ABSTRACT
In recent weeks, numerous reports have appeared in the newspapers about companies in various branches of manufacturing — the textile industry, the lumber business, ironworks, etc. — which have found themselves forced by the present hard times to make more or less sweeping cutbacks in their operations, to reduce working hours, or to dismiss redundant labour. As everyone knows, this phenomenon very frequently accompanies economic crises, it is their saddest and at the same time their most irrational, almost incomprehensible consequence. Everything else makes sense — but not unemployment. That prices go up and down, that wages are raised or cut according to the circumstances, is a natural and perhaps inevitable consequence of the vagaries of the business cycle. But that it can ever pay to do nothing, to leave the available productive forces unused, in other words, that it should be possible to reverse an economic decline by means of inactivity — this seems, at least at first glance, like a self-contradiction, a pure paradox. Looked at in the abstract, it only seems possible on one condition, namely, that the product of the labour has sunk so much in value that it does not even correspond to the quantity of foodstuffs and other necessities that are required to maintain the actual muscular exertion associated with the labour, in other words, the difference between the worker's vital needs at work and at rest. As a matter of fact, a suspension of work for this very reason is met with as a regularly recurring phenomenon among peoples living in primitive conditions. When the harvest has been brought in, the Russian peasant and his whole family go to bed and sleep the winter away, like hibernating bears, in order to conserve their stocks of food as far as possible — at least if the harvest has turned out below average. This used to be the case with Irish farm labourers, too, and others. But it would be surprising, to say the least, if the same thing were possible in countries with an advanced material culture, and the issue therefore seems to require more thorough investigation.
