You can't help soften the blow of inflation by giving people more money! That will just cause more inflation and make everything worse!

We've all heard it a thousand times, giving normal working class people, especially poor people, more money will only make everything worse by causing more inflation. Somehow this will leave the majority worse off than if nothing had been done.

This is considered common sense among liberal-conservatives but as leftists we instinctively know that it is bullshit. Maybe higher wages and benefits would increase inflation but the net total is that the working class would be better off than before.

Instinct is not a very convincing argument though so how do you argue the case against the wage inflation spiral to liberal-conservatives?

  • TerminalEncounter [she/her]
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    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Firstly, it is not necessary to convince the average chud or lib in order to seize power. The workers want higher wages, it's their useless middle managers and bosses that come up with fictions like a "wage push" theory of inflation. They are so few in number that convincing them is kind of pointless, a lot of them hold the keys to power in the bourgeois state but that's why revolution is a necessity. That being said, there's definitely some confused workers and union people that get it in their heads that higher wages necessitates inflation and its these people you should engage with.

    Marx covers this in Value, Price, Profit (really good short theory, you should read it) - here's Michael Roberts quotes from it cause I can't be assed to dig out my copy and retype it out: "a struggle for a rise of wages follows only in the track of previous changes, and is the necessary offspring of previous changes in the amount of production, the productive powers of labour, the value of labour, the value of money, the extent or the intensity of labour extracted, the fluctuations of market prices, dependent upon the fluctuations of demand and supply, and consistent with the different phases of the industrial cycle; in one word, as reactions of labour against the previous action of capital.”

    “By treating the struggle for a rise of wages independently of all these circumstances, by looking only upon the change of wages, and overlooking all other changes from which they emanate, you proceed from a false premise in order to arrive at false conclusions.” Broadly speaking, argued Marx, “A general rise in the rate of wages would result in a fall of the general rate of profit, but not affect the prices of commodities.”

    I.E. wages increasing comes out of the rate of profit rather than prices in general - which is why the bourgeois and their middleanager professional class are so dead set against wages and benefits.