Commentary on Political Economy

Tuesday 26 April 2022

The Fed put must go. The key to capitalist advance is that resources (capital) must be allocated to production that satisfies social needs in return for the acquiescence of living labour to wage labour. 

The obvious tension between the antagonism of living and wage labour must be maintained. It is not a lasting “peace”. It is always a compromise. But excess in either direction leads to the misallocation of capital, which must eventually result in economic crisis - financial or industrial (inflation or deflation, stagflation, recession, depression).

Capital is productive only if production strengthens the ability of its society to satisfy workers’ needs. Capital is nothing without the antagonism of workers. By decomposing the working class, capital is dumb, deaf and blind. The task of capitalist entrepreneurship is to liberate the productive potential of living labour within the binding limits of the wage relation.


This is a political and institutional task that involves both private enterprise AND the state. A weak working class - a society distracted by culture wars and by the retreat of the state - leads to the dissipation of its industrial might, that is, its ability to produce and satisfy human needs in a manner that renders it more competitive, both industrially and militarily, than other competing and especially inimical societies.


This is where the political leadership of the State is absolutely essential! Whereas the economist Joseph Schumpeter championed the innovative drive of the entrepreneur, the sociologist Max Weber intuited that without political leadership the Steve Jobs or Elon Musks or Jeff Bezoses, let alone Mark Zuckerbergs, would lead a society to ruin by “taking oxygen” (John Authers’s expression) or “crowding out” more productive investments.

What we are witnessing now is the hecatomb of unproductive capital, the destruction of unproductive enterprise - of investments that no longer unleash the productive potential of workers, the efficient employment of resources toward the satisfaction of social needs that allow a society to impose itself on (“to compete with”) opposing societies.


Societies that waste their energies and resources on Facebook and Tik Tok or using smartphones rather than computers, or to “cryptocurrencies” or NFTs or …Netflix and Hollywood, or LGBT or “black lives matter” vacuities are bound for the scrap heap of history!


Capitalist industry is NOT a “win-win”: it is ALWAYS a “we win, they lose” (Reagan) because it involves the competitive accumulation of limited resources through profitable (“productive”) investment - that is, through investment that best fulfils the satisfaction of human needs (“wealth”) toward the further production of these needs (enlargement of the working population) so as to overwhelm and dominate antagonistic societies and social formations.




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