The New Age of Mass Unemploymeni

Scan page 6

In a few days time the computer of the less and less appropriately named Department of Employment will print out a figure very close to 2,000,000.

It will be the official total of registered unemployed in Britain in July 1980. It is a figure which means that the TUC's slogan of the last year has already been overtaken by the speed of development of the crisis of the British capitalist It looks a bit forlorn to cry for 'No return to the 1930s' when in terms of the numbers of workers now on the scrapheap of Thatcher's capitalism, we are already there.

The figures for the absolute numbers of unemployed today (in a somewhat larger total workforce) are the same as those of mid-1930, as the very worst period of the great slump approached, and again in mid 1935 as the very slow recovery began.

Snatched The age of mass unemployment, which self-confident capitalist economists and politicians and complacent trade union bureaucrats said was over, is back.

As capitalism once again snatches away the livelihood of millions of workers, and has no useful role for millions more who have never been employed, the conditions are being recreated for the spread of demoralisation and despair, for the growth of divisiveness and conflict within the working class and for the re-emergence on a mass scale of reactionary and barbaric ideologies like fascism.

The task of avoiding such hideous consequences is one which falls to revolutionary socialists.

Only by following in the methodological footsteps of Marx can it be understood that capitalism is unable to solve the problem it has created, also that the solutions offered by the reformists like import controls and more government spending are wrong, and that the only programme which can tackle the problem of unemployment is one based on the independence of the working class from the demands of capitalism and on its international unity.

These articles are designed to contribute to a discussion of the reasons for the new growth of mass unemployment and the programme which socialists must fight for to conquer it.

Contradictions

Unemployment expresses the central contradictions of the capitalist economy in their most naked form.

In the first place, it exposes how capitalist production takes place not because of the usefulness of the goods and services which it produces, not because of the social need for them-but rather because they can be produced and sold at a profit for the capitalists.

Unemployed workers reveal that the economy has the power to produce many more useful things than are being produced. The reason that the surplus labour is not used, in spite of the pressing nature of so many social needs, is that it is not profitable for the capitalists to employ it. ' Yet at the same time we know, as a result of the work of Marx, that profit in the capitaSX7/3 SASS:

SOO: list economy only results from the émployment of workers. The basis of capitalist profit is that capitalists are able to purchase the labouring ability of the workers (labour power) tor wages.

of The use to the capitalist of this labour power is that, unique among all commodities, it can create more value that it itself contains. This surplus value is the one and only source of profit.

So the existence of mass unemployment, at a time when capitalists universally complain of their: failure to make adequate profits, produces a mystery: it profit comes only from the employment of wage labour, why do capitalists not employ all the unemployed workers to make profit?

Part of the answer is that profit never results automatically from the employment of wage labour. Many conditions have to be fulfilled: the productivity of the labour must be high enough, its wages low enough, the market demand for the product sufficient to allow the profit to be made.

All those conditions must be fulfilled simultaneously for profits to be made. And when they are not simultaneously fulfilled for capitalists in general then the system finds itself in crisis-as it is today.

For the capitalists, the conditions for making profits must be re-established once again. And that means that labour during the crisis becomes not just a source of surplus value for the blood-sucking capitalist class-but also a liability.

in order to establish the basis of profitability again, labour, the source of all profit, is not employed; it is sacked, expelled from the production process.

Marx argued that capitalism needed all the time what he called a 'reserve army of labour' -first, to provide the opportunity to expand the most profitable areas of production without causing too many problems to existing activities; and second, in order to regulate wages and force workers in employment to work hard for fear of losing their jobs to the unemployed.

Reserve army

Marx also argued that capitalism had a continuous tendency to recreate this reserve army by adopting new more productive techniques and throwing redundant workers out of work.

If this process did not happen rapidly enough, he believed, then the system would be thrown into crisis and for a time a new mass reserve army would be suddeniy created through a slump.

Marx's view still has extreme relevance today even though in some ways the working of the capitalist economy has changed.

Long boom

During the long boom of the post war period, a period of new expansion of the productive forces of the economy after the ravages of slump and world war, the main capitalist economies experienced near full employment for an extended period, almost for the very first time in their history.

As Marx predicted, this state of affairs was incompatible with capitalism.

Full employment led to the build up of new contradictions in the capitalist economy which have been expressing themselves through falling profitability, astronomical deficits, growing indebtedness, inflation and now the rapid growth of mass unemployment.

The evidence that profitability is still collapsing in Britain could hardly be clearer.

In Diagram 1 the two lines show the rate of return on the real (non-financial) assets of industrial and commercial companies. The thick line refers to the rate of return before tax has been paid, and the thinner one to the rate of return after 'tax.

Unemployment, 1938 The post-tax rate of return has gone down from over 7 percent in the early 1960s to only a little above 3 percent last year. This year it is predicted to be a good deal less than this.

Diagram 2 shows profits in Britain as a total of the national income (GDP-Gross Domestic Product). Quite a large proportion of these are just paper profits resulting from the revaluation of stocks during inflation (this part is known as "stock appreciation")

Of the rest, a rising proportion of total profits for British capital is coming from North Sea oil operations. The rest has all but disappeared.

What all this evidence amounts to is a clear picture of an industry and commerce making on average barely any profits at all, and with no signs of improvement.

. Bank borrowing This is further confirmed by the enormous increase in bank borrowing by industrial and commercial companies-from virtually nothing in 1975, when the last serious recession came to an end, to over £5000 million last year.

Much of British industry is therefore teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

In. Britain today this falling profitability is leading to mass Rate of return / 1963 GLUDING. SEA AC iagram 1 Diagram 2 unemployment in four way!

First, some capitalists ar investing in new more produc tive techniques which requir less labour to operate them il order to try to improve th profits of their companies.

The development of nev micro electronic technology i just an especially dramatic nev example of a process which i inherent in capitalism at al times.

Second, the firms. whic stick to old technology strai! desperately to keep it profitabl by forcing workers to work a the greatest possible intensit and sacking any who are no

Scan page 7

Percentage change in jobs between 197 Wednesday 20

----- pull-quotes -----

13% 12% 11% 10% Ist-i real

10%- 1977