By the way, Marx literally predicted wages stagnating even as production increases. I’ve also added some other benchmarks to help gauge where earners would stand given how much they currently earn.
25k in 2020-> 57k
35k in 2020-> 80k
45k in 2020-> 103k
50k in 2020-> 108k
75k in 2020-> 172k
100k in 2020-> 229k
Imagine working for THREE months a year and being able to afford a place to live or a semester of college tuition
My grandmother put herself through college by working as a grocery bagger over the summer and would save up enough to pay for a whole year of school. She's a cool boomer, but I think about that a lot
Automation is great for those who own it. That’s why automation is such a focus for giant corporations right now. They want to remove power from the hands of the workers
Automation usually means an increase in productivity so now you can produce the same quantum of commodities with less manhours going into them. So their value is less then before, but because your competiton has not become more productive it sells pretty much for the same price as before and therefore you make an extra profit. That is the classic motiv for automation. Removing power from the workers is usually not the reason unless maybe in full employment. Unions have overall lost all over north America and Europe in the last decades. Within international competition nationally organized labour doesn't hold that much power.
I both love and hate reading that kind of stuff. On one hand, the right idea is there - advances in automation even on basic levels like those found in the 18-1900's can absolutely lead to those benefits for people. But because of reasons it hasn't for the vast majority of us. so we're here all these years later with working people not seeing those benefits and it's infuriating that things which should help humanity as a whole are still only helping a small number of people on top
We're in this position because of the actions of the generation that, on average, paid off their 4 year college by holding down a full-time (40 hour) minimum wage job for ONE summer vacation during highschool
I was a barista for over a decade and I’ve always wondered “What if I just put 50% of the money in my pocket?”
Can't ring up the item of you do that, or at least only ring up half the items
Marx's prediction of the falling rate of profit was correct as well
Yes but Marx failed to consider the massive profit I get from my feet's onlyfans
SMH, Marx is getting sloppy, first yooman nature, why the cheese is free, and now this? step up your game Karl
The oil price shock is what triggered the era of neoliberalism in order to prevent that from ever happening again. The end of the gold standard also played a role.
What @truth said below is a much more elaborate comment than mine and is very accurate.
It's that the oil price shocks shook the existing system from a profitability and inflationary standpoint and in order to bring in higher levels of growth increased globalization became necessary. Part of that involved things like ending the gold standard, and pushing for neoliberalism which expanded economies of scale that benefited large enterprises over small ones. The end of small business that slowly followed this is really what resulted in the change in productivity wage curve as the market for hiring employees became looser.
No neoliberalism started in full force immediately after watergate with some hints of such before it happening too. Nixon, even with his problems, was still in many ways following the old social democratic status quo of things like price controls and strict market regulation at the beginning of his presidency. The neoliberal experiment really began with Penochet in Chile as well which also happened in 1973.
The primary reason neoliberalism resulted in the productivity wage curve shifting is that prior to this, large enterprises weren't nearly as much of a thing. Smaller employers had to pay their workers more since hiring was harder, domestic manufacturers didn't have the ability to outsource in the same way due to lack of standardized rules of trade and exchange rates so unions were also able to thrive,
The rise of large global enterprises resulted in highly optimized supply chains, you had far less "duplicated" work within the world market, later on came automation and we ended up where we are now. It's worth pointing out that the productivity wage curve never actually dropped out for those in the top 20-30 percent of income, which is a primary driver of middle income wealth inequality today, but it is this group that both automated, optimized these supply chains, fired a bunch of domestic workers and busted their unions.
This comment seems to be off-topic. You should be careful about that sort of thing, the mods here are pretty strict.
I have literally no idea but I know somebody who is smart out there will tell us
Uhh to be really quick that's when the bottom fell out of the economic model the US was doing. A triple whacking of capital accumulation in Europe and Asia reducing profitability of us corporations (this buildup was required to buffer against the SU, so it's an internal contradiction), the oil shock from opec ( blowback from imperial adventurism to maintain profitability ), and a wage-inflation spiral from full employment hitting against that reduced profitability ( again another internal contradiction ), these three collapsed the previous economic model. Nixon swaps the US over to completely greenbacks and we begin the process of totalizing financialization and economic auto-cannabalism. There's a lot more to it but I'm on my lunch break.
Uhh to be really quick that's when the bottom fell out of the economic model the US was doing. A triple whacking of capital accumulation in Europe and Asia reducing profitability of us corporations (this buildup was required to buffer against the SU, so it's an internal contradiction), the oil shock from opec ( blowback from imperial adventurism to maintain profitability ), and a wage-inflation spiral from full employment hitting against that reduced profitability ( again another internal contradiction ), these three collapsed the previous economic model. Nixon swaps the US over to completely greenbacks and we begin the process of totalizing financialization and economic auto-cannabalism. There's a lot more to it but I'm on my lunch break.
Chief neoliberal economist Larry Summers who was the director of Obama's National Economic Council and economic advisor to the Biden campaign tried his best to discredit and diminish these findings. Here is the response to Summers by economists Lawrence Michel and Josh Bivens from EPI noting how Larry's arguments still fail to overturn their findings on the productivity-pay gap.
Economics is straight up made up. It's very new also
Also keep in mind the boomers in general are pretty dumb.
My dad finally told me how much my grandpa used to make. And how hard it must of been for him to feed his family of 6. I plugged the number into an inflation calculator and my grandpa was making 150k in today's money. My dad who is into economics and stocks never thought about inflation. He still talks about his 3$ an hour job from the late 70s and how little it was.
Moral of the story. Most old people are dumb.
In your “other benchmarks” table, why aren’t the numbers linear? That is, if 25k (2020) translates to 57k, why doesn’t 50k (2020) translate to twice that, 114k?
edit: I actually don’t understand a lot of this. I’m gonna have to find the source and read it
They are not linear because we are multiplying by the percent difference and not just adding. So instead of ($x1973)+($y2020) it is (x1973)•(productivity%2020-compensation%2020)
I guess I don’t understand the whole framework then. I looked around a bit and found this post, is it where the context for these numbers/calculations come from?
You will never be a Marxist. You have no theory, you have no revolutionaries. You are a revisionist man twisted by liberalism and opportunism into a crude mockery of Marx's perfection.
All the "validation" you get is two-faced and half-hearted. Behind your back people mock you. Your parents are disgusted and ashamed of you, your "comrades" laugh at your ghoulish theory behind closed doors.
Revolutionaries are utterly repulsed by you. Hundreds of years of theory have allowed revolutionaries to sniff out frauds with incredible efficiency. Even socdems who "pass" look uncanny and unmarxist to a revolutionary. Your kautskyite opportunism is a dead giveaway. And even if you manage to get a revolutionary in your party, he'll turn tail and bolt the second he gets a whiff of your diseased, infected liberalism.
You will never be a communist. You wrench out a fake smile every morning and tell yourself it's going to be ok, but deep inside you feel the parliamentarism creeping up like a weed, ready to crush you under unbearable weight.
Eventually it'll be too much to bear - you'll but a rope, tie a noose, put it around your neck, and plunge into the cold abyss. Your comrades will find you, heartbroken but relieved that they no longer have to live with the unbearable shame and disappointment. They'll bury you with a headstone marked with your birth name, and every passerby for the rest of eternity will know a revisionist is buried there. Your body will decay and go back to the dust, and all that will remain of your legacy is a skeleton that is unmistakably revisionist.
This is your fate. This is what you chose. There is no turning back.
