>What stuff! Continuing declines in the rate at which real wages are
>increasing!! The best way to get the increase in the real wage at 1%
>(aside from admitting how much inflation has been downplayed) would be to
>push the unemployment rate down to 3%. Seriously! Perhaps the good news
>will push potential immigrants over the hump; the forbidding news will
>force capital to speed up its ability to relocate. The paradox of a
>declining official unemployment rate will be a further increase in the
>supply of available labor power and greater competition in the labor
>market. It's a new economy after all.
Not that new, no. 2% is still well above 0%. For the first time in 30 years, there have been sustained real wage increases across the entire distribution, and labor has won a few major battles. If Tom Dickens is watching, he can tell us what the Fed might make of this.
> > He's paid to do the long-range thinking for
> >capital, after all.
>
>They can think (maybe) but they can't plan. There is a fine essay by
>Gabriel Kolko in Science and Society from 1979 on the myth of the long term
>intelligence of the ruling class.
Was that about the time that Kolko was writing about the end of the American empire?
> In one of Poulantzas' most interesting
>chapters "The Myth of the Moloch State" in *State, Power and Socialism* he
>argues that the capitalist state's inability to enter into the hard core of
>the relations of production make long term planning impossible, reducing
>the state to ad hoc responses to crises the source of which it dimly
>understands.
The proof of the pudding... For a gang that can't plan state, they've won a lot of battles over the last 20 years. Where do you think the ideological and political offensive that began in the mid-1970s came from? It came from capitalist planning in think tanks and academia, long-term lobbying, etc. Deregulation, privatization, the end of welfare - these didn't just come out of the blue. Capital's intellectuals have been planning this for decades, and they've largely gotten the world they want - all without understanding the inner dynamic of the system!
By the way, I think they do understand the fundamental class issues at stake, even if they don't use Marxian vocabluary. Low unemployment and a generous welfare state bad for capital. Scared workers good for capital. Etc.
> >>It is easier for Greenspan to do this in the idiom of fighting wage led
> >>inflation than to openly admit that he is trying to ward off the greatest
> >>equity crash in history, which will bring the world economy down with it.
> >
> >
> >Why didn't 1987's crash do that?
>
>Because Japan had liquidity then?!
They've got liquidity now too - too much, in fact, relative to real investment outlets. 1987's crash didn't spread because Greepsan & Co. pumped liquidity & reasssurance into the system, doing exactly what some Marxists say is impossible, using the mechanism of the state to stem a crisis.
Doug