[PEN-L:27350] unemployment and capitalism (II)

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: unemployment and capitalism (II)

My previous note on this subject was about the existence of substitutes for unemployment under capitalism. But there's also the issue of the existence of unemployment under non-capitalist modes of production.

Unemployment typically doesn't exist under slavery, since the slave-owner tries to get as much labor as possible out of his or her chattel. It also doesn't exist under serfdom, since not only does the lord try to get as much as possible out of the serf, but the serf had enough autonomy (direct access to the means of production & subsistence) that he or she could use any free time to produce use-values for the family. Tributary modes of production were similar. Pre-capitalism communal modes of production (so-called "primitive communism") aimed at producing use-values for the community and so didn't suffer from unemployment. Unemployment didn't exist in the old Soviet Union because of the way that the planning system led to chronic shortages of goods and labor-power.

However, in all of these, there might be unemployment at the edges (e.g., in the towns of feudal Europe). It was recently found that unemployed had existed under the old Soviet Union (though I can't find the reference). But in none of these cases was the existence of unemployment -- or a substitute -- as central to the operations of the system as under capitalism.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine