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On Fri, 25 Jun 1999 18:02:29 Doug Henwood wrote:
>Then why the hell were the employers so hot to bust the unions?
because the profit rate was falling, not due to labor's fantastic power to reverse the laws of motion of capital but due to capitalism's own working against itself. In their desperation to regain previous profitability levels and facing an increasing competitive scenario, the rate of exploitation of productive workers increased throughtout the whole period by any means necessary as it is always the case. Throught the whole period we also see an increasing rate in the organic composition of capital and in the productivity of labor, but of course that you can not see this if you identify the increasing organic composition of capital with the k/y ratio (which was constant during this time) given by conventional accounts. The only option you have from this narrow perspective is to locate the cause in the fall of r in the falling P/y (profit share)ratio driven by the observable p/w ratio, a profit-squeeze by labor. This works out great for capital because they can blame everything on labor once again, bust unions left and right, and since the statistics don't lie, this time they can do it not only with the approval of defenders of the system but also with people on the left (like you on the paragraph below) not able to deny that this attack is justified because it is part of the "class struggle". Sometimes labor wins, sometimes capitals wins and now is capital's turn.
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.
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