[발췌: Michael Perelman's] Sado-Monetarism: The Role of the Federal Reserve System in Keeping Wages Low (2012)

출처: Monthly Review, Vol. 63, Issue 11 (April 2012)
지은이: Michael Perelman
자료: http://monthlyreview.org/2012/04/01/sado-monetarism

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※ 발췌 (excerpts):

Author’s Note: My book The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism (Monthly Review Press, 2011), from which this article is adapted, tells the story of how orthodox economists have systematically excluded all consideration of work, workers, and working conditions from mainstream economic theory, as well as the damage created as a result of that distortion. Neoclassical economists are concerned about the workers’ transactions with capital, but they care little about the workers themselves or their working conditions. Workers merely accept a wage bargain, go to work, and finally collect a wage. What happens at the workplace is irrelevant. The wage bargain is presumed to be voluntary, agreeable to both workers and their employers. In fact, the relationship between labor and capital is anything but voluntary. Capitalism uses a variety of weapons to make labor conform to its needs. The book compares this control to a Procrustean bed. According to Greek legend, Procrustes was an innkeeper who made his guests fit into an iron bed. He stretched the short ones and amputated the tall ones until they were the proper dimensions. Monetary policy is a Procrustean weapon. What follows is adapted from the book. It tells the story of how the Federal Reserve System sadistically wields monetary policy to keep wages low.

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Sado-monetarism is not so much a matter of monetary discipline, as most economists would have it, but of class discipline. In the 1960s, Harry Johnson, a conservative professor from the University of Chicago, writing in a journal dominated by the conservative perspective of his school, offered a shockingly honest evaluation of the class bias of monetary policy. “From one important point of view, indeed, the avoidance of inflation and the maintenance of full employment can be most usefully regarded as conflicting class interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, respectively, the conflict being resolvable only by the test of relative political power in the society and its resolution involving no reference to an overriding concept of the social welfare.”14

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