> >4. Could any govt loosen and spend without wage/price controls; is this
> >anything more than trying to get out of recession by increasing the rate
> >of exploitation and therewith the production and capitalization of
> >surplus value through machinations in the realm of circulation, i.e.,
> >letting the price level grow at a faster rate than the wage level?
>
> Since we're in a Keynesian mode, I'll turn Joan Robinson's assertion into a
> question - under capitalism, is it better to be exploited or not exploited?
Well it's not better (and perhaps not bearable) for the exploited to be more exploited, though it seems implicit in this argument that their pain would be more than compensated for by the pleasures the newly employed would enjoy. Were Keynes and Robinson Benthamite utilitarians? Perhaps the exploited proletariat should simply declare that interpersonal comparisons in utility are impossible and that Robbins was the titan of the proletariat of his time!
At any rate, Keynes argues in The General Theory: "It is true of course (owing to the fact of diminishing returns to an increase in the employment applied to a given capital equipment) that *any* increase in employment involves somes sacrifice of real income to those who were already employed." (p.81)
There is no empirical confirmation of this radical thesis--that periods of diminishing unemployment are perforce periods of declining real wages. And it seems that Keynes later changed his mind about this when confronted with empirical evidence.
Moreover, this is a false dilemma; there would not have been an increase in unemployment if there was more than the given capital equipment to work with--that is, if the rate of accumulation hadn't slowed down in the first place.
So Keynes is only prettifying what Grossmann discovered--that the resumption of accumulation requires a higher rate of exploitation, however accomplished . Of course since accumulation begins on an ever more centralized and capital intensive basis, only ever higher rates of exploitation will enable accumulation to be strong enough to absorb more of the industrial reserve army of labor. And still capital will not be able to absorb the unemployed.
Under capitalist social relations, an ever higher rate of exploitation will not stop the growth of the reserve army of labor or even violent cessations of accumulation during which the capital structure is reorganized and the profitability of the surviving capitals increased. Permanent and cyclical unemployment are permanent conditions of the proletariat, no matter the rate of exploitation it accepts. To disguise this is the work of a reactionary.
best, rakesh
ps. on the question from S&L asset sell offs, I remember an article in the WSJ from last year, suggesting that revenue was significant.
pps. I wasn't suggesting that Japan is an depression; only that the failure of fiscal policy may make people very depressed and help bring it on.
ppps to Barkley: so we didn't have right kind of Keynesianism, with real corporatist collective bargaining? That sounds like we didn't have the right kind of free markets with real deflationary monetary policy. Or India didn't have the right kind of colonial administrators, the jolly and profound ones of Rudyard Kipling's imagination.