[A-List] "The Late '90s Never Happened"

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

The latest issue of "Review of Radical Political Economics" features the
David Gordon Memorial Lecture delivered at the summer 2001 URPE conference
by Doug Dowd. The following excerpt from that lecture covers issues featured
in the above thread in a very concise fashion.

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Depths below depths: the intensification, multiplication, and spread of
capitalism's destructive force from Marx's time to ours

By Doug Dowd

Review of Radical Political Economics
Volume 34, Number 3

<snip>

2.4. The reserve army of the unemployed

In Marx's day the existence of a slack labor market was a function of two
interacting characteristics of British development: (a) the long-term
socioeconomic weakening of the population due to the direct and indirect
consequences of 18th century enclosures, and (b) the contracting phases of
the business cycle.

The devastations of traditional society continue and accelerate in the
poorer countries (and involve many more people). Their agriculture and home
industry and villages and culture and politics have been wiped out in favor
of export crops controlled by giant agricultural companies. The "collateral
gains" in jobs for the displaced peasants by no means make up for what was
lost economically, let alone otherwise; and when they do get work in their
own countries, they are at the same time adding to the reserve army in the
richer countries.[13]

As for (b), the contemporary business cycle is often given a helping hand in
turning down, most obviously with Volcker and Reagan in the 1980s via
monetary policy. Then there is union-busting, privatization, and the
shrinking of governmental social policies; to say nothing of the
developments leading to substantial percentages of the labor force now
confined to part-time temp jobs, with their lower wages and benefits and
higher instability (among other problems).

Nor should it be overlooked that the unemployment rate is systematically
understated in the advanced countries, most clearly in the United States.
Many have been the comments concerning this for many years; recently this
one, in the New York Times (New York Times, 2001):

In May [2001], 6.2 million Americans were counted as unemployed, according
to [BLS] seasonally adjusted numbers. Another 5.2 million wanted work but
had not actively searched for it in the four weeks before the survey. And
3.4 million people held part-time jobs because they could not find full-time
work. If the government were to include all these groups, the current
jobless rate would be 9.9 percent, instead of the official 4.4 percent.[14]

In that both the officially and unofficially unemployed are politically
"voiceless," the systematic understatement of their plight serves in some
degree to support cheerful views of the economy; one more tub of blame
poured on the victims.

NOTES:

[13] India is seen as one of the major successes of the global economy. A
report of its Planning Commission in 1993 showed that the number of
officially employed persons was 308 million; the number of unemployed was
336 million (Meszaroz, 1998) . In Mexico City, whose population rose from
about 2 million in 1960 to about ten times that amount today, the
unemployment rate hovers around 50 percent. The intervening decades were
seen as having taken great strides toward agricultural efficiency, an often
lethal export platform for illegal emigrants as well as fruits and
vegetables. It is worth adding that in India the large mass of unemployed
are not, as in the United States, relegated to prisons.

The poorest and most discriminated against in the United States are those
who have also given up looking for work, and thus are not officially
unemployed. Their counterparts in Britain in the late 18th-early 19th
century were those dispossessed by the enclosures, and herded into
"workhouses." Today's workhouses are U.S. prisons, whose inhabitants have
increased by over 500 percent since 1970. This has been astutely explained
by Lynd and Lynd (2001), when (after noting the influence of the
"prison-industrial complex"), they argue that " ... the prison boom derives
primarily from capitalist society's need to control a labor force that is no
longer economically required .... [P]risons are explained less by a desire
to accumulate profit than by a concern to manage the social discontent
engendered by capital flight and disinvestment; in a word, by
disaccumulation," (Prison Advocacy in a Time of Capital Disaccumulation, My
emphasis).

[14] My emphasis. The article, "Breadline? What Breadline?" was by David
Leonhardt ("Review of the Week" Section). For many years, it is interesting
to note, the American Express Company, following the statistical procedures
of Germany, has always found the actual U.S. unemployment rate (and that of
Japan) to be twice that of the official rate.