Oops, have I crossed the border into "unreasonable" Keynesianism? I missed the "you are now leaving" sign.
If it were true that an unemployment problem was ultimately solved by a war, that suggests to me that the problem is political, not economic. We simply need to agree that mass unemployment is just as much of an emergency as a foreign menace. Wasn't the GI Bill motivated in part by a desire to soak up labor after the war? Don't the Venezuelans also have a program whose purpose is (to put it crudely) to soak up labor? There is always stuff that needs to be done that's not being done. We always need more therapists, more teachers, more people to help others, even if we don't need more cars and steel. I think there ought to be an explicit or implicit government guarantee of employment for every "able-bodied person" (which in this context, is almost everyone, since most people can do something - who can't answer a phone, or watch over something, or keep someone company?) who wants to work. The government can employ people directly, and also rent them out to businesses like a temp agency. Is that Keynesian, or Marxist? 1 in 100 Americans is now in prison. What if we had given those folks jobs instead? We're paying for their housing, food, clothing and medical care anyway. Wouldn't we be better off if they were doing something useful instead? On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 3:19 AM, Patrick Bond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Robert Naiman wrote: > > Is there any case, in the last 100 years, when an industrial democracy > > has experienced anything like the Great Depression, without it being > > abetted by contractionary government policy? > > ...there is no danger of a "Great Depression" so long as you have > > reasonable government policy? > > But Bob, you're sounding unreasonably Keynesian. What's a Marxist > rebuttal? Maybe that with lubrication from the central bank, you can > displace these crises into new spheres of financial bubble-shifting > (which in effect is Bernanke's strategy), heightened uneven development > (the $'s decline being one major geographical feature of moving the > valorisation around), or inflation-inducing deficit spending... but > without addressing the underlying cause of the overaccumulation of > fictitious capital - which is in the overaccumulation of capital in the > productive sectors dating back some decades but intensifying with the > East Asian manufacturing boom of the 1990s-2000s - then you end up... > just like Japan since 1990: in slow-motion > depression/recession/stagnation for ages and ages. > > Would you agree: the Great Depression was "solved" by two processes: > first, war which wiped out vast amounts of economic deadwood and > artificially restoked US industrial production under conditions of > fordist planning, and second, restructured social/political relations > which gave capital the stability in terms of productive (labor-capital > social contracts) and financial/trade (Bretton Woods) systems, to assure > a new round of accumulation. > > And that sort of *resolution* isn't on the cards, as far as I can tell. > > Isn't that the sort of argument we need to stress, to distinguish > Marxist from garden-variety Keynesian riffs? I dunno, but would like to > hear your and others' viewpoints. > > > > > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
