On Sep 24, 2015, at 12:40 PM, raghu <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 11:20 AM, Carrol Cox <[email protected]> wrote: > The last 40+ years have been characterized above all by the continuing > expansion of the "reserve army of labor." And virtually _all_ political > parties, worldwide, have cooperated with rather than instigated this process. > > > Sure, but there is more than one way to keep a "reserve army of labor" > around. You can keep them occupied in precarious jobs or fighting unnecessary > wars. Or you can simply put very large numbers of them in privatized prisons, > refugee camps and the like. > > These were the types of policies favored under G. W. Bush and they have > nothing to do with austerity. Quite the opposite. They involve massive > expansions of government, increased government spending and enormous deficits. > > Your argument that "austerity" is somehow the inevitable outcome of > capitalist development is, I maintain, complete nonsense. Certainly it has > been proven to be demonstrably false by George W. Bush.
Neither side is talking nonsense. 1. There are, as Raghu says, divisions within the financial/political/academic/media elites about the best means of promoting economic growth and ensuring political stability. The debates between left-centre Keynesians and right-centre Austerians are real, and have been especially sharp in the face of lagging growth and mass discontent in the eurozone. Historically, all ruling classes have been divided between what might loosely be described as liberals and conservatives on tactics - about how to strengthen and preserve the mode of production. 2. It’s also true that in the last four decades, as Louis and Carrol maintain, the revolutions in communications and transportation technology and the opening up of new zones of exploitation in China, the former Soviet bloc and other developing capitalist countries have all combined to further alter the balance of power between the classes in favour of capital. These changes are what underlies the shift of the political centre of gravity to the right - to subtracting from, rather than adding to, the rights and benefits won in the preceding period by the working class, ie. to austerity. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
