Chaz: > The solution is both full-employment and shorter workweek with not cut in pay. They complement each other. Giving jobs to the unemployed would allow those already employed to have less onerous workdays. I have never heard of a Marxist or even left (maybe DSA dropped full employment) program that didn't call for both full employment (More Jobs) and a shorter workweek ( May Day !).<
this is a social democratic programme chaz. marxists would presumably acknowledge that, under capitalism, work is limitless, ie., that there is no fixed amount of labour which could be redistributed/shared in this way, but rather a system in which surplus labour is expanded. there are different ways this can be acheived, and with different consequences on working class livelihoods. but to assume that there is a set amount of work time if to forget the entire premise of the marxist critique of the wage and the social division of work time: that capitalism is interested in expanding surplus labour.
the reserve army is only effective from the perspective of capitalism if it is an active reserve army, through either enhancing competition between workers or engendering fear amongst workers of poverty. ie., it is only effective if unemployment equals poverty and marginalisation.
>Working class and left economists going back to Karl Marx have always
considered permanent mass unemployment one of the major socio-economic
problems with capitalism<
not at all. marx considered unemployment a problem _insofar_ as it registered impoverishment, a decrease in the proportion of the social product going to the working class, as a strategy for the growth of surplus labour and a mechanism of control of workers.
>Mass unemployment is a major and root cause of almost all important personal
and social ills : mass poverty, hunger, homelessness, urban crisis,
crimes, alcoholism , drug addiction, all around disease, lack of health care,
suicide, divorce, wife abuse, child abuse, etc.<
bring on durkheim - work as the social glue... next thing you know, you'll be arguing that labour camps are the way to cure 'society' of its ills...
>For example, the bourgeois press has itself has been attributing recent
drops in the crime rate among Black men to a drop in unemployment. The
implication is that unemployment is an important cause of crime.<
and you seem to belive the bourgeois take on the virtues of work, don't you? poverty makes it necessary for people to engage in the informal economies of drugs (etc), not unemployment; it is the equation between 'being in waged work' and being 'socialy useful' which makes it more likely that someone who is unemployed will reach for alcohol. note: that what is regarded as socially useful is whether or not you are making money, mostly for someone else.
>I have no doubt that the government economists and statisticians do not
intend the unemployment rate to measure human deprivation to the extent I am
pushing it.<
it's never been an intention. and, if you 'push it' you end up with an equation between poverty and unemployment that not only is wrong, given that what causes poverty is a low income (not whether it comes from welfare or an employer), but that makes work seem like the solution to poverty, which it plainly has never been. better me thinks to focus a struggle on the proportions going to the working class (whether in the form of wages or welfare) and those going off as profits. here at least we are not tempted by the national socialist 'solution' of forced labour, which your perspective remains enthralled by.
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but, on another related point: if prisoners increasingly work, then why would prisoners be counted in unemployment stats? wouldn't this mean they (the proportion of prisoners that do work) be counted as employed?
there has been a significant shift, not away from work, but toward forms of work which it doesn't take much to see are contraventions of the conventions on forced labour, like prison labour, workfare, and so on.
Angela --- rcollins at netlink.com.au