Bill L writes: > >Wouldn't the foundation of this be full employment policies, say, as >proposed by Jamie Galbraith?
But what if the available full employment policy is the export of unemployment? galbraith has got his accomodating fed but deficits perhaps only 1/5th as big as he would like. If we begin with capital as a global relation, then we can enquire into the size of the global reserve army of labor and surplus population as they are products of on-going primitive accumulations, the concentration and centralization of capital on a global scale, and the slow down in the rate of accumulation (remember there are no nation states in Marx's theory; he begins with capital as a global social relation purified of any relation with any non capitalist mode of production); then going from the macro to the micro or from the more abstract to the more concrete we can investigate whether these populations are non randomly distributed across nations (just as long term unemployment is non randomly distributed according to race in the US). And then we can make the determination of whether a national employment policy is solving the problem (e.g., taxing capital for the expansion of good public sector employment as Mat F often recommends) or just pushing it on to others. That is, making sure that the losses fall as much as possible on the other. That is, "we" eliminate their excess capacity, not "ours" or "our" firms abroad are allowed to circumvent local content rules and the like but we don't accept "their" competitive imports or "their" non competitive imports if they don't use say "our" fibre; or "we" silently benefit from the capital inflow that "we" enjoy while "we" wail about how much "aid" we imagine that we give to "them." The problem of course is that a working class which is imprisoned by these us/them terms may not be able to protect itself in the long term. Rakesh
