Post by addisona on Feb 11, 2022 13:26:10 GMT
Many Republican-controlled states are freaking out about the working class. Business owners, particularly of restaurants, are complaining they can't find anyone to fill job openings, and conservative legislatures are leaping into action. At time of writing, Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Wyoming, and Utah have announced they will begin refusing the federal $300 supplement to unemployment benefits in the next few weeks, and more may follow. Utah has to "roll those back, to get more people into the workforce to get those jobs, to get back to employment," said Governor Spencer Cox.
It is amusing to consider this development in light of the ongoing conservative panic attack over President Biden's supposed "American MARXISM" agenda, in the words of prominent right-wing radio host Mark Levin. Ironically, what Republicans are doing to the unemployed actually is explained by classic MARXISM.
Let me explain. In his magnum opus Capital, Marx argued that a capitalist system will more-or-less automatically produce a population of surplus workers. Businesses become more productive through greater capital investment, which will require more workers in some areas but far fewer in others, and hence this process will always tend to to create an "industrial reserve army" of surplus labor — that is, the unemployed.
This reserve army of labor is very important for classical capitalism. It "becomes … the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production." The reason is that businesses are constantly changing the way they operate, and so always need a large supply of idle workers to fling into new projects on a moment's notice:
theweek.com/articles/982343/republican-theory-unemployment-classic-marx
It is amusing to consider this development in light of the ongoing conservative panic attack over President Biden's supposed "American MARXISM" agenda, in the words of prominent right-wing radio host Mark Levin. Ironically, what Republicans are doing to the unemployed actually is explained by classic MARXISM.
Let me explain. In his magnum opus Capital, Marx argued that a capitalist system will more-or-less automatically produce a population of surplus workers. Businesses become more productive through greater capital investment, which will require more workers in some areas but far fewer in others, and hence this process will always tend to to create an "industrial reserve army" of surplus labor — that is, the unemployed.
This reserve army of labor is very important for classical capitalism. It "becomes … the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production." The reason is that businesses are constantly changing the way they operate, and so always need a large supply of idle workers to fling into new projects on a moment's notice:
theweek.com/articles/982343/republican-theory-unemployment-classic-marx