> Louis Proyect
>
> (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu