Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Marx? Really?

"Meanwhile, a fascinating piece of analysis from the U.K. Guardian summons up the ghost of Karl Marx, and boy does he look ready to rock. '[Marx] argued that labor-saving capital investment would limit demand for labor, while also bankrupting small-scale producers, in agriculture for example. They would swell the labor supply, creating a permanent 'reserve army of labor' that would prevent real wages growing as fast as labor productivity. Workers would thus spend an increasing proportion of working time producing profits for capitalists -- a falling share for labor or a rising rate of exploitation, in Marx's terminology.'
As the Times' Daniel Gross noted, also on Sunday, something pretty close to what Marx predicted appears to be happening right now. Workers' wages in the U.S. and Europe are growing nowhere near as fast as corporate profits or productivity, especially as compared with what happened during previous periods of economic growth. The obvious reason: the exploitation of the billions of new workers who have joined the global economy, mostly from China and India and the former Soviet bloc, in the last 20 years. Capital is in the driver's seat, labor is under the whip, Marx predicted it all. "

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