Can Wage Increase Be Inflationary?

in #economy2 years ago

The reason that wage increases can never in and of themselves be inflationary comes down to the complete inability of marginalist econ to conceive of the category of objective value, which is also why it is completely unable to conceive of the concept of class struggle and the concept of exploited labor or surplus value. the reason it abstracts class out of its models for "wage-push inflation" is bc it literally has no consistent way to distinguish between proletariat and bourgeoisie, bc the conditions of exploitation in the labor process are simply ignored and so its categories become unable to account for the reality of this dimension of the economy. even if ur a post-keynesian in the mould of the popular front kaleckians like the "marxist" economist john bellamy foster (who promotes the same sort of inflation theory that socks has been in here) u are left with only the capacity to imagine a class struggle of the united workers and small capitalists against a rentier or monopoly class, which not only doesn't make sense scientifically but is downright politically dangerous, as we saw with the failure of the popular front strategy in france (read: it getting crushed by the capitalists) running up to WWII, which tried to use kaleckian econ and its utopian world of class collaboration against the "rentiers" for full employment under capitalism to achieve socialism. didn't happen
even if proletarian consumer spending does exceed capitalist consumer spending, the deflationary pressure on industries that produce capitalist consumer goods compounds the decrease in the rate of profit, which leads capital to flow into industries producing proletarian consumer goods and increasing the supply of necessaries at the expense of luxuries, transforming any distortions in aggregate demand into changes in the constituent parts of demand and automatically equalizing prices, without anything needing to happen except the original rise in wages. so at “equilibrium” here there is no inflation from a wage increase, only a decrease in the rate of profit - to the extent there is inflation, it is a temporary adjustment which in and of itself creates the exact counter-tendencies that reverse it, unlike, for instance, inflationary monetary policies aimed at staving off recession, which never reach this kind of “equilibrium” without the turbulence of the crisis that they only exist in order to prevent.

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