Why capitalist measures can't end unemployment

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Final part of a series by Bob Sutcliffe 1ea-break In arapanese car piant: exporting ROMAN SO WHO TO 63 No answers in the Paris stock exchange: the crisis is worldwide to fight capitalist unemploy- require that further demands ment, it is totally insufficient by culminating in the expropriation itself since would worsen without compensation other aspects of the capitalist capitalist firms would have to be And therefore the interests state expenditure.

When the month of August added over 100 ,0,00 to the unemployment 1 register to put it over two million for the first time since 1934, Thatcher and Prior arrogantly put the blame for this on the workers themselves.

This was just an instance of the way in which the capitalist class both in Britain and elsewhere, makes use of the existence of the mass unemployment it has created to strengthen its propaganda for other aspects of its anti-working class objectives.

Propaganda

So, for example, noW throughout the world, the bourgeoisie is conducting a massive propaganda campaign alleging that it is the greed of the working class itself which creates unemployment.

Workers, by demanding too much pay or refusing to take cuts in pay, are, so the argument goes, "pricing themselves out of a job"

Like other notions which are propagated by capitalist ideology; this one has some power because it is subscribed to also by a large proportion of the established leadership of the working class.

And that occurs because also this notion like other notions of bourgeois ideology, contains a tiny partial element of truth.

It is true that the life of one capitalist factory, threatened with imminent bankruptcy and closure, might in some cases be extended for a time if the workers were forced to take a wage cut so that at existing prices the firm could continue to make a profit.

In a number of cases in the last few months unorganised workers have been "persuaded" by this plausible looking argument.

But the element of truth in the argument is so partial and one sided that in reality it is utterly false.

Measures which might temporarily help the workers of a single capitalist in alliance with their exploiter, cannot if universally applied assist the working class as a whole against their exploiters.

Quite the contrary. General wage cuts under capitalism will not only fail to eliminate unemployment, they would contribute to the creation of unemployment and the intensification of slump.

This is precisely a concrete illustration of the contradiction which Marx emphasised between the production and realisation of surplus value.

One-sided There are equally important illustrations of this central contradiction in the panaceas of the left of the Labour Party and the Communist Party.

Just as the Tories argument, that workers price themselves out of jobs, depends for its power on a limited and one-sided understanding of capitalism, so equally do the favourite arguments of the left reformers that unemployment can be eliminated by government spending and import controls.

The first of these arguments is another example of the failure to recognise the contradictions between the conditions for producing and realising surplus value.

If the problem would go away as many of the Labour lefts imply simply by an increase in government spending then why are the leaders of the capitalist class at the present time so desperate for government spending to be reduced?

While an increase in public spending on useful public works crisis if it were implemented. to create jobs is an essential part of the socialist programme of the working class would unemployment is no unswer ni bradl controls is in fact an almost exact larger scale parallel to the Tories' arguments about wage cuts.

Like wage cuts, import controls involve a section of the international working class allying itself with an appropriate 103581-est 31 section of its own exploiters against other workers and exploiters.

Like wage cuts, import CRONZETEATI controls, if they were generalised would have a detrimental rather than a favourable influence on the interests of the OKS COMELNINES working class.

These examples of the consequences of the contradiction 77° EXISON 241 between the production and realisation of surplus value illustrate that within capitalist relations there is no straightSELLE 4TX BORSK HIS forward non-contradictory way of combatting unemployment or any of the other ills created by capitalist society and its CASUA-715 crisis.

Analysis of the contradiction shows that the interests of the working class cannot be sections, each one of them forming an alliance with "their own" section of the exploiting capitalist class.

ELASABOREI Those interests can only be protected through a struggle in which the working class acts independently of its own exploiters and therefore in unity, both between firms and industries nationally, and between countries internationally-and not in competition with eachother.

And more than anything a struggle must be waged in the workers' movement against the division, which the capitalists need to foment, between full pay rather than redundancies; government spending programmes on useful public works to create new jobs-but at the same time points the way towards the abolition of the system which already refuses to implement such .. obvious measures.

Mass unemployment today is being created in the interests of the capitalist system.

It will not be eliminated by that system though it may contribute to the development of a political response from the exploited classes which capable of expropriating and eliminating private property and so eventually the pursuit of profit rather than social need as a basis for production and employment.

Even the capitalists own statistics show beyond question that in the present crisis the capitalist system is virtually unable to offer any kind of employment to a whole generation of workers.

Under such conditions the words of the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International have renewed relevance.

In that programme, Trotsky argued that the question of unemployment was 'one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralisation and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind.

"Let it perish"

If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish"

Socialist economy and workers self-management will not mean the substitution of mass unemployment by jobs for all; it will mean a revolutionary change in the nature of labour.

Under capitalism labour is alienated; workers are forced to fight for jobs simply in order to survive.

socialist planned économy labour can become the unalienated expression of the conscious decisions of human beings.

Under capitalism the fight against mass unemployment takes the form of a fight for the right to perform alienated labour, but it can only be definitively successful insofar as it is transformed during the course of a struggle into the fight to destroy and replace the system which makes that alienated labour necessary.

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