Pandemic Immiseration

Abstract

During the post-Second World War economic boom, Marxists were hard-pressed to defend the key tenet that capitalism tends to raise the rate of exploitation of workers by lowering their real wages relative to labor productivity and profits. Amid unmistakable improvements in material living standards for most workers in most advanced capitalist countries, it was hard to argue that the working class was undergoing relative impoverishment, let alone absolute impoverishment.

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