[lbo-talk] shorter hours or austerity and misery?

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Fri Oct 3 17:21:47 PDT 2014


Eugene Coyle: Three paragraphs from a long essay byAlan Nasser in today's Counterpunch: (professor emeritus of Political Economy and Philosophy at The Evergreen State College.)

"In what follows we'll see that less work with higher wages is at this historical juncture not merely economically possible, but desirable as the only practical alternative to the secular stagnation grimly forecast with much flurry by such luminaries as Paul Krugman, Larry Summers and Robert J. Gordon, and by the IMF in its April 2014 World Economic Outlook. Both Marx and Keynes saw their prescriptions as not merely a "better idea," but as the alternative to severe ongoing crisis, understood as dramatic reductions in real production, employment and wages.

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No one could abstractly disagree -- but the question is political, not economic.

In the final chapter of Wages, Price and Profit Marx (summing up) argues that capitalists will _always_ strive for lower wages, and only political struggle will blunt that drive.

There is no crisis; to see a crisis is to think in abstraction from capitalist reality. I would reserve the word "crisis" for the eruption of uncontainable working-class resistance, spilling over all "legal" bounds.

That is a crisis. Austerity, even austerity far worse than so far experienced, is not in itself a crisis.

Carrol



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