Re: it's over!

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

I wrote:
> >Further, we need to distinguish the NBER's bourgeois definition of
> >recession (falling real GDP) from a proletarian one (rising
> >unemployment, falling employment). By the latter definition, the
> >recession is hardly over.

Doug: 
> In most post-WW II U.S. bizcycles, employment bottomed the month of
> the recession trough +/- a  month or two. The last two cycles have
> been unusual in that employment continued to fall after the official
> trough. I think that's post-bubble behavior.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the short-term interests of the US working class was more in line with that of the capitalists, as seen in these kinds of stats. But since the 1970s, there's been a widening gap between these two, as the political economy of US growth has become less and less focused on autocentric (national) accumulation and more international and as the welfare state has shrunk or been decentralized to the states. Neo-liberalism replaced New Deal liberalism.  By the 1990s, the federal government was no longer a growth center (and instead was actually encouraging recession with budget surpluses) so that profit- and stock-market-led private-sector demand led the economy in the Clinton boom.[*] This was the bubble economy and now we're in post-bubble phase, as Doug points out, with the recession being more like those of the pre-WW2 period. The early-1990s recession was a mixture of the early post-WW2 kind of recession and the new, as befits a transition period. 

Just because there's a larger deviation between the short-term interests of the working class and those of the capitalists these days doesn't mean that the workers are about to unite to overthrow the system. These kinds of things can easily go right-wing, as with the militia movement of the early 1990s. Working-class alienation and resentment might also be channelled into pro-war sentiment...

[*] BTW, I'm reading Bob Pollin's CONTOURS OF DESCENT on this kind of stuff. It's excellent, though it won't be available to most people until later this year...

Jim