> Take, for example, the work of Glyn and Sutcliffe in England during
>the 70's-80's. These well intentioned leftist economists believe
>that you can tell a Marxist story by using conventional accounts.
>They observed that the English economy was stagnat due to a fall in
>the rate of profit(r). They defined r as total profits/capital
>advanced, p/k which can also be expressed as r=(p/y)/(k/y) where p/y
>is the profit to wage ratio (the profit share) and k/y the
>capital-output ratio. Since they observed that k/y was constant and
>the p/y ratio was falling, they attributed the fall in the rate of
>profit to what they called a profit-squeeze by labor. According to
>their story, the English labor movement was so strong that it was
>able to squeeze profits, re-distributing income toward!
[...but...]
>What was wrong with their story?
>Looking at the same period using Marxian accounts (like
>Shaikh/Tonak) it shows that the rate of surplus value increased
>throughout the period, ie. productive workers were exploited at an
>increasing rate.
Then why the hell were the employers so hot to bust the unions? Where did the political pressure for Thatcherism come from? Seems to me the bourgeois stats were exactly right, and the balance of class forces was against the employers in the British (and U.S.) 1970s. That reversed in the 1980s, though not as dramatically in Britain as it did in the U.S. Did the employing class, lacking access to the Shaikh/Tonak technique, not know how well off it was before Thatcher, Reagan, and Volcker?
Doug