WaPo:
"Tonight I ask more of America’s business leaders to follow John’s lead," the president said. "Do what you can to raise your employees’ wages."What's missing in this picture? The role of credit. As heterodox and Marxist economists will point out again and again, it's not just that wages have been flat for the past 40 years (the neoliberal period), but more importantly: the middle class/working class has used credit to make ever-growing ends meet. The explosion of private debt was closely observed and analysed for three decades by the American Marxist economists at the Monthly Review. Also, the Italian Marxists called this state of things (flat wages/growing private debt) the renting/borrowing of pay increases. Meaning, one no longer gets a pay increase directly but must instead borrow/rent it from a bank or against the value of a home.
Here’s the trouble with Obama's request. Companies have discovered that precisely by keeping wages lower, they have been able to boost profits to record levels and fulfill their ultimate goal: rewarding shareholders. In a report released earlier this month, Goldman Sachs chief U.S. chief economist Jan Hatzius noted that the strength in corporate profits is “directly related to the weakness in hourly wages.”
“The weakness of wages and the resulting strength of profits are telling signs that the U.S. labor market is still far from full employment,” Hatzius wrote.
To conclude, one must always keep in mind that Marxists are essentially critics of capitalism. As the literary critic Frederic Jameson pointed out in a 2012 interview, there really isn't that much politics or utopian visions in Marx's major works.
Frederic Jameson: I know this is probably surprising for people who always think of Marx in political terms, but there is really very little mention of any political action in Capital. There is certainly the implication of the kind of society that could come out of capitalism and also of the contradictions that could lead to the end of capitalism and I am not saying that Marx was not political or didn't constantly think of political strategies, but Capital is not a book about that. It is a book about this infernal machine that is capitalism.
