Doug advises higher wages and public spending. He also writes in historical explanation of how we got here: "go back to the 1970s. Corporate profitability ... had fallen sharply off its mid-1960s highs. ... After three decades of seemingly endless prosperity, workers had developed a terrible attitude problem, slacking off and, quaintly, even going out on strike." The capitalists hit back hard.
It reads like the theory that wages squeezed profits, causing the 1973 recession and subsequent stagflation. Now, after the capitalists have pushed the pendulum hard to the right, the need is to restore workers' consumption. The implication is that capitalism has a sweet spot in the middle, somehow combining adequate exploitation hence healthy profits with reasonably good times for workers. Is this not the implied theory? _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
