Twentieth-century inflation indexed labor’s power as a political actor.

Evidence

Warnings of a wage–price spiral were soon revived, and central banks responded with sharp hikes in interest rates. Most episodes of inflation in the twentieth century, however, resulted at least in part from collective wage demands. Inflation was therefore not merely a technical datum but an index of history: the moment that a factor of production, labor, became a political actor with a claim to its share of the collectively generated surplus. It was precisely this metamorphosis that neoliberalism set out to reverse. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 242

Categorization

• XREF: This redefinition of inflation as an index of worker power connects to Milgrom’s work on institutions — the disappearance of collective wage demands is the disappearance of an organized actor. Also a contender for the reader’s diagnosis of why saturation yields no change: labor no longer figures as an organized force. — connects to: Monetary inflation was cast as merely a symptom of governmental and worker misbehavior — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 783; Inflation is a social power contest over bargaining power, not a purely monetary event — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 526
• SEED: A strong essay angle: ‘Inflation as an index of history’ — what current inflation signals about the disappearance of labor as a political actor.