>>> "rc-am" <rcollins at netlink.com.au> 06/19/99 02:37AM >>>
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.
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Chas.: in the sense that important early Marxist parties were social democratic parties, as in Germany and Russia.
What's your program again ?
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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.
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Charles: Not really. It is to remember all the fundamentals of Marxism and to have a maximum and minimum program, which means that Marxists advocate reform measures as well revolution,else they become ultra-leftists.
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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.
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Charles: This doesn't contradict what I said. To deny a significant correlation between poverty and unemployment seems very strange.
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>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.
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Charles: You say "not at all" and then don't contradict what I said. What you say here repeats and supports my argument.
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>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...
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Charles: "Social glue" is your misinterpretation. In a wage-labor system, most people must get a job to live. Capitalism took away the peasants' small means of production, such that proletarians must sell their labor power the capitalist to make a living. Marx not Durkheim. It is your confusion not my argument that leads to forced labor camps.
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>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?
Charles: No. That's Marx I'm following: 'From each according to ability, to each according to WORK" is not from the bourgeoisie. but Marx, lui-meme. You are "conflating" Marx's concepts of the role of useful labor in society in general and the need for a job in a wage-labor system with the Protestant ethic or work ethic. It is not work as a "virtue", but labor as the source of use values in society. See _Capital_ Chapter VII, on the labor process.
Marx's approach on this , as with bourgeois political rights, does have the clever side-effect of showing that the bourgeois cannot live up to their own virtues. If the bourgeois say work is a "virtue", Marx says, well the working class is doing the work , not the bourgeoisie.
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poverty makes it necessary for people to engage in the informal economies of drugs (etc), not unemployment;
Charles: And in a wage-labor system, unemployment is a main cause of poverty.The causal chain is obviously a little more complicated than the way you chop it off and look at only one loop.
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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.
Charles: The equation exists in fact, thus, there is a causal link in fact. You seem to be attributing a kind of futuristic consciousness to most people that they don't actually have now. Yes, most people living now connect "socially useful activity" with having a job.
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>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.
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Charles: It has certainly been Marxists' intention.
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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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Charles: "Enthralled by" is your distorted projection onto my argument. Repeating again and again that my perspective leads to forced labor doesn't make it so. The allusion to "national socialist 'solution' of forced labor" is a vicious slander. I'll think of a cut to get you back for that one.
That there is no connection between poverty and unemployment is pretty obviously false. Of course, there are working poor too. Demanding full employment does not contradict demanding decent wages . Nor does it contradict demanding jobs or income, as the Constitutional Amendment I showed you does.
I don't think I have seen your program , have I ?
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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?
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Charles: Probably by YOUR logic (not mine) , since you think advocating work for workers leads to forced labor camps.
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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.
Charles: Your idea that this is what Marxists mean by full employment is so out of it it isn't funny.
CB