[lbo-talk] Query: What does it mean for an Economy to 'work'?

[Arthur Maisel]

If the new payroll software issued the guys in the mailroom bigger
paychecks than the CEO, you can be sure that the IT person's defense that
the software was working fine---because "it's issuing checks, which *when
viewed in abstraction *is all that it's designed to do"---would not keep
her from being fired.

On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 2:30 PM, Eric Beck <ersatzdog at gmail.com> wrote:


> On Friday, September 27, 2013, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > Obviously, the capitalist economy (seen in abstraction from the
> 'interests'
> > of any one capitalist or any specified group of capitalists) has _always_
> > worked -- even during the Great Depression. For it to fail to work it
> (the
> > capitalist economy) would have to disappear, melt away, evaporate, and be
> > replaced by other social arrangements. There has _never_ been, so far,
> the
> > remotest possibility of that happening.
> >
> > The economy is working fine right now. It may be incredibly miserable for
> > several billion people, but the economy, as such, is just fine.
> >
>
> Sure, if you are thinking the capitalist economy means the continuation of
> the private accumulation of profit, then it's working. Seems like a pretty
> uninteresting and insufficient definition of capitalism to me, though. For
> one thing, that says nothing about the *rate* of exploitation, which is
> important to both individual capitalists and the "system" as a whole; for
> another, it says nothing about capital as a technique of social control;
> and there are other ways in which the economy is currently not working, or
> certainly not working ideally.
>
> I think you might be putting too much effort into parsing the talking
> points of politicians and journalists.
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