• Unemployment and revolution

I've finally managed to make the whole of the the 1981 paper "Unemploment and Revolution" available on the site. 

Below is the Contents page containg links to all subsections.

This paper is quite old and makes a lot of references to the particular situation in Australia at the tme it was written.  It really needs a 2006 introductory section.   Nevertheless it remains an excellent analysis of why unemployment is an intrinsic part of capitalism and will always remain so.

I considered putting it in the the Nature of work thread, but decided that it deserved a thread of its own.  I think it should be read and discussed in conjunction with that  other thread however.

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First published  in  August 1981 as an"Australian Political Economy           Movement" conference paper.     (Adelaide 8-9 August.1981)    Republished subsequently by the Red Eureka Movement.     Part 7 was written one year after the original document.

                          CONTENTS

(A)  Brief Synopsis

Part 1:  What is "unemployment"?

Other Societies

Science Fiction

Part 2:  What "normally" causes unemployment?

The Labour Market

The Unemployment Pool

Changes in the Level of Unemployment

Part 3:  What regulates unemployment?

What Do the Unemployed Actually Do?

How Unemployment Regulates Wages

Booms and Busts

Wages and Class Struggle

Union Solidarity

Arbitration and Wage Indexation

Capital Accumulation

Technological Change

Job Creation and Destruction

Part 4:   Technological unemployment

Is It Technological?

"Controlling" Technology

Part 5:  "Cyclical" Unemployment

Anarchy of Production

Planning and Money

Profitability

Overproduction

Are Wages Too High?

Stimulating Demand

Economic Crisis

Part 6:   Solutions

"Giving Fraser the Razor"

Blowing Up the Balloon

Fine Tuning

Political Facts

Shorter Hours and Higher Pay

Expanding the Public Sector

Workers' Co-operatives

Labor to Power with Socialist Policies?

Economic Consequences of Statism

Protectionism

"Militant Struggle"

Revolutionary Optimism

Part 7:   Revolution

           

            We Need a Program

Expropriating Big Business

Central Planning

Labour Policy

The Struggle for Control

Socialist Management

Investment Planning

I wouldn't say I agreed with everything in this article but, nevertheless, it's really good for you guys! The author does make the point that there needs to be a crisis in the present system before any change can be possible.  We haven't had one for a while but there may be one coming shortly according to the The Bank for International Settlements, the world's most prestigious financial body. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtmlxml=/money/2007/06/25/cncredit125.xml The present state of the international financial system is extremely precarious and has been likened to a patient on a life support system. http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article1473.html  Things may go either way but it may be useful to brush up on the theory of revolution and the transistion to a Socialist system, so all comrades might want to read through it.

You might also want to read up on Marx's  concepts of constant, variable and
organic capital which does correctly predict long term tendency of ever decreasing profits and hence the implication that Capitalism contains the seed of its own destruction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall Opponents of Marx have been able to claim , with some justification that he must have been wrong because, in the last 60 years, capitalism in its modern phase has grown by leaps and bounds even though the rate of profit has indeed fallen during this time and clearly Marxists need to come up with some explanation for this.

One of the arguments that economists such as Michael Hudson (http://www.michael-hudson.com ), who is leftish but not overtly Marxist, is making is that modern capitalism is not so concerned with profits, in the classical sense,  but more interested in capital gains, which is not quite the same thing. In an expanding economy, which we've had since WW2, its quite possible to realise capital gains,  with little or no asociated profit in the normal sense. The dot.com bubble was the extreme example of this. People invested in companies that were making little or no profits at all in the hope of making capital gains. Of course, except for the few who had the foresight to bail out at the right time,  it all ended in tears. However, even with much more
conventional shareholdings, the payable dividend  is often very small as a %
of their total value and the only real reason for holding them is an expectation that they will rise in value. But what if the market 'turns sour' and actually  hits a  peak, or even a temporary plateau,  as surely must happen sooner or later?  The situation may not be too dissimilar to the operation of 'pyramid selling scheme' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme The people involved in the early stages make money, but the vast majority who are sucked in later lose heavily. Of course it wouldn't stop there. Heavy unemployment will follow, pensions funds will collapse, and if the working classes, worldwide, don't wish to suffer as they did in the thirties, a genuinely socialist alternative needs to be developed.