Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.
Display:
There is a substantial difference, to take one example, between a political economy in which organised labour is one of the internal power groups controlling the large firm and a political economy in which that control is reserved for upper management.

Isn't Germany the counter-example? DB's worldwide rapacious financial predation is built on an economy organized around industry in which organized labor has place at the table. To use the image that SKoD used above, the capitalist state has digested such mechanisms quite comfortably.

Mills in the 1950s describes an American power system in which organized labor had been tightly integrated in a subsidiary role. One does not need to be an orthodox marxist to see that the operation of a worldwide system of capitalism is a strong current, not easily diverted.

by rootless2 on Sun May 29th, 2011 at 08:14:38 PM EST
[ Parent ]
I'll note that labour's place at the table in Germany has been shrinking in both extent and importance since the reunification. Whether this is a cause or a consequence (or both?) of the increasing financialisation is an interesting (i.e. non-trivial) question.

But if our exchange over the last few days has done nothing else, it has at least motivated me to dig a bit deeper in DB and SG, since they seem to be running their own foreign policy.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Sun May 29th, 2011 at 08:50:54 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Display:

Occasional Series