[The following article appeared in the December 22 issue of Inprecor, a fortnightly news bulletin published by the United Secretariat of the Fourth Internation.]
Two years of severe depression, followed by two more of faltering, noncumulative upturn; four years of chronic large-scale unemployment, affecting young people in a catastrophic manner; virtual unanimity that this unemployment will persist for a long time to come—truly those mass organizations of the European workers movement that used to live in the euphoria of "permanent expansion ensuring full employment and social progress" have a lot to get over. The traumatic shock that the working masses are gradually absorbing should be translated by the reformist mass unions and parties into demands, programs, and proposals for action. But their political and economic disarray is matched only by their theoretical incomprehension of the origins and nature of the crisis.
A Crisis of Shortage or of Overproduction?
Representatives of the ruling bourgeois ideology have launched a massive campaign designed to disorient and mystify working-class opinion by "explaining" the crisis in terms of scarcity. According to these conceptions, there is a critical shortage of oil and other raw materials which is aggravated by the reduction of investment resources due to "excessive" workingclass consumption; the whole economy is suffering from a huge dearth of capital.
On the basis of the available empirical data, it is possible to grasp the mystifying character of this "explanation." The 1973- 75 recession was one of overproduction, not one of scarcity: there was an overabundance rather than a shortage of oil; raw materials prices have collapsed instead of soaring. Far from suffering a capital shortage, the capitalist economies were straining under enormous overcapitalization-a mass of industrial capital could not be invested and nearly 30% of world production capacity was not used. The savings ratio was rising and the banks held an abundance of money-capital on which capitalist entrepreneurs hardly drew, given the stagnant business situation.
How could rapid wage rises and "excess" working-class consumption be responsible for the crisis, when there was huge spare capacity in consumer sectors like textiles, petrochemicals, housing construction, electrical appliances, and the automobile industry? Can it seriously be imagined that lowering wages would have allowed higher sales of clothing, furniture, apartments, and refrigerators?
By defining the phenomenon as a capitalist crisis of overproduction, Marxists emphasize the two interlinked aspects that have characterized every such crisis in the history of the capitalist mode of production: namely, the decline in the rate of profit and the lack of outlets among "final consumers." The former gives rise to a reduction of productive investment, and thus of sales of producer goods; the latter to a fall in sales of consumer goods. But the two are structurally interlinked in the causing of the crisis. That is why an attempt to solve the crisis by constricting mass consumption is really a policy of simpletons. The capitalist governments discovered this at their expense between 1929 and 1933. But today they seem to have forgotten some of the lessons of those dark years.
For Marxists, unlike the neo-Ricardians and their bourgeois or right-wing Social Democratic political followers, the falling rate of profit is caused not by wage rises, but by the rising organic composition of capital. Throughout the postwar period of accelerated expansion, constant capital increasingly replaced living labor, inexorably leading to a decline in the rate of profit. The kernel of truth in the employers' argument is the fact that relentless working-class opposition to a fall in the price of labor power, together with the prevalence of full employment, did not allow the functioning of the mechanism that offsets the falling rate of profit: namely, a fresh spurt of the rate of exploitation of the labor force. But to recognize this is obviously quite different from calmly asserting that "high wages" were responsible for the falling rate of profit.
The theoretical debate on these questions is not at all a platonic discussion. The bourgeoisie-and the right Social Democrats-seek to lay the blame on the unions and the workers in order to weaken their resistance to the various austerity policies. Trade-union and working-class militants have an overriding duty to oppose these attempts and to staunchly defend their right to protect their purchasing power. But such a defense can acquire coherence and persuasiveness only if it offers another explanation for the origins and nature of the crisis-the one that can be found in Marxist theory.
Marxist economy theory thus assumes a directly political and practical function in the ongoing class struggle and the defense of labor against capital. The struggle for the defense of Marxism here coincides directly with effective defense of the real wages and employment of the proletariat. Clearly, then, the general offensive launched against Marxism during the last year is no more due to chance than the economic crisis itself. It plays a precise role in the class struggle.
Right-wing Social Democrats have long since broken with Marxism and are carrying into the broad workers movement the traditional banalities of bourgeois ideology: "We're all in the same boat"; "We must all defend the national economy (or the firm, or Europe)"; "In a period of crisis, the class struggle falls away, sacrifices cannot be avoided, and all that remains is to share out the burden equitably," etc.
The position of the left Social Democrats and the Eurocommunists (and even of the CPs that maintain their fidelity to the Kremlin) is of a rather more confused character. They attempt to combine ritual and generally very summary restatements of the Marxist analyses with a strategic orientation according to which it is possible to overcome the crisis without eliminating the capitalist regime. The intellectual acrobatics involved are quite staggering and impress only the naive or the ignorant.
Thus, Paul Boccara, the leading economist of the French CP, naturally speaks of a capitalist crisis (although the word "overproduction" has to struggle to make itself heard). He even mentions the rate of profit in passing. But the stress is on the "waste of the material means of production.
He is thus able to slide from recognition that the crisis cannot be solved in the framework of capitalism without a sharp rise in profits to the argument that the crisis could be overcome through "elimination of waste" and "democratic planning," that is, through rationalization of a mixed economy that is elsewhere acknowledged to be capitalist.
Crisis-Management Through Austerity or Defense of the Workers Interests?
The main goal of the capitalist offensive launched against the workers in every capitalist country since the onset of the crisis is to significantly lower real wages and reconstruct the industrial reserve army on a large scale. This in turn would ensure a lasting rise in the rate of surplusvalue and the rate of profit, which in the end would set the economy moving again. But even if these rises did not lead to recovery, they would bring about a longterm shift in the relationship of social forces to the advantage of capital. And that is the real historical objective.
The Social Democrats have become the principal force advocating and implementing this policy in a whole series of countries-most notably in Britain, West Germany, Portugal, and Denmark. Some Eurocommunist parties have quite simply fallen into step, even overtaking them in the "boldness" of their commitment. This is especially the case with the Italian and Spanish CPs, and the Spanish PSOES has taken the same path. The Portuguese CP has adopted a more nuanced position, supporting austerity policy in principle, but allowing itself to be dragged into opposition to certain practical measures under the pressure of its trade-union and working-class base.
Alone among the big workers parties of Europe, the French CP for the moment declares its resolute opposition to any austerity policy, in the name of classical Keynesian anticrisis measures. In this respect, it meets up with most of the left Social Democratic currents (the Labour Left in Britain, the left of the German and Italian SPs, CERES in France, Fraternidade Operaria in Portugal, the Renard left in Belgium, and so on).
The right Social Democrats and right Eurocommunists use two kinds of argument to justify their commitment to the policy of austerity. The first and essentially political argument boils down to the age-old one of the lesser evil. "If we don't administer the crisis, then reaction will do it and the austerity will be even harsher." In other words: "Allow them to cut off three of your fingers, lest they cut off your whole hand."
No serious proof is given to support this defeatist assertion. For who has ever shown that the workers are incapable of opposing wage-freezes and wage reductions through energetic and united struggle? Who has demonstrated that conservative governments can actually achieve their anti-working-class political projects? Have these politicians forgotten the heavy defeat inflicted by the British miners on the Heath government's anti-trade-union offensive? How can we explain the relative failure of the austerity policy in Italy, despite the PCI's total support for it, except in terms of the vigorous resistance of the workers at the level of the workplaces and trade unions? Wouldn't that resistance have been even more successful if it had been supported, rather than betrayed, by the big reformist parties?
The second argument is of a more strictly economic, and even technical, nature. The right wing of the organized workers movement asserts that unless consumer spending is restricted, it will be impossible to restore full employment—or in the demagogic words of Helmut Schmidt: "Today's profits are tomorrow's jobs."
Disoriented and frightened by the sudden reappearance of mass unemployment, a large number of workers have indisputably allowed themselves to be influenced by this kind of argument-not only in Europe but also in Japan. The trade-union bureaucracy has forcefully transmitted this ideological offensive. We need hardly dwell on the assumption underlying this line of reasoning-namely, the theses that the capitalist mode of production is the only one possible and that it is therefore necessary to adapt not to the laws of "the economy" in general, but to the laws and intrinsic logic of capitalist economy. There could be no better demonstration of the degree to which these bureaucratic layers of the workers movement have integrated themselves into bourgeois society and identified with the "values" of the ruling class.
However, the argument is totally fallacious even from a purely "technical" point of view-even if we deliberately place ourselves within the framework of the possible, or even probable, consequences of austerity policy. For it starts out from the simplistic and erroneous hypothesis* that the nation's resources are divided between two general funds: that of the producers' own consumption, and that of productive investment. The truth is quite different.
There are in fact not two but three broad categories of material and human resources: a) the consumption fund of the productive class (including the social security income of all members of the proletariat who are unable to sell their labor power for any reason whatsoever: retirement, sickness, disability, unemployment, preg nancy, occupational training or retraining); b) the productive investment fund; and c) the fund of unproductive expenditure, which comprises not only spending on the civil service and the military and the distribution and sales costs resulting from the anarchic nature of the capitalist mode of production, but also the consumption of the bourgeois class and the mass of their savings, whether they are hoarded, utilized for speculative purposes, or taken out of the country.
It is thus quite possible for the first fund to diminish without a rise in the second. (This occurs when the capitalists' accumulated profits are not invested productively but serve to swell the total mass of unproductive expenditure.) It is even possible that the first and second funds decline simulteneously. That is exactly what happened in 1975 and what is apparently being repeated today in many imperialist countries.
It is therefore not true that today's profits are tomorrow's jobs: profits may rise considerably while the level of employment falls. Identification of investment with job-creation is another trap. For a growing portion of investment is directed toward rationalization, which eliminates more jobs in the industries affected than it creates in the producer-goods industries.
Insofar as chronic unemployment persists and worsens despite the implementation of austerity policies, this ignorant argument of the right wing of the workers movement becomes less and less credible among trade unionists and has to give way to new ones. Moreover, even among moderate union members, irritation and indignation over the powerlessness of "left," "center-left," or "right" governments to restore full employment is growing with every month that passes.
Constraints of International Competition
Committed to austerity policy regardless of its effects on workers' living standards and employment levels, these supporters of class collaboration are falling back to a second line of defense. According to this, economic recovery is possible only through vigorous expansion of exports and a major reduction in imports. Now, the worldmarket competitiveness of "national" industry depends on the "moderation" of wage rises. Therefore, austerity is necessary in order to ensure export-led growth within the framework of "the competitive constraints imposed by the open economy."
Here again, empirical facts give the lie to this thesis. The imperialist countries where real wages have been squeezed or frozen (above all Britain and Italy) have had much less success on the export market than West Germany and Japan-countries in which the absolute level and rate of growth of wages have been highest in the last two years. Industrial competitiveness depends essentially on unit costs. And in the imperialist economies, these are determined far more by technological progress, economies of scale (the size of the production run), the supply of capital and credit, and the specific weight of fixed costs, than they are by the absolute level or the rate of growth of wages. It should not be forgotten that in manufacturing industry wage costs account for little more than 25-30% of total production costs.
Furthermore, it is self-evident that "export-led growth" is a quite unrealistic project when applied in all countries. As long as the world market undergoes only very limited expansion or even contraction (as was the case in late 1977), the gains of some countries are inevitably the losses of others. Thus, when the reformist unions and workers parties join in their bosses' export drive, they do so not only at the expense of workers' wages in their own country, but, still more, at the expense of the jobs of their class brothers and sisters in other countries. For the watchword "Workers of the world, unite!" these ideologists substitute a new and oh-so-attractive slogan: "Workers of the world, help get rid of each others' jobs and condemn each other to unemployment!""'
The employers of each country readily invoke the exigencies of international competition to justify their opposition to an immediate reduction in working hours (with no loss of weekly pay and no speedup, and with compulsory hiring of additional workers). Nearly every large tradeunion federation of West Europe has declared itself in favor of the immediate introduction of a 36-hour or 35-hour workweek. It is necessary to call for an immediate Europe-wide campaign of struggle for the 35 or 36-hour week, spreading if possible to North America and Japan, and culminating in a European general strike for this objective. This is the only way in which unemployment can be radically reduced in the short term.
But how can a Europe-wide struggle for the 35-36 hour week appear credible if the workers' leaderships are at the same time participating in the struggle of "their" bosses to defend the competitiveness of "their" industry and to win new markets for "their" country at the expense of their neighbors? Association in international capitalist rivalry or the practice of international workers solidarity: these are two mutually exclusive lines of action.
The Neo-Keynesian Temptation
Those who reject or seek to disguise austerity policy generally opt for economic priming techniques of Keynesian or neo- Keynesian inspiration. They argue that a rise in the purchasing power of workers and the poorest sections of the population would create an additional consumer goods market, which would allow a revival of economic growth (moreover of a different type from that of the fifties and sixties: more equality, more social consumption, etc.). The French Union of the Left sets out in this direction—cautiously in the case of the Mitterrand-Rocard-Attali team, more clearly in that of the PCF and CERES.!!
It is undeniable that a rise in the income of the "lower classes" (which have fewer savings than the bourgeoisie or upper layers of the petty bourgeoisie) can have an immediate "multiplying" effect and, in the short term, lead to a significant upturn in the consumer-goods sector. The whole experience of the last 45 years shows that this is possible under the most diverse governments: from Roosevelt's New Deal to the first year of Popular Unity in Chile, from the French Popular Front government of 1936 to those that followed one after the other in Portugal between September 1974 and November 1975.
But this experience also confirms the following points:
a. Such an upturn in the consumergoods sector does not automatically entail a large-scale recovery of job-creating productive investment. That is why the New Deal failed in the overall struggle against unemployment.
b. It is impossible to avert a powerful bourgeois riposte once the growth of workers' real wages reaches the point where the existing distribution of the national income between wages and total surplus-value is seriously disturbed. This reaction involves flight of capital, investment strikes, economic sabotage, financial (and if need be, political and military) plots directed against the government's policy.
c) Accelerated inflation inevitably results from the conjunction of the two preceding features, inserted as they are in the framework of capitalist relations of production and bourgeois state power, as well as in the international capitalist economy (realities which are hidden behind verbiage concerning "the stage of advanced democracy" and "the maintenance of an open economy"). This may even become galloping inflation-the "natural" mechanism whereby the capitalist robs the workers of their initial gains and confronts them with a more and more disorganized supply of the most essential products.
Some writers, including the theoretician of the British Labour Left, Stuart Holland, have denied that priming techniques inevitably have an inflationary effect. They argue that such techniques have in the past been associated with a state fiscal crisis-that is, with the bourgeoisie's refusal to pay enough taxes and with an inadequate level of nationalization-and that it is for this reason that they have generally led to inflation.
Now, we can hardly dispute the fact that such inflationary sequences have actually occurred. But this refusal of the bourgeoisie is due neither to chance nor to the capitalists' lack of "civic virtues": it is part of the very logic of the capitalist system. According to the inexorable laws of competition, the only profit of interest to the capitalist firm is the profit which can be used to improve investment, growth, competitiveness, and share of the market-and not surplus-value "in general," considered as a portion of national income without regard to its mode of employment. One cannot expect private property to exhibit a consciousness of collective responsibility.13
Experience has also shown that any tax reform or control and any increased tapping of profits not linked to the destruction of the political, economic, and social power of the bourgeois class has only marginal and even adverse effects. In order to prevent the bourgeoisie from destabilizing an economic policy that does not serve its interests, its power must be taken away. As long as it retains power, it will behave in the future as it has done in the past in similar situations.
Thus, recourse to neo-Keynesian priming techniques can have only very limited positive effects-especially in terms of time. After a year or two, tensions will mount considerably at every level of social, economic, and political life. The "mixed" economy is a myth: capitalist economy can only recover and prosper in the interests of the capitalists. These tensions can therefore be overcome in one of two ways: by starting out again on the road of austerity (which is precisely the capitalist logic), or by expropriating the bourgeoisie and embarking on the construction of a socialist economy. But to remain halfway between, or to seek to combine, the two solutions leads rapidly to total paralysis and disorganization of the economy—as occurred in Chile in 1973.
On the Social Democratic left and among the more sophisticated left Eurocommunists (represented by the PCF ... in this period before its possible entry into a Union of the Left government), attempts are made to take account of the negative balance-sheet of Keynesian or neo-Keynesian anticrisis measures. The different theorists thus draw a step closer to the "planism" of the thirties, connecting a policy of economic recovery through mass consumption to a significant extension of state-guaranteed or state-controlled investment.
In this way, productive investment is supposed to take over from consumer expenditure in extending the upturn to industry as a whole. This would make possible cumulative growth, rather than a faltering upturn confined to Department II alone. The PCF economists speak boldly of an almost overnight achievement of 6% growth, independent of the world context.14
These propositions concerning investment throw a sharp light on all the contradictions of the concept of "mixed economy."
If investment is essentially reduced to the classical domain of the economic and social infrastructure—which is the sense of the demand for recovery through "public works" that played an important role in the thirties-then it does not, in principle, clash with the interests of big capital, whose costs of production are thereby partially socialized and whose profits eventually rise. But the entire contradiction then shifts toward the realm of financing.
Financing large-scale public works out of profits and capital arouses all the bourgeois reactions mentioned earlier, while taxation of consumption and wages for this purpose comes down to a mere variant of austerity policy. That leaves financing by means of budget deficit-in other words through inflation. But there we are back with the tensions we have already examined.
Alternatively, a program of recovery through more modest public works may be associated with a policy of nationalization or refloating of bankrupt productive companies. This is essentially a matter of saving jobs by nationalization of losses. Such a policy may serve the immediate interests of the workers on condition that it does not also involve compensation, selling back to the capitalists, or financing out of workers' consumption, and that the companies concerned are placed under workers control. As in the previous case, conflict with the bourgeoisie centers around the proportions of net tax revenue derived from wages and surplus-value. The reactions of the bourgeoisie will be the same as before should its profits and possessions be seriously affected: if economic catastrophe is to be averted, it will be necessary to go all the way towards rapid expropriation of big capital.
A specific variant of this Keynesian anticrisis policy focuses not on extensive nationalization, but on control of investment, arguing that this will ward off the danger of "excessive centralization" or, more simply, "statization." Such positions are developed by a group of German left Social Democratic economists, who gave a report to a working conference held in Bielefeld in March 1977.15 Concerning these problems, they use the vague formula "democratic decentralization of economic decisions"-in reality, a translation into the self-censored language of the respectful West German left of the conceptions of decentralized self-management fashionable elsewhere on the European Social Democratic left.
The weakness of this position lies in its inability to grapple with the possibility that such a system could be interrelated with the maintenance of private property, market economy, and insertion in the international capitalist economy.
Who will compel the trust barons to respect the decisions of trade-union bodies concerning investments? By what mechanism will these be imposed? Given the competitive basis of the system, can capitalists ever invest according to criteria other than company profitability without courting disaster? How is it possible to suppress competition without also suppressing private and corporate property, that is, without socializing the right to dispose of the means of production? Will big capital not respond in the most violent and radical manner to any such socialization-regardless of whether it is "juridically" termed nationalization, socialization, collective appropriation, or planned collective self-management?
The final variant is that of recovery through productive investment in the state sector, expanded to include not only branches of raw materials production, infrastructural sectors, or unprofitable enterprises, but also some of the most profitable industrial firms among the big monopolies. In that case, the capitalists will evidently put up fierce resistance on the political and economic levels. Above all, bitter competition will appear together with the threat that the fall in investment in the private sector will neutralize the rise in public investment.
This conflict will be combined with a battle over finances of a much sharper character than in the other variants. What is to be the source of the considerable sums required to restart investment in the infrastructure as well as in the old and new nationalized sectors? This dilemma is even more explosive than the ones stemming from the previous hypotheses. The choice is even more acute: advance toward expropriation or relapse into austerity.
The contradictions of this project (upturn in consumption + increased nationalization + "democratic planning") go deeper still. For its supporters do not envisage a break with the international capitalist economy, except in the most unstable form of protectionism and autarchy.16 It is utopian to imagine that control of trade and increased protectionism can be applied in a country remaining within the Common Market. It is even more utopian to think that, in the present climate of a diseased international capitalist economy, imports can be restricted without provoking retaliatory measures on the part of bourgeois "partners" and rivals.
The French SP expresses this contradiction in a particularly striking manner when it peremptorily declares: "The safest and most powerful lever with which to arrest the flight of capital is of course a return of economic development to the right road; for economic health (sic) is the best gauge of monetary stability. And today, only the left is able to achieve this economic recovery."17
Is there such a thing as "economic health" independent of class interests? Will the bourgeoisie perhaps emotionally applaud an upturn in production if it is accompanied by redistribution of national income at the expense of profits? Is the flight of capital a purely technical reaction? Or is it not rather a social and political riposte?
Any remotely serious policy of control and redeployment of investment necessarily entails a break with the institutions and "rules of the game" of international capitalism, and reorientation of the economy toward international planning of production and trade, based on the international workers movement, the countries with a planned economy, and certain semicolonial and dependent countries. But that would again arouse the bourgeoisie to a violent riposte and leave no middle ground between paralysis and capitulation on the one hand, and rapid advance toward expropriation of capital and democratic socialized planning on the other.
At each turn, the mixed economy proves to be a dangerous myth and a trap for the workers movement. The economy can function according to the laws of profit, in which case it will come out of crisis only when profits are raised at the expense of the workers. Or it can function according to the logic of planned satisfaction of the democratically expressed needs of the working masses. But in order to move it onto that road, it is necessary to expropriate the bourgeoisie, overthrow its political power, pull down its state apparatus, install workers power, and destroy the drawbridge of the international flow of capital. At any event, the economy can never simultaneously operate according to the two contradictory logics. Any attempt to make it function on such a utopian basis merely condemns it to rapid and total breakup and paralysis.
The question of the survival of a "private sector" or that of "an alliance with the petty bourgeoisie" is a false problem.
The truth is that neither the PCF's "revised and corrected" Common Program, nor the program of the British Labour Left-not to speak of the German Social Democratic left-envisages expropriation of big capital in its entirety (that is to say, finance capital, all large national and foreign enterprises, the major means of transport, and all large concerns in the import-export, wholesale, and retail trade). If they are all taken over and if the political power of the bourgeoisie is overthrown, then a socialist solution to the crisis is possible. But if nationalization is confined to a few sectors of the economy, if big capital is allowed to subsist or is even fostered by substantial compensation, and if links with international capital are retained as well as the bourgeois state apparatus, then there is no way out of the impasse.
The crisis is rooted in the contradictions of capitalism. The only profound and lasting escape that does not conflict with the workers' interests is the overthrow of the capitalist system. A start can and must be made by defending the workers' immediate interests regardless of the effects on capitalist profitability. But such a defensive struggle cannot be successful in the long term-especially in the field of employment-unless it broadens out into a full-scale mobilization against capitalism itself. Anything else is just a cheap fiction whereby one deceives oneself and the masses.
December 10, 1977
Notes
1. According to the French Planning Commission, if value added grows at the slower annual rate of 4.5% in the period 1974-1980 (which will almost certainly not be attained), then the employed population will rise by a mere 0.8% per annum-that is, at a lower rate than new entrants to the labor market. Structural unemployment would therefore rise, and not diminish, between now and the end of the decade. The tendency can easily be projected up to 1985. See Christian Sautter: "Investissement et emploi dans une hypothèse de croissance ralentie," in Economie et statistique, October 1977.
2. According to the article quoted in note 1, "substitution of capital for labor" grew constantly during the period of expansion, passing from an annual rate of 2.5% in 1951-1957 to 4% in 1957-1963, 5.1% in 1963-1969, and 5.8% in 1969-1973. The annual growth rates of gross productive fixed capital (3.4% in 1951-1957, 5.2% in 1957- 1963, 6.6% in 1963-1969, 7.4% in 1969-1973) also rose and are evidently higher than those of the real wages of productive workers. These indices may be used to deduce the tendency of the organic composition of capital to rise. But they should not be conflated with it. For in Marxist economic theory, constant capital also includes the value of that portion of raw materials, auxiliary products, energy, etc. that enters into the value of current production.
3. On the contradictions of the PCI's positions on this question, expressed particularly in the book by Sergio Zangirolami (Economia politica e crisi attuale [Rome, 1977]), see my article in Inprecor, June 23, 1977: "Eurocommunism and Austerity: the Example of Italy."
4. See Boccara-Herzog-Le Pors-Quin, Changer L'économie (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1977), pp. 85, 89, 90.
5. PSOE-Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers Party).-IP
6. CERES-Centre d'Etudes, de Recherches et d'Education Socialistes (Center for Socialist Studies, Research, and Education), a wing of the Socialist Party that publishes its own journal.- IP
7. At its recent Fourth Congress the PSUC (Catalan CP) adopted an economic document which centered around the struggle against inflation and for the reestablishment of company profitability and competitiveness.
8. There is a striking parallel with the Stalinist doctrine of the priority of heavy industry over the consumer goods industry, a notion based on the same false hypothesis.
9. The PCF also takes up this strategy, without (for the moment) using it as an argument in favor of austerity. See Boccara et al., op. cit., pp. 90-91, 97ff., and pp. 146, 149, 150.
10. The former Dutch Social Democratic prime minister, Dr. Willem Drees, has stated in an interview given to Ekonomies bulletin (the Economic Bulletin of Amsterdam University), May 1977: "The mass of unemployment is caused by the fact that we allow work to be performed in Holland by foreign workers that could be done by Dutch people.... These foreign workers should have been left to return, to the extent that Dutch workers became available. ... But in any case (foreign) workers who are here without a permit should be rigorously excluded. ..."
11. See especially Boccara et al, op. cit., p. 141ff; and Socialist Party: 89 Answers to Questions on the Economy (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), pp. 29- 30, 35-36.
12. Stuart Holland, The Socialist Challenge (London: Quartet Books, 1974).
13. An interesting demonstration of this is given in Rudolf Hickel, Oekonomische Stabilisieringspolitik in der Krise (Bremen University, 1977).
14. Boccara et al, op. cit., p. 174. Jean-Pierre Chevenement, the leading figure of the CERES, is rather more cautious. See Le Vieux, la crise, le Neuf, Flammarion, Paris, 1974, pp. 124-5. In West Germany, a group of left economists around Professor J. Huffschmid-who stand midway between left Social Democracy and the CP-are calling for a special pump-priming budget of DM20 billion (US$9 billion) instead of the DM3 billion decided by the government.
15. Baisch et al, Die Wirtschaftskrise in der BRD.
16. This is especially true of the British Labour Left. While remaining ambiguous, the PCF's theses suggest a similar tendency.
17. Socialist Party: 89 Answers to Questions on the Economy, op. cit., p. 105.