I agree with Paul Phillips that NAIRU/NRU makes favourable institutional
change seem unacceptable. I just don't happen to believe that the ascendancy
of NAIRU/NRU was inevitable and I don't believe it's now invulnerable. None
of this is at all unfortunate for my position. My position is that the left
hasn't really challenged NAIRU/NRU with something fundamentally different
and effective.
Here comes the broken record part: all this talk about inflation and wages
and social wages and social safety nets goes around in circles. It is way of
talking founded on the false claim that exchange relations are central to
economic life. It's not necessary to accept such a dogma, nor is it
particularly unheard of to explicitly reject the dogma. Marx did a credible
job of rejecting it in Chapter 1 of Capital -- you know, the bit about the
commodity fetish making relations between people appear as if they are
relations between things. But if you want to insist that economic relations
are relations between things and not people (and I'm not saying that you,
Paul, are insisting any such thing), then NAIRU/NRU is probably as good a
way as any to explain such a fetishized economy. (I wouldn't say for certain
because I don't want to get bogged down in metaphysics).
How do you move away from talking fetish about inflation, wages, supply,
demand, etc.? Well, you can look at the relations of production (I'm not
coining a phrase here, y'know) and the production of surplus value. Here we
find, or Marx finds, an astonishing peculiarity of capitalism: that labour
power is the only commodity whose use value produces value. No matter how
you slice it, at this point in the analysis the focus has to shift from
VALUE (which, at any rate, is always relative) to TIME which is the stuff in
which life is lived OR NOT LIVED. In other words, the "class struggle" can
only ever be about control over the disposal of the workers' TIME.
>I beg to differ with Tom Walker but not with the basic point he
>makes -- that there is a need to modify, change, update etc. our
>institutions to keep up with social and technological change. If
>he looks carefully at what I said,however, it was to emphasize that
>the verticle Phillips curve acceptance (and the causes for it) clears
>the way for the neo-lib agenda which, in the absenc e of alternative
>institutional change only serves to hurt labour for the benefit of
>capital. Unfortunately for Tom's position, the Nairu/NRU analysis
>is based on neo-lib assumptions which makes favourable institutional
>change outside the pall of acceptable policy solutions.
>
>Paul Phillips,
>Economics,
>University of Manitoba
Regards,
Tom Walker
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