> On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 6:23 PM, Mike Beggs<mikejbeggs at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I don't see what's so difficult about it. In conditions of full
>> employment we have something more than bravado with which to resist
>> the shittiness of jobs, because you're not tied to any one in
>> particular - it's easier to move around and firms are more desperate
>> for your labour, so wages tend to rise faster, so you can spend less
>> time working if you like. Full employment conditions make us freer
>> from work, in a way that bluster doesn't.
> Nonsense. The times of full employment in the last century have been
> world war and something as bad, society-wide unpaid reproductive labor
> and unimaginable exploitation in the periphery. It made *some* people
> freer while the rest paid for it horribly. I can't imagine demanding a
> return to that.
>
>> For these reasons, I don't think full employment is sustainable for
>> capitalism in the long run, which is why an awful lot of macro-policy
>> effort goes into cooling things off should the economy threaten to get
>> there.
> I agree that it's not sustainable, but not for the administrative
> reasons you name. It's unsustainable because the forces that made it
> possible aren't willing to allow it to happen again. And thank god for
> that.
Eric - please think about this. What you're saying is that we're better off in (a) a situation where everybody needs a job to live but millions of people can't find jobs; than in (b) a situation where everyone needs a job to live and everyone who wants a job can easily get one.
This is not a false binary. This *is* the choice that the question full employment poses.
Maybe we're not all on the same page about what "full employment" means. It does *not* mean everybody works. It does not mean maximizing the number of people in the labor market. It means that everybody who *wants* a job can find a job with relative ease.
As for your claim that the powers that be "aren't willing" to allow it - does that mean you're only in favor of demands that the authorities will willingly grant???
SA