york | A recent exchange on capitalaspower.com, titled ‘Capitalizing Time’, suggests a possible confusion regarding our claims, so a clarification is in order. Over the years, we have argued that the relationship between sabotage and distribution tends to be nonlinear. Up to a point, sabotage redistributes income in favour of those who impose it; but after that point, sabotage becomes ‘excessive’ and the effect inverts. One illustration of this nonlinearity is given by the relationship between unemployment and the capital share of income.
In ‘Capitalizing Time’, Blair Fix plots this relationship, with the income share of capitalists on the vertical axis and the rate of unemployment on the horizontal axis. However, the low-pixel graphics of the chart are too crude to reveal the nonlinearity. Figure 1 corrects this shortcoming. It shows the same relationship, but with finer graphics that make the nonlinearity visible (the definitions and sources for all figures are given in the Appendix). Note that, unlike Blair, we use the capital share of domestic income rather than of national income. The reason is that the latter measure includes foreign profit and interest, which are unaffected by domestic unemployment. In practice, though, the two sets of data yield similar results.
In ‘Capitalizing Time’, Blair Fix plots this relationship, with the income share of capitalists on the vertical axis and the rate of unemployment on the horizontal axis. However, the low-pixel graphics of the chart are too crude to reveal the nonlinearity. Figure 1 corrects this shortcoming. It shows the same relationship, but with finer graphics that make the nonlinearity visible (the definitions and sources for all figures are given in the Appendix). Note that, unlike Blair, we use the capital share of domestic income rather than of national income. The reason is that the latter measure includes foreign profit and interest, which are unaffected by domestic unemployment. In practice, though, the two sets of data yield similar results.
