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
>
>
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