Carryfast:
Rjan:
Think about it, is there a single day in your life, when you’ve gone into work and found a gaggle of managers or owners pondering the question of how they can put your wages up or ease your burden at the expense of their profits?Ironically,as your comments have shown,the idea that more wages means less profits
We’ve had this one. Fordism does mean a lower rate of profit - which is compensated for by sweeping away competitors and the sheer scale of the resulting market.
seems to be more in the heads of the Socialists,like those running the Chinese Communist Party or historically at home like Jim Callaghan and Denis Healey and their non Fordist Capitalist allies,than anyone with any basic grasp of economics.You know people like Eisenhower and Kennedy and the heads of 1960’s US industry.
Let me be clear, the 1960s were a time during which the rates of profit in most industries dwindled to nothing (or negative). Because this was caused by a transfer of income to workers, it was in fact an economic golden era for wage-earners and caused a huge boom in effective consumer demand, and caused a huge boom in the amount of profit-making activity (i.e. volume of profit).
Capitalists themselves kept their heads just above water by consolidating production, eliminating competitors, reducing worker numbers (or upscaling production), upskilling workers, and making huge capital investments in workforce time productivity, but many capitalists (who wouldn’t or couldn’t do the former) lost fortunes and aristocrats were reduced to penury. Economic rents, the deadweight claims of unproductive owners and their children on workers’ fruits, were as completely squeezed out of the economy as possible. It wasn’t always big capitalists that lost out - small ones did too, like unproductive farmers who were expropriated with compensation, and their land given to productive farmers to manage.
The only exception to the downward rate of profit, I think, was in new industries like electronics and computer technology and so forth, where profits obviously boomed in new product markets that previously didn’t exist, and lots of small businesses also sprouted up to cater for niche production and services.
Many small business owners in that era were not children who had inherited without merit, or spivs undercutting the big boys (because things like wage councils and training levies prevented free-riding and low-road competition), but skilled workers who were previously trained by and gained experienced from larger or more established employers - and financially astute workers had the money and the secure jobs to fall back on, which allowed them to set up businesses and take risks, and even fail but still get back up again.
Another notable thing to say is that this was happening all over the Western world. Because of the world wars, workers in every country were militant and class-conscious, pre-war capitalist thinking was discredited (although industrial relations in Britain continued to be more raucous than the European norm), nationalism was discredited. And there were still extensive capital controls and labour controls to keep markets in their place. There was the Soviet ideological threat.
Post-war capitalism (state-managed, heavily regulated, heavily taxed, heavily monopolistic, etc.) was a brilliant economic model without question - it produced unrivalled enjoyment of liberal freedoms for ordinary people, unrivalled economic security, unrivalled economic creativity and development. The better question is where did it all go wrong?
