Friday, May 15, 2009

Political Aspects of Full Employment III, 2.

by Michal Kalecki

The fact that armaments are the backbone of the policy of fascist full employment has a profound influence upon that policy's economic character. Large-scale armaments are inseparable from the expansion of the armed forces and the preparation of plans for a war of conquest. They also induce competitive rearmament of other countries. This causes the main aim of spending to shift gradually from full employment to securing the maximum effect of rearmament. As a result, employment becomes 'over-full'. not only is unemployment abolished, but an acute scarcity of labour prevails. Bottlenecks arise in every sphere, and these must be dealt with by the creation of a number of controls. Such an economy has many features of a planned economy, and is sometimes compared, rather ignorantly, with socialism. However, this type of planning is bound to appear whenever an economy sets itself a certain high target of production in a particular sphere, when it becomes a target economy of which the armament economy is a special case. An armament economy involves in particular the curtailment of consumption as compared with that which it could have been under full employment.

The fascist system starts from the overcoming of unemployment, develops into an armament economy of scarcity, and ends inevitably in war.


next

3 comments:

TheTrucker said...

The reality is that "fascism" rejects economics in favor of irrational morality. The notion of economic classes and the idea that a society evolves due to economic considerations is rejected in favor of man's development along moralistic lines that call for constant war. When and if the current evil is defeated then some new evil will be found. That which was permissible in the past is now found to be reprehensible in that man's reason for existence is the constant fighting of "evil" in the good graces of the almighty. If the fight were to end then there would be no more fascism. Hence, all will be made "evil" in turn.

Daro said...

"Bottlenecks arise in every sphere, and these must be dealt with by the creation of a number of controls."

Does "controls" mean just government diktat or does it include incentives to draw resources away from other spheres. If I was a Republican I might argue that that is the difference between left and right. The left seek to control flows by top-down paternalistic government decree and the right seeks to tap existing market forces by incentivisation. Hence their constant tax cuts policy. The logical fascist might argue; why not a mix of both? Fascism can feed at both troughs.

TheTrucker said...

The phrase "logical fascist" is an oxygen moron in that the typical fascist is not logical or rational. The use of neoclassical economics to foster trickle down theories of economic "good" are part of the deception being employed to create the "new world order". The state will shrivel and die as the multinational corporations actually rule the entire world. It might be fair to say that the new "state" is a worldwide "state", but the point is that control comes from the top, and the wealthy caste, and not from the bottom or the middle section of the private wealth pyramid. In fascist Utopia representative government is the representation of "owners" only.

Conservatives believe that people are inherently evil and that leaders are endowed by God to lead us all along the path of righteousness. The Liberals believe that all people have a unique relationship with their own spirituality (unique relationship with God) and are not in need of false "leaders" to tell them where the path of righteousness might lie. For the Liberal, consensus, is the key to the discovery of righteousness. Some will go so far as to say that righteousness is what the vast majority say it is -- the consensus of all of the sentient beings relying upon their unique spirituality.

These propositions guide the normative forms of economic theory. On the right you will have "trickle down", social and economic Darwinism, and on the left you will have "economic justice", equal opportunity, and perhaps a bit too much "compassion". Is fascism a self righteous mask for greed and power lust? Or do these people actually have a religious afliction?