The most recent dramatic development along these lines is the rediscovery of: (1) the conflict between labor and capital (underlying and shaping the accumulation process and giving it its class bias), and (2) the growth of monopoly power. Thus in attempting to understand why the U.S. economy “is still by most measures, deeply depressed” while “corporate profits are at a record high,” Paul Krugman has recently argued, most notably in a December 9, 2012 New York Times column entitled “Robots and Robber Barons,” that this might have to do with these two factors.
Over and over again Krugman has indicated surprise at where his analysis is leading him. “Are we really,” he writes, “back to talking about capital versus labor? Isn’t that an old-fashioned, almost Marxist sort of discussion, out of date in our modern information economy? Well, that’s what many people thought; for the past generation discussions of inequality [within orthodox economics] have focused overwhelmingly not on capital versus labor but on distributional issues between workers…. But that may be yesterday’s story.” In a related blog entry on December 11, entitled “Human Versus Physical Capital,” he wrote: “If you want to understand what’s happening to income distribution in the 21st century economy, you need to stop talking so much about skills, and start talking much more about profits and who owns the capital. Mea culpa: I myself didn’t grasp this until recently. But it’s really crucial.”
Krugman is concerned in particular with the issue of the dramatic drop in the labor share of GDP. He attributes this in part to a labor-saving bias in technology, which he refers to somewhat metaphorically as the rise of “robots.” Reaching back into the past he observes in “Robots or Robber Barons” that “serious economists have been aware of this possibility for almost two centuries. The early-19th-century economist David Ricardo,” he tells us, pointed to just such a tendency in his 1817 Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, which “included a chapter on how the new, capital-intensive technologies of the Industrial Revolution could actually make workers worse off, at least for a while.” Krugman, however, stops short of referring to that other “serious economist” who famously expanded upon Ricardo’s thesis: Karl Marx. Still, Krugman recognizes the significance of his own recent awakening in this respect: “I think it’s fair to say that the shift of income from labor to capital has not yet made it into our national discourse. Yet that shift is happening—and it has major implications” (“Robots and Robber Barons”). Moreover, he is alert to the dangers this spells for the system. “If income inequality continues to soar,” he writes, we are looking at a “class-warfare future” (Krugman, “Is Growth Over?” New York Times, December 27, 2012).
