The unfinished 20th century

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"The reduction of working hours has not only the possibility of
distributing more widely ever fewer jobs, but it is also about
emancipation: the liberation from working for somebody else, and
reclaiming one's own time for living, which up to now has had to be
devoted to the production process. If work were to be redistributed, then
the paradigm of capital could be shattered. For this reason, the
possibility of workers experiencing a sense of emancipation through a
reduction of working hours has been politically suppressed."
 -- Franz Segbers

Sir Sydney J. Chapman precisely analyzed the reasons for systematic
market failure in the determination of the hours of work. His was a
neo-classical analysis of impeccable orthodoxy -- assuming competitive
markets, rational agents and the compensation of labour at a wage equal to
its marginal productivity.

Although we have BEEN TOLD innumerable times about von Mises and Hayek and
their disproof of socialism, we DO NOT SEEM TO HEAR about Chapman and his
disproof of labour markets. Von Mises and Hayek built their mansion on a
foundation that had already been shattered by Chapman's analysis. In their
fanciful world, production begins with capital goods, which, presumably,
fall from the sky into the deserving arms of the cunning entrepreneur.

Chapman's analysis was the culmination of a tortuous process, begun by
William Thornton, of dismantling the prejudices of the wages-fund
doctrine as they continued to persist in marginalist thought. Public
relations -- not economic analysis -- has succeeding in resurrecting the
dead doctrine because it is more agreeable to the dictatorship of
finance capital. If there are "eighteenth Brumaires" in political history,
why can't there be eighteenth Brumaires in the history of ideology?

   Society is saved just as often as the circle of its rulers contracts,
   as a more exclusive interest is maintained against a wider one. Every
   demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most
   ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most
   shallow democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an "attempt on
   society" and stigmatized as "socialism." And finally the high priests
   of "religion and order" themselves are driven with kicks from their
   Pythian tripods, hauled out of their beds in the darkness of night,
   put in prison vans, thrown into dungeons or sent into exile; their
   temple is razed to the ground, their mouths are sealed, their pens
   broken, their law torn to pieces in the name of religion, of property,
   of the family, of order. Bourgeois fanatics for order are shot down on
   their balconies by mobs of drunken soldiers, their domestic
   sanctuaries profaned, their houses bombarded for amusement -- in the
   name of property, of the family, of religion, and of order. Finally,
   the scum of bourgeois society forms the holy phalanx of order and the
   hero Crapulinski installs himself in the Tuileries as the "savior of
   society."


Temps Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant