Marx The Teacher

These results each time consist in an avalanche of consumers’ goods that permanently deepens and widens the stream of real income although in the first instance they spell disturbance, losses and unemployment.

If we look at those avalanches of consumers’ goods we again find that each of them consists in articles of mass consumption and increases the purchasing power of the wage dollar more than that of any other dollar—in other words, that the capitalist process, not by coincidence but by virtue of its mechanism, progressively raises the standard of life of the masses. It does so through a sequence: of vicissitudes, the severity of which is proportional to the speed of the advance. But it does so effectively.

One problem after another of the supply of commodities to the masses has been successfully solved 10 by being brought within the reach of the methods of capitalist production.

The most important one of those that remain, housing, is approaching solution by means of the pre-fabricated house.

And still this is not all. Appraisal of an economic order would be incomplete—and incidentally un-Marxian—if it stopped at the output which the corresponding economic conveyor hands to the various groups of society and left out of account all those things that the conveyor does not serve directly but for which it provides the means as well as the political volition, and all those cultural achievements that are induced by the mentality it generates. Deferring consideration of the latter (Chapter XI), we shall now turn to some aspects of the former.

The technique and atmosphere of the struggle for social legislation obscures the otherwise obvious facts that, on the one hand, part of this legislation presupposes previous capitalist success (in other words, wealth which had previously to be created by capitalist enterprise) and that, on the other hand, much of what social legislation develops and generalizes had been previously initiated by the action of the capitalist stratum itself.

Both facts must of course be added to the sum total of capitalist performance.

If the system had another run such as it had in the sixty years preceding 1928 and really reached the $1300 per head of population, it is easy to see that all the desiderata that have so far been espoused by any social reformers—practically without exception, including even the greater part of the cranks—either would be fulfilled automatically or could be fulfilled without significant interference with the capitalist process.

Ample provision for the unemployed in particular would then be not only a tolerable but a light burden. Irresponsibility in creating unemployment and in financing the support of the unemployed might of course at any time create insoluble problems. But managed with ordinary prudence, an average annual expenditure of 16 billions on an average number of 16 million unemployed including dependents (10 per cent of the population) would not in itself be a serious matter with an available national income of the order of magnitude of 200 billion dollars (purchasing power of 1928).

Unemployment is one of the most important issues in of capitalism.

I do not think that unemployment is among those evils which, like poverty, capitalist evolution could ever eliminate of itself. I also do not think that there is any tendency for the unemployment percentage to increase in the long run.

The only series covering a respectable time interval—roughly the sixty years preceding the First World War—gives the English trade-union percentage of unemployed members.

It is a typically cyclical series and displays no trend (or a horizontal one). 11 Since this is theoretically understandable—there is no theoretical reason to call the evidence in question—those two propositions seem established for the prewar time to 1913 inclusive.

In the postwar time and in most countries unemployment was mostly at an abnormally high level even before 1930.

But this and still more the unemployment during the thirties can be accounted for on grounds that have nothing to do with a long-run tendency of unemployment percentages to increase from causes inherent in the capitalist mechanism itself. I have mentioned above those industrial revolutions which are so characteristic of the capitalist process. Supernormal unemployment is one of the features of the periods of adaptation that follow upon the “prosperity phase” of each of them. We observe it in the 1820’s and 1870’s, and the period after 1920 is simply another of those periods. So far the phenomenon is essentially temporary in the sense that nothing can be inferred about it for the future. But there were a number of other factors which tended to intensify it—war effects, dislocations of foreign trade, wage policies, certain institutional changes that swelled the statistical figure, in England and Germany fiscal policies (also important in the United States since 1935) and so on. Some of these are no doubt symptoms of an “atmosphere” in which capitalism will work with decreasing efficiency. That however is another matter which will engage our attention later on.

But whether lasting or temporary, getting worse or not, unemployment undoubtedly is and always has been a scourge. In the next part of this book we shall have to list its possible elimination among the claims of the socialist order to superiority. Nevertheless, I hold that the real tragedy is not unemployment per se, but unemployment plus the impossibility of providing adequately for the unemployed without impairing the conditions of further economic development: for obviously the suffering and degradation—the destruction of human values—which we associate with unemployment, though not the waste of productive resources, would be largely eliminated and unemployment would lose practically all its terror if the private life of the unemployed were not seriously affected by their unemployment.

The indictment stands that in the past—say, roughly, to the end of the 19th century—the capitalist order was not only unwilling but also quite incapable of guaranteeing this. But since it will be able to do so if it keeps up its past performance for another half century this indictment would in that case enter the limbo filled by the sorry specters of child labor and sixteen-hour working days and five persons living in one room which it is quite proper to emphasize when we are talking about the past social costs of capitalist achievement but which are not necessarily relevant to the balance of alternatives for the future. Our own time is somewhere between the disabilities of earlier stages in capitalist evolution and the abilities of the system in full maturity.

In this country at least, the better part of the task could even now be accomplished without undue strain on the system. The difficulties do not seem to consist so much in the lack of a surplus sufficient to blot out the darkest hues in the picture: they consist, on the one hand, in the fact that the unemployment figure has been increased by anti-capitalist policies beyond what it need have been in the thirties and, on the other hand, in the fact that public opinion as soon as it becomes at all alive to the duty in question, immediately insists on economically irrational methods of financing relief and on lax and wasteful methods of administering it.

Much the same argument applies to the future—and to a great extent the present—possibilities held out by capitalist evolution for the care of the aged and sick, for education and hygiene and so on. Also, an increasing number of commodities might reasonably be expected, from the standpoint of the individual household, to pass out of the class of economic goods and to be available practically up to the satiety point. This could be brought about either by arrangements between public agencies and producing concerns or by nationalization or municipalization, gradual progress with which would of course be a feature of the future development even of an otherwise unfettered capitalism.