neomarxian

[A] renewed demand for full employment must insist on a literal reading of the term; a living wage; and the responsibility of the state to ensure jobs whenever business does not. Possibly to achieve true full employment where the long postwar boom only approached that condition would only revive and confirm the profit-squeeze thesis, and enforce the conclusion that full employment is as ruinous to capitalism as commonly supposed. In that case, the attenuation of profitability, at a high plane of prosperity, might lead us to recall Marx’s proposition that no social order is ever overcome until all its productive capacities—surely these include those of its working people—have been fulfilled. Turning away (revolution is the word) from profitability as the index of social health, we might attain a nearly steady-state summit of civilization, and content ourselves with a slow-growing economy in which the red of socialism had been interfused with the green of sustainability. Or—a more pedestrian chance—full employment might spell nothing worse for capital than moderate inflation, with a balanced rate of exploitation securing the steady growth of wages and profits both. On this subject the last word still belongs to Kalecki: ‘If capitalism can adjust itself to full employment, a fundamental reform will have been incorporated in it. If not, it will show itself an outmoded system which must be scrapped.’