https://vimeo.com/433213972 Robert Pollin advocates a macroeconomic agenda centered on full employment. The decades long neoliberal attack on the working class is heightened with COVID-19. The world needs a New Deal to counter levels of unemployment and inequality last seen in the Great Depression. Produced by Lynn Fries / GPEnewsdocs TRANSCRIPT ROBERT POLLIN: Isn't it ironic that we have 15%-20% unemployment depending on how you measure it and the stock market is going up, not down. It went down, but then it came back up. It came back up because the Fed is keeping it up. So the Fed is defending capitalism really to an unprecedented degree. LYNN FRIES: Hello and welcome. I’m Lynn Fries and that was Robert Pollin joining in this episode of Global Political Economy newsdocs. What would it take to move from COVID-19 lockdown to an abundance of decent jobs in all countries? Is it possible for a capitalist society to reach full employment and stay there? In this segment with Robert Pollin we get some perspective on all this and on why full employment is such a challenge to capitalist prerogatives and neoliberal logic. Robert Pollin is Professor of Economics and Co-Director of PERI, the Political Economy Research Institute, at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. A prolific author, Robert Pollin’s upcoming new book is titled Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal, The Political Economy of Saving the Planet co-authored with Noam Chomsky. Welcome Bob. POLLIN: Thank you. FRIES: With the COVID-19 crisis unemployment is reaching levels last seen in the Great Depression. Your book Back to Full Employment delves into basic observations of Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Michel Kalecki [pronounced Michael Kaletsky] and Milton Friedman as major thinkers on unemployment. Let’s start there. Give us a précis on that. POLLIN: Karl Marx is widely considered to be the great thinker of socialism. Which he was but the fact is that Marx spent about 90% of his time - when he wrote about political economy - writing about the nature of capitalism. And in his discussions about capitalism one of his most fundamental insights, in my opinion at least, was his point that capitalism needs mass unemployment in order to function as capitalism. Not that you need mass unemployment in terms of the well-being of human beings but if we're operating within a capitalist system, you have to have masses of people who are unemployed or else you can't have a functioning capitalist system. And his argument is straightforward. What he said was: In a full employment version of capitalism, workers will get more bargaining power. Why? Because if they don't like their job, they can quit and just go get another job and they don't have to worry because you have full employment. So, what Marx said is: you have to have that mass of unemployed people or what he called the reserve army of labor waiting outside the factory gate; waiting outside the office; waiting in the unemployment lines. And that because of that, that enables capitalists to maintain bargaining power over workers and to keep their wages down. If workers have more bargaining power, they bargain up their wages, that squeezes profits and capitalism without profits is impossibility. So that's why Marx said mass unemployment is intrinsic to the operations of capitalism. Now, if we move forward to some of the other major thinkers that you've listed, we have John Maynard Keynes I would argue as the next great theorist on unemployment.
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