Sections (TOC) :
• 1
43 Words; 269 Characters
• 2
32 Words; 210 Characters
• 3
66 Words; 397 Characters
• 4
299 Words; 1,603 Characters
• 5
36 Words; 250 Characters
• 6
108 Words; 620 Characters
• 7
38 Words; 241 Characters
Sections (Content) :
• 1
There is no ground for confidence or even for hope that the economic system which produced the depression of the lamentable thirties in the United Kingdom will, if left to itself, fail to reproduce similar depressions in future. There may be worse depressions.
• 2
...it is inherent in the design of an unplanned market economy that every approach to full employment produces increasing inner tension, until this tension is relieved by the brutal cure of depression.
• 3
With these wonderful tools with which you now work, every few years you have produced so much that all of the markets at home and abroad are glutted, and the capitalists cannot sell what you have produced in such abundance, and so they stop their machinery, shut up their mills, lock out their "hands" and paralyze industry, and there you are, idle, helpless, hungry, hopeless, desperate.
• 4
A panic comes, industry is paralyzed, because with machinery you can produce so much more than your paltry wage will allow you to consume. You make all things in great abundance, but you can not consume them. You can only consume that part of your product which your wage, the price of your labor power, will buy. If you cannot consume what you produce, it follows that in time there is bound to be overproduction, because the few capitalists cannot absorb the large surplus. The market is glutted, business comes to a standstill and mills and factories shut down. At such a time Chicago is hit, and hit hard; and you workingmen find yourselves out of employment, a drug on the market. Nobody wants your labor power, because it cannot be utilized at a profit to the capitalist who owns the tools, and when he cannot use your labor power at a satisfactory profit to himself he doesn’t buy it. And if he doesn’t buy your labor power you are idle, and when you are idle you don’t draw any wages, and you can’t buy groceries and pay rent; you can’t buy clothing and shoes, and you begin to look seedy and shabby. By degrees you become a vagrant and a wanderer and lose what little self-respect you had. And then you hear that your wife has been evicted, and that is a thing that happens every day in the week. Your child is now upon the streets and your former cottage home is deserted. You now start out on what proves to be a never-ending journey. The road you are now traveling stretches wearily on, and from the hedges bark the dogs of capitalism. You are a tramp.
• 5
...industrial depression, when unemployment is rife, and when, as frequently happens, the workers starve, not because of "decreased efficiency," but for the very opposite reason, that the markets are glutted with the products of their labor.
• 6
...after having followed them [the economists] so far, we are none the wiser, and if we ask them: "How is it that millions of human beings are in want of bread, when every family could grow sufficient wheat to feed ten, twenty, and even a hundred people annually?" they answer us by droning the same anthem- division of labor, wages, surplus value, capital, etc.- arriving at the same conclusion, that production is insufficient to satisfy all needs; a conclusion which, if true, does not answer the question: "Can or cannot man by his labor produce the bread he needs? And if he cannot, what is hindering him?"
• 7
...an unchanged pattern of wants would hardly suffice to absorb the rapid growth in the flow of consumer goods coming on to the markets of rich countries, the US in particular, without the pressure afforded by sustained advertising.
Chronology :
April 11, 2020 : Depressions -- Added.
HTML file generated from :
http://RevoltSource.com/