Bush To Propose $3b For Workers

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sun Oct 7 04:02:04 PDT 2001


On Thu, 4 Oct 2001, Michael Perelman wrote:


> This is a short section from my book: Transcending the Economy
>
> Lessons from Germany on Inequality and War

Michael, doesn't the beginning of this passage contradict the end? The first paragraph says:


> A recent collection of essays, comparing the experience of London,
> Paris, and Berlin during World War I, suggests that, at least in part,
> Germany lost that war because the German government was less able than
> either France or Britain to persuade its people that it was acting
> fairly (see Winter and Robert 1997; especially, Bonzon 1997, p. 302;
> and Triebel 1997).

And the last paragraph says:


> Gabriel Kolko, a renowned professor of history at York University in
> Toronto, noted that German workers did not recover their 1913 level of
> wages until 1928. The Nazis realized that they could not pursue their
> program of military conquest, if they repeated the mistakes of World
> War I and undermined social solidarity by intensifying inequality.
> In Kolko's words: "Forced to choose, the Nazis ... preferred to risk
> depriving the war effort to possibly alienating the workers and seeing
> them driven once again to political action in various forms, including
> slowdowns and sabotage." So, in World War II, Hitler protected wages.
> As a result, "Real weekly income in Germany grew dramatically from
> 1932 to 1941, and even in 1944 it was only slightly less than it had
> been at its peak 1941" (Kolko 1990, p. xvii).

__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com



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