[PEN-L:27326] Re: LTV and income disparity

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
> > >>
> >There was no unemployment before capitalism.
> >
>
> Absolutely false. In England, for example, in the 14th and 15th centuries,
> vagabondage--landless migrant would-be workers--was a huge social problem.
> In ancient Rome, there was the proletariat--a term that meant "those whose
> only function is to breed."
>

I haven't been following this thread, and I don't know who it is you're
responding to here, but I think the proposition "There was no
unemployment before capitalism" may be tautologically true. If X
thousands of peasants are forced off the land in what is essentially a
tributary "economy," you certainly have X thousand "without a way to
subsist," but there's a certain anachonism to referring to them as
"unemployed." Odysseus returns to Ithaca as a  _thetis_ (I haven't
checked to see if I'm remembering the term correctly), usually
translated "beggar," but what it means non-anachronistically is "a man
not attached to an _oikos_, a status _lower_ than that of a slave. But
it would be utterly confusing to use the modern concept of
"unemployment" in glossing the _Odyssey_.

I don't know enough in any detail about 1300-1500 in England to argue
over that "economy," but I would be doubtful that the modern concept of
the "industrial reserve army" would apply -- nor would their inability
to purchase commodities have affected the "realization of surplus." They
weren't "unemployed," they were merely marginal -- they had more in
common with the _thetis_ than with unemployed in a capitalist economy.

Carrol