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

[Charles Brown]

On Fri, Oct 3, 2014 at 8:21 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> 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.
>
> ------------
>
> 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
>
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

CB. The epidemic of desperate political actions and declarations by
Republicans means that a major section of the bourgeoisie feels a
political crisis. It approaches part of Lenin's definition of a
revolutionary situation: the ruling class no longer can rule in the
same way.  For some reason, the sections of the bourgeoisie
represented by the Republican Party do not feel that they can continue
to adhere to the laws and customs of US bourgeois democracy as it has
been practiced for the last 100 years or so. The Republicans are
elevating the Legislative branches over the Executive
unconstitutionally and rudely in terms of American political custom.