Mark Blythe: It's the Economics, Stupid

If you don’t know about Mark Blythe, get your head out of the sand … and now you know.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/crisis-of-globalisation-mark-blyth

"When you do this with what essentially national labour markets and national financial markets that were relatively closed—let’s say homogenous states that looked the same, made the same stuff and occasionally traded with each other but kept their finances separate — once you change that, through the practices of neoliberalism, and you become one big market in the [Polanyian] sense of integrated finance and capital movements etc, a couple of interesting things begin to happen.

... labour’s ability to command its share of the surplus declines to zero. The strike becomes a meaningless weapon. Strikes decline to function—like to zero—in the western world. And you get prolonged wage stagnation, because essentially all the surplus goes to capital. There’s no reason for it not to. So labour’s ability to push up wages goes to zero...