Re: [Pen-l] De-Growth Conference Declaration

[Sandwichman <lumpoflabor@xxxxxxxxx>]

I would put the horse in front of the cart. I would see the growth-as-policy-imperative to have been in large part a defensive measure by capital to the long-term threat that progressively reduced hours of work posed to the continued social domination by capital. In the pre-Great Depression past, it was conceivable to work out the contradictions of capital accumulation through periodic crises. But after the Depression and the war that option became not so attractive. It is only in those circumstances that systematic and recurrent state intervention to foster relatively uninterrupted growth became politically tolerable to capital. 


We have now worked through the phillips-curvian and NAIRUist permutations of the growth policy imperative and we're back to square one but this time with unavoidable environmental constraints. Isn't it remarkable that one "obvious policy" is so obviously not on the agenda of even most self-defined progressives? I have long argued that this silence is the clue that resolves the mystery -- the dog that didn't bark, so to speak.

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 12:17 PM, ehrbar <ehrbar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Therefore "debound" policies have to be implemented to get persistent
de-growth (German: "Nachhaltige Schrumpfung").  One obvious such
policy is shorter work hours.

-- 
Sandwichman
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l