What on earth do Robertson and Leumer mean? In
calling for militant unions they are not only
repeating Marx's worst forecasts about
revolutionary potential but the fact that
successful union strikes are becoming rarer from
year to year. Why? Because in this increasngly
interdependent age almost any strike hurts the
general public as much as the employers,
sometimes more so. For example, in the great coal
strike of 1984 when almost 200,000 miners downed
tools for 12 months, the public didn't support
them and, ultimately, a third of the miners
peeled away and formed a more sensible union. Two
months ago, when doctors voted to go on strike
against reforms of the National Health Service
(not involving reduction of their salaries nor
increases in their hours) they changed their
minds at the last minute when they realized that
half the doctors were ashamed of it and the
general public were already becoming very angry
about it. (A public service doctor working office
hours can easily earn US$250,000 p.a. and one who
will work in the evenings and week-ends can
easily earn US$750,000p.a. Surgeons [working in
normal hours] can easily earn twice as much as
this. Many of the general practice doctors who
work week-ends are doctors who come over from
Europe and then go back to their own practice on a Monday.)
Marx was a genius and had at least as many
brilliant insights as faux pas. He said that any
new productive process throws up groups or class
of individuals on either side of the new profits
-- some will,tend to receive them, others will
lose out. Let me take this one forward as he
might have done had he been able to look a
century ahead and glimpsed the versatility of
automation and the thousand or so jobs it is
destroying every day somewhere in the advanced
world. He'd have noticed that the bulk of
present jobs, which involve repetitive tasks will
one day disappear, leaving only a rump (what I
call the 20-class) of increasingly highly
educated, increasingly specialized. who actually
run the economy. They, too, will form
self-selecting enclaves around their
specialization but such would be their high level
of interdependence they won't be trying to
contend against one another as employers and
employees (as Marx imagined, as between
capitalists and the proletariat) because it would
destabilize the economy, but purely as merchants
exchanging their personal skills or their
material products with one another . There'd be
temporary surges in profits (that is, when prices
of this or that could be raised), and one
specialization would become more prosperous for a
while, as the software behind the automatic
machinery became more sophisticated and could use less energy.
Marx was a great believer in socialism and
believed that class conflict was the way to
achieve it. Unfortunately, attempts at socialism
so far have turned out to have nasty results
(think of the starvation and suffering of
millions of North Koreans at present). I'm a
believer in 95% socialism or indeed anything that
takes us a very long way from the present situation.
Keith
[email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Sid Shniad
Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2012 7:25 PM
To: undisclosed-recipients:
Subject: When Mainstream Economists Discover Karl Marx
<http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33291.htm>http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33291.htm
Information Clearing House December 11, 2012
When Mainstream Economists Discover Karl Marx
Paul Krugman Discovers Marx (and Misses the Point)
By Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer
In his recent
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/opinion/krugman-robots-and-robber-barons.html?hp>New
York Times op-ed piece, Princeton professor and
regular columnist for The New York Times Paul Krugman observed:
âThe American economy is still, by most
measures, deeply depressed. But corporate
profits are at record high. Itâs simple:
profits have surged as a share of national
income, while wages and other labor compensation
are down. The pie isnât growing the way it
should but capital is doing fine by grabbing
an ever-larger slice, at laborâs expense.â
And then he adds with almost shocked
incredulity: âWait are we really back to
talking about capital versus labor? Isnât that
an old-fashioned, almost Marxist sort of
discussion, out of date in our modern information economy?â
This is exactly the conflict that Marx
identified as the fundamental, inescapable
contradiction of the capitalist system that
would eventually create the conditions of its
downfall: there is a tendency for the owners of
businesses, the capitalists, to accumulate
ever-vaster wealth while the people who work for
them experience a declining standard of living.
Marx supported this conclusion by offering a
description of the fundamental operating
mechanism of capitalism. Capitalism is based on
the principle of private ownership and
competition. Private businesses compete with
one another for customers, and those who fail to
attract a sufficient number eventually perish.
But in order to attract customers, businesses
must maximize the quality of their product while
minimizing its price. If two products embody the
same quality but one is cheaper, customers, in
pursuit of their self-interest, will purchase
the cheaper version, all other factors being equal.
This means that capitalists must constantly
attempt to minimize the price of their product
simply for the sake of their own survival. If a
business devises a way to lower costs, it can
capture the market. But, as Marx pointed out,
labor costs are a huge factor in determining the
price of a product. So those businesses that
minimize labor costs can prevail in the
dog-eat-dog world of capitalism. For this
reason, a downward pressure on wages and
benefits is always operating to one degree or another.
But Krugman made no reference to this aspect of
Marxâs analysis and instead identified two
other factors that contribute to the growing
inequality in wealth between capitalists and
workers, both of which are discussed by Marx.
The first factor involves the introduction of
technology into the labor process, i.e.
âlabor-savingâ technology. In other words,
machines replace workers or reduce the amount of
skill required in the labor process. To give a
current example, software has been developed
that analyzes legal documents at a fraction of
the time it takes lawyers while costing much
less. Accordingly, many well-paid lawyers lose
their jobs to such software. Living during the
industrial age, Marx supplied many such examples.
Krugman referred to his second explanatory
factor that increases inequality between
capitalists and labor as the âmonopoly
powerâ of large corporations where
âincreasing business concentration could be an
important factor in stagnating demand for labor,
as corporations use their growing monopoly power
to raise prices without passing the gains on to
their employees.â Here Krugman is approaching the heart of Marxist theory.
Krugman is basically arguing that large
corporations use their power to override purely
economic trends and simply demand that their
employees work for less. But this is precisely
the point of Marxism, although from the other
direction. Marx persistently argued that
capitalism could not function without the
willingness of the working class to perform the
work. When workers organize and engage in
collective action by withholding their labor,
the balance of power shifts in favor of the
workers who can then demand higher wages as a
condition for their return to work, as the ILWU
(International Longshore and Warehouse Union)
recently did on the West Coast and the teachers did in Chicago.
Amazingly, Krugman never mentions the decline of
organized labor as a huge factor explaining the
decline of the standard of living of working
people, adding that there has been so little
discussion of these developments. But others,
especially former Secretary of Labor
<http://robertreich.org/>Robert Reich, have
discussed these trends and identified the decline of labor as a major factor.
In the 1930s when labor unions were tenaciously
fighting for working people, huge gains were
made in terms of salaries and benefits. They
conducted militant sit-down strikes and
mobilized tens of thousands of people from the
community to support laborâs struggles. Their
successes were to a large degree responsible for
the emergence of the so-called middle class that
thrived in the 1950s and 1960s.
Workers who are organized, acting both
collectively and forcefully, can change the
economic landscape. But once organized labor
becomes complacent and relaxes its guard and
ceases to struggle, the laws of capitalism
ineluctably grind down their gains and the
growing inequality returns until workers again rise up.
Marx argued that eventually workers would see
the futility of this repeating cycle, reject
capitalism altogether, and begin to construct a
socialist society built on entirely humanistic and democratic principles.
In
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/business/unionizing-at-the-low-end-of-the-pay-scale.html?pagewanted=all>a
recent New York Times article on unionizing
workers at the bottom of the pay scale, a union
organizer was quoted as saying, âWe must go
back to the strategies of nonviolent disruption
of the 1930s.â Currently organized labor is
all but dying out. Strikes are like an
endangered species. Rather than engaging in
militant struggles, union members are urged to
elect Democrats who then call on workers to accept sacrifices.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has called on
working people âto fight like hellâ to
resist cuts to Social Security and Medicare. But
these are just words. To this date, the unions
have failed to mobilize their members to stage
massive demonstrations across the country
against cuts to these popular social programs
demonstrations that could culminate in hundreds
of thousands of working people descending on
Washington, D.C. to make their demands clear to
the Obama administration and the rest of the
politicians. Without the unions taking the lead
in this struggle, there is little individual
workers will be able to accomplish. And if the
unions refuse to return to their more militant
roots but remain invisible, economists like Paul
Krugman will continue to ignore their existence
and overlook their current historic failure to defend working people.
Ann Robertson is a Lecturer at San Francisco
State University and a member of the California
Faculty Association. Bill Leumer is a member of
the International Brotherhood of Teamsters,
Local 853 (ret.). Both are writers for Workers
Action and may be reached at
<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected].
!DSPAM:2676,50c8cc0b25481622477788!
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