this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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A third person - "Not necessarily. If the demand for labor is bigger than the supply then markets make labor more expensive.
Leftist - " How is that possible? "
A third person - " There are various ways. Workers could start more cooperatives or invest their savings in new companies"
Leftist - "But why should I care about markets when it is easier to change the political system?"
A third person - "Is it easier?"
Damn this third person never heard about the reserve army of labor, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, and like all of American history showing the hollowing out of working class power. JUST INVEST YOUR NON-EXISTENT SAVINGS INTO NEW COMPANIES ITS SO EASY. And please how will your worker coop survive in this hellscape with a bourgeois state over it? It will be outcompeted and swallowed immediately by corporations who have no qualms over worker or environmental rights. This isn't china, Huawei (a worker coop) is villified and attacked at every turn here.
You know maybe you have a point, let's be more like China.
Does the third person argue that it is easy or does the third person only argue that it is easier than the alternatives? How easy would it be to run a revolution or just to establish a socialist party?
What is the third person missing about the reserve army of labor? To me, it seems that reducing the reserve army of labor is their main argument.
What the third person doesn't mention is that there is a tendency to spend all possible income. The housing market shows that most people use reduced interest rates to increase their offer to outcompete somebody instead of sticking to their limits.
Are skilled workers willing to share their increased income with the poor? San Francisco has huge social problems even though many workers have a huge income.
This worked (to some extent, in the small cohort of industrialized capitalist countries as a sort of class collaborationist regime mediated by unions and a relatively activist government) for around 20-30 years after WWII but that's exactly what it is - something that will only work temporarily and for as long as it's tolerable to capitalists, because the political system is built by and for capitalists, and as soon as they see an opening they will use the state to beat back and discipline labor (in this case the neoliberal reaction that's continued since the 80s). Reformism is a circular dead end because politics and economics are inseparable, and political power just like economic power under capitalism is always (in the long term) gonna be stacked in favor of the people with capital - and those people aren't gonna give up their power without a fight.
That analysis is also looking at the whole labor market as a closed system within rich capitalist countries when the reality is that most of the breathing room that the middle class / unionized labor had during that period was built on top of capitalist super exploitation of labor in Africa, South America and Asia, and that sort of exported exploitation is always gonna be the case under a capitalist political system built around nation states.