Why are there Socialists that still care about "Full Employment" instead of just being Fully Automated Luxury...

Because there is literally no argument against full employment. Unemployment is artificially created by capitalism. Full employment would reduce work hours massively. Short reminder that every existing socialist country did have/does have full employment.

Google Bookchin

EVERYONE IS A WORKER

Oh no, not new social institutions like wage-earner funds and a big gun or - god forbid - scrapping capitalism!
Kalecki is great, but it feels like a strong misrepresentation of his analysis to pretend "The capitalists won't like full employment and will try to resist" means that the problem is full employment.

The capitalists will do as benevolent social democratic science demands or they will find themselves volunteering to push the limits of benevolent science's understanding of how homo sapiens react to adverse environmental conditions and-or large drops.

Grocers aren't workers, they are petite bourgeois

Can't be the case. Grocer cat must have no employees and only exploit themselves due to the remaining market forces, a one-cat cooperative. After all, as we can clearly see grocer cat is not a particularly portly pussycat, and thus mustn't be bourgeoisie.

He and his wife are shaped like bleach bottles.
THICC

We Don’t Want Full Employment, We Want Full Lives!

there won't be once humans no longer exist

Fully Automated Luxury Communism is neoconservatism.

Full employment should be considered a sign you're on the way to FALC, not an opposition to it (at least assuming gradual transition but if you're gonna have a revolution it doesn't much matter if there's full employment first). If you can't maintain full employment then you're clearly on the road to a fully automated hellhole in which people live on scraps of welfare barely sufficient to survive.

I just want Iain M. Banks The Culture.

Good stuff
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture

Full employment basically is to have a situation where most of the Labour that is provided on the market is purchased or utilised, save for structural unemployment. What this actually means if you take a more holistic view of things though is increased bargaining power for labour, which means that labour has greater flexibility to set the conditions and prices of providing labour, and flexibility to withdraw the supply of labour from an industry given conditions are not met (since there is full employment there is a much smaller to non existent reserve army of labour).. but taken to its logical conclusion, a Full Employment targeting scheme would require a jobs program and generous public spending, which would mean something like an EOLR Job Guarantee and a UBI as well as large scale infrastructure spending, basically you will gain the right to REFUSE work. The power that such an arrangement actually hands to labour particularly organized labour in the form of Unions who would be emboldened by the increased labour bargaining power will allow some tremendous shifts in policy space, like idunno, democratic ownership of the economy.

Also Fully Automated Luxury Communism is a fucking meme with current technology

This.. until we have the technolofy to attain FALC than Full Employment ahoy!

I return to leftypol after 2 years, somethings changed.. ya'll are starting to pick up on the importance of stuff like MMT and Post-Keynesian economics for the modern left.

Because full employment will drastically limit the power of capital due to labour power being a scarce commodity. Furthermore, the ability for a worker to get a state-guaranteed job will increase their economic security and allow them to make more demands of capital (since capital now has to compete with the state for workers). Meanwhile UBI has the very real risk of creating a fully automated hellhole where a large portion of the population are permanently unemployable and reliant on a rapidly deteriorating welfare system. Pushing for automation before the revolution is already well under way is bound to go wrong

We have some fucking smart people here on leftypol now. I'm glad to be back

Because FALC is an idealistic pipe-dream.

sorry to do this but i'm just happy to see some more Left-Heterox Econ readers on leftypol after not being here for about a year. Thank fuck, this is what the left needs right now.

Programs like Löntagarfonderna which was the original vision of the Rehn-Meidner model (basically Swedish equivalent of Lerner's Functional Finance model) which have direct worker control are some of the solutions the the problems Kalecki outlined in his 1943 paper.

Because science fiction is not a political movement you teenager

presented without comment

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Doesn't this also imply that private employers will face extremely tight rates of profit? Once the employees have the power to demand that no surplus is extracted from them, capital accumulation starts to crater, as do investments by the capitalists etc.
You would need to either implement a strategy of centrally planned investment, or demand that the workers redirect a certain share of their income towards investment, which will then empower the financial sector to an extreme degree. We are all made to pay into pension funds and other kind of insurances which make us pay money that is so centralized and reinvested over the long term via the mediation of the insurance and financial sectors, who so gain the reins of future economic development. And this sounds like a song we've all heard before, it doesn't end on a high note - unless here too, there is a large element of state control.
What you propose needs to lead necessarily to either a neoliberal reaction, or a gradual moving into increasing central planning.

Full employment isnt the same as 40+ hours of work a week.

The reason why full employment is important is as follows:
1. Being part of the economic production process gives you economic power. Economic power is political power. Being part of the production gives you control over the production, which means that you are not fully dependent on the whims of others.
2. While there still is some scarcity, you will receive compensation like labour vouchers. By guaranteeing full employment you improve the lives of the people because they never have to worry about losing the ability to continue their lives as they live them due to decisions made by others.

I mean you were sort of on the right track up until
I mean you say that as though this is the only potential outcome just cause you say.

The alternative is expansion of Wage-Earner directed Investment Funds, Co-Operative arrangements, LVTs, etc. and a great State investment apparatus e.g. a Investment Bank, which is basically just what we Democratic Socialists have been pushing for since like forever, the gradual democratization of the economy.

Also no, the pursuit of full employment policy over the long run will "crowd out" a lot the financial sector, and Labor share of national income will grow to eclipse profit.

This is sorta what JK Galbraith alludes to in "Economics and the Public Purpose" basically the idea of Social Democracy is to rescue Democracy from Capitalism.

Also thirdly while we are at it even attempting to instute a kind of program like this will also require a political program that clamps down heavily on the financial industry anyway, reinstating regulations like Glass-Steagall and penalizing high frequency trading and speculative ABS trading, and instituting large scale debt relief. This would be necessary as debt relief and controlling the expansion of and accelerating complexity of financial instruments will be necessary to restore confidence and offset savings plans.

All right you are very much winning me over to the socdem gang, but one sticking point remains. Your program hinges on having a government that increases control over and clamps down on the financial industry, as well as keeping private industry in line via the provision of government work programs.
But isn't this more or less what we had in the industrialized west before the neoliberal turn already? This policy was destroyed by the forces it was supposed to be reigning in - by the elite moneyed interests. How do we stop this from happening again, or in our present state, from keeping on happening (pic very much related), if not by eliminating all these interests outright and moving to a complete government/democratic control over the economy?

bottom line is though that the pleb class is largely suited just to dumb labour, the kind that will largely be automated. You can't just make them a doctor or scientist a few hours a week cause they have to do their share. Course FALC is miles away. So we should UBI and force porky to pay for us.

Thats the part where I sort of take notes from the P2P and Pirate Party style movements, Labour organization is one thing, but weakening the apparatus of information control, disrupting the "Propaganda Model" as Chomsky puts it through the high speed, spontaneous organizational capacity of the internet, limiting and basically removing or circumventing DRM and Intellectual Property rights will basically turbo charge the ability for Organized Labour to bargain. In addition, we need reforms like citizens initiated referendum, campaign finance regulations, electoral reform and at the end of the day a change in the culture, to remove the veils of Capitalist Realism from the eyes of the public.

I can't make any promises for the future, i'm not a Historical Materialist nor Idealist, I don't think there is a certain trajectory for human society towards classlessness, I just think its a good path to take.

Fucking end yourself.
Ubi is not going to happen in the way you want. You have no power over the means of production, and with increased automation, even less so.
We are communists, we do not "gibs me moneys". Welfare isnt socialism.

youtube.com/watch?v=J10jKdPRN9A

Basically cucking the fuck out of Silicon Valley is going to have to be a huge part of our praxis.

And fighting against Imperialism too, we can't allow the security and military apparatus to continue its expansion.

Basically we gotta be militant, subversive, change the culture and believe in what we are doing. A bleeding heart is your praxis!

Job guarantees can make a big impact, but not that big an impact. Remember that labour power is a commodity. Workers are not paid a proportion of the profits, they are paid the price of their labour power. Workers cannot demand that the capitalist not extract their surplus value, they can only demand a higher wage. Abolishing surplus value would require the abolishing the commodity form and capitalism (which is good for us). A job guarantee will raise the price of labour power, since there will be a guaranteed employer providing a fixed wage, and no worker is gonna accept a wage lower than that. Full employment will also raise the price of labour power, due to the scarcity of it. A rise in the price of labour power will of course lower the rate of profit and increase automation, but that's true for pretty much anything that empowers the proletariat, and it will put them in a better position to eventually supplant capital.
For a historical example of what happens when labour becomes more scarce, look at the Black Death. The Black Death lead to a massive depopulation across Europe, which paradoxically greatly increased the power of the peasantry and urban labourers, because of their scarcity. This led to the collapse of serfdom and the undermining of the feudal system, which along with the development of labour saving technologies allowed for the slow rise of early capitalism in the centuries after

Fuck off

I didn't feel the need to respond to the value form thing since I don't subscribe to any Value Form theory, but you're right on the money, the whole point is that labour's share on output eclipses profit and leads investment space being determined largely by worker controlled and public apparatus. This sort of goes into the whole "if they know how to achieve full employment, will public officials actually want to do it?" problem, if they know its going to require things like Worker Funds, Union managed investment funds and a State Investment Bank to achieve full employment, what incentives will they have to actually implement those.

Lemme paint you a picture.. When the globalization of labour runs its course and more labour saving capital innovations are created, and the state has decided for whatever reason to pursue full employment, capitalists don't actually have the ability to move shit in response to industrial action, they can't capture policy space with that threat. We'll see how that plays out with time.

What it also did was provoke an incredibly violent reaction by the old feudal authorities in wage suppression. Don't overestimate the "law" of supply and demand - as soon as labour becomes too scarce, the entity that demands the labour will resort to overt coercion.
More to the point, though, how to decide what a high enough wage is? How much say do the employers get? The labourers themselves? Etc. If you were to truly empower labour, you would be empowering them (rightly) do democratically demand a wage that leaves no room for exploitation. No worker accepts a low wage, and they vote for the government to make it so that jobs are provided at those high wages. At which point private capital either flees or goes on strike, and you end up having to centralize the economy into the state anyway.

In response to capitalist coercion yknow how conservatives always joke about Keynesianism being about breaking glass windows (they mistake the broken window fallacy by Bastiat to be about federal spending when its actually more about opportunity cost lelelel).. I say we actually cause riots as part of industrial action yknow.. like it has lots of multipliers from all the broken windows and lots of medical work as we put investment bankers in hospital.

More animated jpg magicks

Of course, and the empowerment of the peasantry wouldn't last forever, but it still created massive, lasting changes to the feudal system. Now imagine if those peasants had the power to actually beat the nobility
Which, as I said, would require a revolution, in which case your point is moot since capital is gonna flee no matter what and the country will be run by the DotP. A job guarantee would simply be a reformist measure to increase the power of labour over capital which would be combined with other measures to reduce the reliance on private capital in the rare scenario that a socialist party was actually elected and the revolution wasn't right around the corner

ive got a lot on my phone but not lots on my pc unfortunately.. i mostly tumblr from muh phone

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Apart of the transitional demands.

And so on…..

Federal Job Guarantee works well in the US.

i agree with literaally every single aspect of this..

also add in

JOIN US

A believing heart is your praxis!

FALC is achievable…
Just in, say, 2000.8547 years?

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