pre-Keynesian

Lawrence lawrence at krubner.com
Thu Aug 30 16:08:00 PDT 2001


From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>
> but also, more
> importantly, in the political sense, that of Kalecki's analysis of
> the impossibility of sustained full employment under capitalism. As
> he put it, if workers aren't under any meaningful threat of "the
> sack," they'll get to militant - they'll become unmanageable, their
> wages will rise, profits will fall, and all the lines of class
> authority will wither. That's the political point behind all the
> orthodox eocnomists' worry about NAIRU.

Well, the amount that capitalists spend on propaganda can vastly change the length of time a country can remain at full employment. Gramsci never said this, but it comes to close to some of his points. Japan had full employment for 30 years, from the early 60s to the early 90s. How? I got a clue about how that was accomplished from an article I read a few years ago in The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. The article focused on the coal strike (in Japan) in 1958, and its breakup in 1959. After that strike, the Japanese business class adopted a new tact, they began to spend lavishly on corporate promotion, team building, loyalty building, ie, all the forms of propaganda that might help keep workers docile. I read in Business Week a few years ago something about "And Japanese corporations still spend too much on their workers. They spend 6 times more than American companies on team building exercises and events." Of course, Business Week did not understand the politics involved, it simply felt Japanese companies were failing to cut useless costs. And perhaps Japan will need to follow a different course now. But they had a system that worked for a long time, full employment and no militancy (except for a brief stretch in the 70s).



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