Thanks for this reference Tom. I find it quite useful for some work I am doing.
Gary
On 2014-04-27, at 10:45 AM, Tom Walker <[email protected]> wrote:
> http://econospeak.blogspot.ca/2014/04/inequality-and-class-struggle.html
>
> In his discussion of the Cobb-Douglas production function and the presumed
> stability of the capital/labor income split, Thomas Piketty references the
> work of "the young German historian and economist Jürgen Kuczynski" (p. 219).
> Readers of Capital in the 21st Century may be interested to learn a bit more
> about this intriguing character, whom Marc Linder profiled in a 1994
> monograph, "From Surplus Value to Unit Labor Costs: The Bourgeoisification of
> a Communist Conspiracy" published in the book, Labor Statistics and Class
> Struggle.
>
> In the mid-1920s, the American Federation of Labor adopted a new wage policy
> linking wage demands to productivity gains, which Linder described as
> "strongly reminiscent of the reasoning that Marx had used in an address to
> the General Council of the First International in 1865 to refute the claims
> of one of its members, a carpenter named John Weston, that a general increase
> of wage rates did not benefit the working class." An excerpt from Linder's
> book:
> The reason that Green’s “Modern Wage Policy” Declaration seemed so curiously
> suggestive of Marx’s own popularization of the theory of exploitation is that
> it was, implausibly enough, written by a German Marxist mole in the AFL. That
> person, who was also responsible for developing the data on relative wages
> for the AFL, and thus for the organization’s conversion to a crypto-Marxist
> strategy of holding the line on the rate of surplus value, was twenty-two
> year-old Jürgen Kuczynski…
> In September 1926… Kuczynski departed for the United States, where his
> father, who spent half of each year at the Brookings Institution and as late
> as 1931 was a member of its advisory council, had secured him a stipend at
> the short-lived Robert Brookings Graduate School of Economics and Government.
> Through his father, Kuczynski again came into social contact with many
> scholarly and political leaders in Washington, D.C., including Justice
> Brandeis, a distant relative.
> Shortly before his departure for the United States, Kuczynski was struck by
> Paul Douglas’s recent article comparing the movements of real wages,
> production, and productivity. Although Douglas did not draw the parallel or
> discuss its significance, he presented data showing that from 1899 to 1923,
> the real earnings of manufacturing wage-earners had risen 28 per cent whereas
> their per capita output or productivity had increased 52 per cent. Kuczynski
> then published a piece in the Finanzpolitische Korrespondenz, which his
> father edited, in which he methodologically went a step beyond Douglas: by
> dividing the index of real wages by the index of production, he generated an
> index of “the share of industrial workers in the total product of industry.”
> This “social standard of living,” which Kuczynski conceded was very rough and
> in need of refinements, had declined by 50 per cent between the turn of the
> century and World War I and remained stagnant thereafter.
> In the course of re-reading Douglas on the boat to the United States, a
> “fundamental idea” dawned on Kuczynski -- namely, that the relationship
> between production and real wages was nothing but Marx’s idea of relative
> wages. Whereas only bourgeois theorists and especially social-democratic
> revisionists contested Marx’s ‘“theory of absolute immiseration,’” relative
> immiseration seemed, once the absolute variant was accepted,
> self-explanatory. The reason that no one had thought of calculating relative
> wages was the lack of relevant data. When Kuczynski realized on the boat that
> statistics recently published in the United States had made such calculations
> possible, he arrived in Washington with his “tongue hanging out.” In November
> 1926, two months after his arrival, he published two more articles in his
> father’s journal on relative wages, which were both suffused with a primitive
> version of ameliorative underconsumptionism. In one, expressly referring to
> Marx’s distinction between real and social standards of living, he loosely
> defined the latter as (wage-working) consumers’ share of the national
> product, In the other he presented the first fruits of his calculations of
> relative wages in several industries as the result of dividing real wages
> (measured both by a cost of living index and an index of wholesale prices of
> the particular industry) by productivity. In 1927 and 1928, Kuczynski
> published additional articles on the same subject in Germany until the
> relative wage “had again found its place as a category of Marxist doctrine."
> While refurbishing Marxism, Kuczynski also performed a much more spectacular
> feat: ventriloquizing President Green. Although Frey’s efforts at the 1925
> AFL convention had “given a great movement a great idea,” Kuczynski was
> disappointed that the Federation had “forgotten” about computing the worker’s
> share of the product or implementing the new principle. To be sure, Kuczynski
> overstated his own and underestimated the AFL’s initiative: immediately after
> the Atlantic City convention, The New York Times had published an interview
> with Green in which he anticipated by a year Kuczynski’s call for a workers’
> share index. Specifically, Green stated that the AFL should do research to
> show workers and the public “how the purchasing power of wages has varied . .
> . and what relation that curve bears to the output per worker.”
>
> --
> Cheers,
>
> Tom Walker (Sandwichman)
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