Sandwichman — The Political Economy of the Working Class

Karl Marx chronicled and contributed to the political economy of the working class. He did not invent, conclude or supersede it.

He did not invent, conclude or supersede it. In his Inaugural Address to the International Working Men’s Association, Marx celebrated the first victory of the political economy of the working class, the passage, in 1847, of the Ten Hours' Bill:

This struggle about the legal restriction of the hours of labor raged the more fiercely since, apart from frightened avarice, it told indeed upon the great contest between the blind rule of the supply and demand laws which form the political economy of the middle class, and social production controlled by social foresight, which forms the political economy of the working class. Hence the Ten Hours’ Bill was not only a great practical success; it was the victory of a principle; it was the first time that in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class.

This passage tells us what we most need to know about the political economy of the working class. It is founded upon "social production controlled by social foresight" in opposition to "the blind rule of supply and demand laws." The "most notorious organs of science" had predicted and "proved" that "any legal restriction of the hours of labor must sound the death knell of British industry" and, of course, they were subsequently proved absolutely wrong. Not 'merely' wrong, but the exact opposite of apposite....

Econospeak

The Political Economy of the Working Class

Sandwichman

Sharan Burrow — Pay people a decent wage. The economy can afford it

The rules of the global economy are rigged against those who have to work to earn a living, and in favour of multinational corporations and the ultra-rich.

It is no accident that, as Oxfam has revealed, the richest 1% own more wealth than the rest of humanity combined. This is inequality by design. The world is facing a huge decent work deficit, and the rules of the global economy need to change.

The just-so story of economic liberalism is that economics is a natural science and economics outcomes are determined by natural processes to the degree that governments do not interfere. Let to itself,  the economy will deliver optimal growth and just deserts for all based on their respective contribution.

The reality is that governments are here to stay. and the rules get written by whoever controls them.

Neoliberalism is based on the just-so story of economic liberalism being the natural state, while using social class, political power and economic wealth to capture governments and write rules favorable to capital (asset ownership) that disadvantage labor (people) and land (the environment).

 

World Economic Forum
Pay people a decent wage. The economy can afford it
Sharan Burrow | General Secretary, International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC)

David F. Ruccio — Inequality and immiseration

"Immiseration" has a nice quality to it and is less emotionally loaded than "exploitation," which is now associated with "Marxism" in the pejorative sense in capitalist countries like the US.

It’s clear that, for decades now, American workers have been falling further and further behind. And there’s simply no justification for this sorry state of affairs—nothing that can rationalize or excuse the growing gap between the majority of people who work for a living and the tiny group at the top.

But that doesn’t stop mainstream economists from trying...

Are mainstream economists capitalist shills or are they just clueless about reality? Or maybe both.

American workers are getting relatively less of what they produce, which means more is available to distribute to those at the top of the distribution of income.

That’s what mainstream economists can’t or won’t understand: that workers may be worse off even as their wages and incomes rise. That problem flies in the face of every attempt to celebrate the existing order by claiming “just deserts.”

There’s nothing just about the relative immiseration and growing inequality faced by American workers. And nothing that can’t be changed by imagining and creating a radically different set of economic institutions.

Economists operate in terms of the institutional status quo and those stepping out of line are marginalized a "heterodox," or "Marxist." The economics department at Notre Dame, where David Ruccio taught for many years, was recently reorganized to diminish if not entirely excluded heterodox teaching. This is also an institutional problem and it is closely connected with the larger institutional issues in which contemporary capitalism is embedded and imposed on workers (labor) and the environment (land).

The economics profession needs to be address these issues to remain credible.

 

Occasional Links & Commentary
Inequality and immiseration
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

David F. Ruccio — Technology, employment, and distribution

I can make the case that things would be much better if the adoption of new technologies did in fact displace a large number of labor hours. Then, the decreasing amount of labor that needed to be performed could be spread among all workers, thus lessening the need for everyone to work as many hours as they do today.

But that would require a radically different set of economic institutions, one in which people were not forced to have the freedom to sell their ability to work to someone else. However, that’s not a world Autor and Salomons—or mainstream economists generally—can ever imagine let alone work to create.

Technological innovation increases the potential to substitute leisure for work, but that is ruled out institutionally and operationally in a capitalist system operated on wage labor. Rather than increasing leisure the gain from increased productivity goes to owners of technology and technology workers. This puts downward pressure on other workers and increases unemployment in less desirable work. The result is increasing inequality and social dysfunction.

Occasional Links & Commentary
Technology, employment, and distribution
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

Ian Welsh — Capitalism and Good Post-Capitalism

Ian reflects on the forced transition from feudalism to capitalism through enclosure and urbanization, and what the transition to post-capitalism needs to involve. At least, the peasants, serfs, and tenant farmers were self-sufficient under feudalism. Under capitalism they became wage serfs and debt slaves. Post capitalism is about fixing that.

Ian Welsh
Capitalism and Good Post-Capitalism

Capitalism and Slavery — Alex Gourevitch interviews Greg Grandin

Interesting article of the evolution of liberalism as a social, political, and economic theory out of slavery, including wage slavery. Liberalism is work in progress. Humanity has come a long way, and still has a long way to go before realizing the ideal of liberalism, if that is even possible practically.

Capitalism is, among other things, a massive process of ego formation, the creation of modern selves, the illusion of individual autonomy, the cultivation of distinction and preference, the idea that individuals had their own moral conscience, based on individual reason and virtue. The wealth created by slavery generalized these ideals, allowing more and more people, mostly men, to imagine themselves as autonomous and integral beings, with inherent rights and self-interests not subject to the jurisdiction of others. Slavery was central to this process not just for the wealth the system created but because slaves were physical and emotional examples of what free men were not.

But there is more. That process of individuation creates a schism between inner and outer, in which self-interest, self-cultivation, and personal moral authority drive a wedge between seeming and being. Hence you have the emergence of metaphysicians like Melville, Emerson, and of course Marx, along with others, trying to figure out the relationship between depth and surface.

Enslaved peoples multiplied the fetish power of capital at least fivefold: they were labor, they were commodities, they were capital, collateral, and investment, they were consumers (since in many parts of South America, they were paid wages), and, in some areas, they were money, the standard on which the value of other goods was determined. They were also items of conspicuous consumption.…

There are numerous figures who affirm the value of freedom, the right of self-government, and at least some of whom will go on to engage in republican revolution against colonial domination. Yet these same individuals show little to no sympathy for the slaves, or even participate in their re-enslavement.…

That contradiction was the structuring contradiction of the day (and still is, no?). Spanish-American merchants wanted “more liberty,” and they defined liberty as their right to buy and sell humans as they would. In the United States, Kentucky’s 1850 “bill of rights” stated that the “right of an owner of a slave to such a slave, and its increase, is the same, and as inviolable as the right of the owner of any property whatever.”…

Others have made this point, including David Brion Davis, that the struggle over slavery, both for and against, had the effect of reifying slavery as the supreme evil, and reifying freedom — defined as the absence of formal slavery — as the supreme good. The issue is complex, obviously, since for enslaved peoples slavery was indeed the absolute evil, and they valued political freedom as a supreme good. And there were many abolitionists who viewed chattel slavery within a broader spectrum of exploitation, including wage slavery, that needed to be abolished. And I know that scholars of the US have shown that conceptions of US citizenship, and freedom, are layered, complex, and contradictory.

Still, as someone who has worked primarily on Latin America, I can’t help but compare that region’s deep tradition of social rights to the US’s antipathy to those rights, at least among a mobilized and consequential sector of the US public.

Take, for instance, Rand Paul’s recent comment that to believe in the right to health care is to believe in the right to slavery. It seems fairly clear to me that the Right’s inability to escape the rhetoric of slavery, its insistence on framing all political debate within the absolutist antinomy of freedom and slavery, and to assail not even social rights but even the idea of public policy as a form of enslavement, has something to do with the history of slavery in America. 

The cult of white supremacy that grew out of that history evolved into today’s cult of individual supremacy. Paul’s statement would be totally incomprehensible to most people in Latin America, indeed the world, as silly as anything that came out of Alice’s mouth: “If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary-wise; what is it wouldn’t be, and what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?” The problem is that the US has had a world of its own, so the idiocy of white supremacy, and its progeny, individual supremacy, is perpetuated.

Jacobin
Capitalism and Slavery: An Interview with Greg Grandin

Alex Gourevitch, assistant professor of political science in the Department of Political Science, Brown University interviews Greg Grandin, professor of history at New York University

David F. Ruccio — Maximum wage—or, even better, no wages

The time is ripe to open up the debate about proposals like establishing a maximum wage, guaranteeing a basic income, and prohibiting any and all forms of wage-labor. The only price of admission is to listen to the howling of mainstream economists.

Real-World Economics Review Blog
Maximum wage—or, even better, no wages

David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

Filip Spagnoli — Let’s Get Rid of Wage Labor

Post-capitalism.

Actually, as Daniel Ellerman addresses this in Does Classical Liberalism Imply Democracy? If life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights, ruling out selling oneself in to slavery, for example, how is it not a violation of an inalienable right to sell one's a portion of one's life for a wage since this is an alienation of one's liberty?

In other words, what the inalienable rights of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness means legally is that these are not property, which is a right that is alienable in that the right to exclusive or partial use of property can be exchanged, thereby alienating (excluding) the original owner from use and conferring exclusive or partial use to another through transfer of ownership.

Spagnoli's post may seem far-fetched but read in terms of Ellerman, who is a proponent of social democracy, it makes a lot more sense. No surprise there, since Ellerman is one of the smartest guys around. If you haven't yet read that article, I strongly suggest doing so as a counter to neoliberalism.

Incidentally, the irony of the phrase. "inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," as a partial enumeration of human rights, and which are also asserted as divinely endowed, is the hypocrisy of its author, a slave holder.

P.A.P.-BLOG // HUMAN RIGHTS ETC.
Let’s Get Rid of Wage Labor
Filip Spagnoli

(h/t Mark Thoma at Economist's View)

Matias Vernengo — What makes capitalism capitalism?

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Naked Keynesianism

What makes capitalism capitalism?

Matias Vernengo