> I'm sympathetic to Eric's position, but I'm not sure I can fully defend
> it. The basic argument, which strikes me as at least plausible, is that
> full employment looked like a plausible demand during a period when
> Keynesian policies seemed to be working. The move away from Keynesian
> policies was a fairly conscious strategy by (some) capitalists, but this
> strategy was, I think, predicated on, or required by, a) technical
> changes that made things like global supply chains more successful and
> b) political action from groups who had been excluded from the benefits
> of these policies, which made the particular way the policies had been
> implemented up to that point politically impossible to maintain. So,
> what I'm wondering is, does a demand for full employment necessarily
> include a demand for a return to Keynesianism and, if it does, are
> Keynesian policies compatible with economic and political changes since
> the 70s?
I'm more familiar with the Australian history, and to a lesser extent, the British than the American. But I think the notion of a specifically Keynesian post-war boom, in the sense that Keynesian policies were responsible for the boom, needs some major revision. As SA said, this was a key argument of my doctoral thesis so I could go on far too long here. There was certainly a watershed in policy thinking and strategy consolidated by WWII, but in postwar conditions macro policy was deployed for restraint as much as for stimulus. There never was a commitment to full employment in the US in the 1950s. It was really only in the 1960s, with the Democratic presidents being advised by the likes of Paul Samuelson, that rhetoric changed, and here it was the idea that you could trade off a certain amount of inflation for unemployment. (The Phillips curve was associated with the left in the US, where it suggested lower unemployment could be sustainable, and the right in the UK and Australia, where it suggested more unemployment was called for.)
In the UK and Australia, as signalled by the Beveridge Report and the White Paper on Full Employment respectively, there was a genuine commitment at the end of the war to maintain full employment. But from 1945, and especially from the Korean War boom, the central macro problem turned out to be inflation and too much private demand rather than too little. Rapid inflation relative to the US (to whose currency they were tied) meant they faced a chronic tendency to balance-of-payments crises and thus the macropolicy instruments were repeatedly forced to restrain demand rather than boost it. Full employment was really mostly generated by rapid private expansion. The policy difference from the pre-Depression period was not so much that fiscal and monetary policy were continually used to bolster demand, but that there was no need for doses of outright deflation, because of 'creeping inflation' in the US, to whose dollar everyone else was tied. Technically the US dollar was tied to gold, but the tie was stretched until it finally snapped in 1971.
I think we are all in agreement that the conditions that made full employment possible are not all under the control of the state. It depended on rapid productivity growth such that worker expectations could be met without undermining profitability. Those conditions ended in the 1970s. But I'm not sure about the idea that it depended on excluding people from the labour market or on the repression of the Third World. (Not sure if this is what you are suggesting.) Again, my position is not that full employment could be easily reached by different policy settings, although I do think it is an open question whether the 'natural rate' could be pushed down significantly. My argument is rather that it is a worthwhile demand for a radical movement precisely because it is not obvious to people why policy is devoted (in good macro times, not now) to taming wage growth by targeting an unemployment rate above full employment - a demand for full employment exposes some contradictions, as they say.
>
> (As may be apparent, I'm sort of handwaving in the direction of a
> Regulation School analysis here).
The thing I like about the regulation school is the breakdown of the political-economic sphere into a number of relatively autonomous elements. But I think this is wasted when they are all put back together again into an artificial totality like 'Fordism' or 'post-Fordism' - with the argument that capitalism develops in discrete stages. (Same problem with 'neoliberalism'. This is less of a problem with Aglietta and the original regulationists, but 'Fordism' and 'post-Fordism' is what it's been reduced to.
> Yeah, I really disliked the "jobs for all" demand when I first saw it,
> but that may have partly been an ultra-leftist allergy to anything that
> looks like workerism. I like the way the proposal talks about public
> works programs as a way of providing universal access to public goods,
> which cuts against a possible interpretation of "jobs for all" as a
> moralization of the value of work for its own sake, and mentioning
> working hours would go further in that direction. A basic income demand
> would be good, too, but I'm not sure how to phrase an argument for that
> which fits with a demand for full employment.
You know, I don't think we're all that far apart on this. I just think it's important to make the distinction between 'full employment' the labour market condition and the demand that everyone does a 9-5 40-hour week. Workforce participation was significantly lower in the full employment period, after all.
Mike