Peculiarities of the Labour Market

Abstract

Again: up to now we have been talking solely about foundations and only about the foundations of what is relevant ‘in principle’ or ‘in essence’ to our problem, i.e. what relates to the principle of explanation of the (economic) essence of the wage phenomenon. With regard to ‘praxis’ all that has been said is only a ‘tendency’ or, as applied to ‘practice’, only an extremely crude ‘first approximation’ which requires not only a consideration of the concrete circumstances of each individual case but in many areas a general theoretical refinement. Regardless of the impossibility of ever exhausting a real phenomenon theoretically, the ‘practical’ value of this fundamental theoretical knowledge is actually much greater than is usually admitted, for it throws indispensable light on a whole series of practical questions; nonetheless in essence it is so abstract that in many cases it performs only one practical service, which is however much more important than is accepted by those who consider theory to be destroyed by a reference to deviant facts; this service involves facilitating the diagnosis of such deviant facts. For as we have seen it makes a very big difference to know whether a phenomenon belongs to the essence of the free market economy or whether it is to be explained in terms of a structure different from the one inherent in the free market economy.