エリック・ホブズボーム (Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, 1917 - 2012)
Devine1974:
required qualitatively new levels of skill in the labour
force; the labour process has made more exacting
demands on workers. Higher living standards have
been necessary to accommodate the educational
and psychological implications of these changes.
Second, the post-war period has seen the develop-
ment of a "mass produced economy of mass
consumption"." While this has obviously brought
great benefits to the working class and has had an
overwhelmingly positive effect, its influence has
nevertheless been contradictory. The inherent
tendency of capitalism today to generate discontent
is not only due to its exploitation and manifest
disregard for human aspirations. It is also due to the
persistent and glaring inequalities of wealth and
income and the individualistic, competitive ethos of
the system which, together with technical and
fashion obsolescence, advertising, etc., continuously
create social pressures for evermore consumption-
for more “things", which are frequently meretricious
and desired primarily for the sake of novelty. At the
same time, a growing tendency towards alienation,
as human relationships and values are undermined,
reinforces the desire for individual consumption
to compensate for the resultant social and psycho-
logical deprivation. Thus, in capitalist societies today
there is a permanent tendency to demand ever more
consumption and hence ever higher real wages.
8 Cf. Social Trends, 3, 1972, p. 90.
9 E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, p. 281; for a
discussion of the social consequences of technical change
and mass produced mass consumption, see the whole of
Ch. 14.
第二に、戦後は「大量消費の大量生産経済 "mass produced economy of mass consumption"」の発展を目の当たりにした。これは、明らかに労働者階級に大きな利益をもたらし、圧倒的に肯定的な効果をもたらしたが、その影響は、それにもかかわらず、矛盾していた。今日の資本主義に内在する不満を生み出す傾向は、その搾取と人間の願望に対する明白な軽視だけに起因するものではない。それはまた、富と所得の永続的で明白な不平等と、技術やファッションの陳腐化、広告などとともに、絶え間なく、より多くの消費を求める社会的圧力を生み出すシステムの個人主義的で競争的なエートスにも起因している。同時に、人間関係や価値観が損なわれると同時に、疎外への傾向が強まり、結果として生じる社会的・精神的・論理的な剥奪を補うための個人消費への欲求が強化されます。このように、今日の資本主義社会では、これまで以上に多くの消費を要求し、それゆえにこれまで以上に高い実質賃金を要求する傾向が恒久的に存在している。
8 Cf.社会的動向、3、1972年、p. 90を参照してください。
9 E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, p. 281; 技術的変化と大量生産された大量消費の社会的帰結の議論については、第 14 章の全体を参照のこと。
www.DeepL.com/Translator(無料版)で翻訳しました。
『革命の時代』(邦訳は『市民革命と産業革命』)、『資本の時代』、『帝国の時代』という「長い19世紀」(1789年〜1914年)の三部作のあと、1914年から1991年までを「短い20世紀」として、『両極端の時代:短い20世紀』Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century.(Extremesが複数形であることに注意。邦訳では『20世紀の歴史――極端な時代』と訳されている)を著わした。日本では、テレンス・レンジャーとの共著である『創られた伝統』 The Invention of Tradition(直訳は「『伝統』の発明」または「伝統を発明すること」)が知られる。
2012年10月1日、病気のため、ロンドンのロイヤルフリー病院で死去[1]。95歳没。
著書
単著
Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, (Manchester University Press, 1959).
Conflict theory of inflation and inflationary biases
A series of articles in the journal Marxism Today in 1974 illustrated the proposition that inflation was the result of a distributional conflict between workers and capital. These articles were written with reference to the early 1970s, when inflation rates rose in many Western economies.
One article by Pat Devine stated that the inflation process was a structural construct embedded in the intrinsic capital labour conflict. He argued that the increased bargaining power of workers (that accompanied the long period of full employment in the post-Second World War period) and the declining productivity growth in the early 1970s imparted a structural bias towards inflation which was manifested in the inflation breakout in the mid-1970s that “ended the golden age.”
He further claimed that the prolonged growth of money wages was “unprecedented in the history of capitalism” (Devine, 1974: 80). Capitalists increased prices to maintain profitability and thus countered the attempt to raise real wages.
Large, oligopolistic firms with price setting power engaged in non-price competition (for example, product quality). These firms, however, were interdependent because their market shares were sensitive to their pricing strategies. When a firm was faced with nominal wage demands, its management knew that its rivals would face similar pressure and that their competitive positions would not depend on the absolute price level while the government continued to ensure that effective demand was sufficient to maintain full employment. On the other hand, a firm could lose market share if it increased prices while other firms maintained lower prices. As a result, firms had little incentive to resist the wage demands of their workers and strong incentives to protect their profits by passing on the demands in the form of higher prices.
This structural depiction of inflation as being embedded in the class dynamics of capital and labour, both of which had increased capacity to set prices and defend their real shares of income, implicates Keynesian-style approaches to full employment.
There was also an international component to the structural theory. It was argued that the Bretton Woods system (see Chapter 9) imparted deflationary forces on economies that were experiencing strong domestic demand growth. As national income rose and imports increased, central banks were obliged to tighten monetary policy to maintain the agreed exchange rate parity and the constraints on monetary growth acted to choke off incompatible claims on the available income.
However, when the Bretton Woods system of convertible currencies and fixed exchange rates collapsed in 1971, the structural biases towards inflation came to the fore with floating exchange rates. Devine (1974: 86) argued that:
《floating exchange rates have been used as an additional weapon available to the state. Given domestic -inflation, floating rates provide a degree of flexibility in dealing with the resultant pressure on the external payments -position. However, if a float is to be effective in stabilising a payments imbalance it is likely to involve lower real incomes at home. If a reduction in real wages (or their rate of growth) is not acquiesced in there will then be -additional pressure for higher money wages and if this cannot be contained the rate of inflation will increase and there will be further depreciation. 》
The structuralist view also noted that the mid-1970s crisis, which marked the end of the Keynesian period, was not only marked by rising inflation but also by an ongoing profit squeeze due to declining productivity growth and increasing external competition for market share. The profit squeeze led to firms reducing their rate of investment (which reduced aggregate demand growth), which combined with harsh contractions in monetary and fiscal policy, created the stagflation that bedevilled the world in the second half of the 1970s.
The resolution to the structural bias proposed by economists depended on their ideological persuasion. On the one hand, those who identified themselves as Keynesians proposed incomes policies (which we shall explore in more detail later in this chapter) as a way of mediating the distributional struggle and achieving nominal income claims that were compatible with the available output.
On the other hand, the emerging Monetarists considered the problem to be an abuse of market power by the trade unions and this motivated demands for policymakers to legislate to reduce the bargaining power of workers. The rising unemployment was also not opposed by capital because it was seen as a vehicle for undermining the capacity of the trade unions to make wage demands.
From the mid-1970s, the combined weight of persistently high unemployment and increased policy attacks on trade unions in many advanced nations reduced the inflation spiral as workers were unable to pursue real wages growth, and productivity growth outstripped real wages growth. As a result, there was a substantial redistribution of income towards profits during this period.
The rise of Thatcherism in the UK and Reaganomics in the USA exemplified the increasing dominance of the Monetarist view in the 1980s.
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