Rising mass incomes as a condition of capitalist growth. Preserving capitalism through the empowerment of labor in the past and the present

Hartmut Elsenhans

Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, 2019, vol. 42, issue 4, 554-589

Abstract: Capitalism is market-regulated production for profit. Net profit depends on net investment spending. Net investment spending ultimately requires rising mass incomes. Both the transition to capitalism and its continued existence require social embeddedness and labor having negotiating power. Such a configuration is not an inevitable nor automatic result of history. Rather, this configuration is regularly threatened, because capitalists are not interested in preserving labor’s strength. Labor supports said configuration indirectly by the wage struggle. Where negotiating power of labor does not exist, market relations do not lead to capitalism but instead to the shedding of labor, to marginality, and to relations of rent appropriation. Today’s marginality-ridden economies of the Global South have become competitive in lines of production which are important for the leading industrial countries; however, they are competitive not on the basis of low real wages but on the basis of enhanced opportunities for currency devaluation. The tendency of wage restraint, in both the Global South and West, increases the danger of global underconsumption. There are considerable residual difficulties in bringing labor with different historical and cultural backgrounds in the West and in the South together in order to strengthen labor against international big business

Date: 2019
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DOI: 10.1080/01603477.2019.1672560

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