Full Employment and Capitalism [1950]

In the nineteenth century there had been talk in labour circles of ‘the right to work’, and socialists had used the existence of chronic or recurrent unemployment as a leading count in the indictment of capitalism for its inhumanity and inefficiency. Talk of the possibility of full employment in a capitalist world derives from the publication in 1936 of Lord Keynes’s famous theory of the factors which determine the general level of employment. As soon as one examines actual situations, it becomes evident that under conditions of capitalism a position of full employment is a highly unstable one: unstable in the sense that a small pressure in either direction is likely to give rise to a rapid cumulative movement, uphill or downhill into falling production and falling demand. If capitalism could be made to operate as though it were socialism, then of course we could have full employment as a stable and permanent condition of things, and much else besides.