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Unemployment

Large numbers of people are poor because they can’t find work. Large numbers more are underemployed. But why? There’s certainly plenty of work that needs to be done. There are houses, schools and hospitals to build, clothes to make, recreation areas to develop, food to grow, areas to reforest, rivers to be cleaned. And the more people who work, the more there is to pay them with: more houses, food, clothes, services. That’s all that money represents anyway. It should be a more or less straightforward task matching up the people with the jobs. What’s the problem then? Between the people who want to work and the tools they need to do the work stands a tiny group of capitalists. Their business is to make money. And you can’t use the machinery they own unless it will do that. They prefer to run their factories at 50% or 75% of capacity, to keep products scarce enough to be profitable - and are able to do so when they begin to dominate an industry. They also need a pool of people unemployed to keep wages low. Workers who fight for better wages can always be sacked and replaced with someone from the dole queue. Unemployment is inevitable in a society based on profitmaking. The primary aim of production is not to meet people’s needs, but to produce as fast and as cheaply as possible. The fewer the number of workers to produce a particular product, the higher the profits, so there is a constant drive to replace workers with machines. Of course, in the long term, more unemployment increases the risk of economic crises by reducing the number of people who can pay for products. But, competing against each other to survive, each individual corporation considers only its own short-term interests, not those of society as a whole. In the process of trying to maximise profits, however, intercapitalist competition actually results in overproduction - even with factories running under capacity. Individual companies competing against each other try to undercut the competition’s price, and end up making too much food, too much clothing, too many buildings, too much furniture. But "too much" is not more than is needed, only more than can be sold at a profit. When the capitalists can’t sell their products at a profit, they cut back production. Cutting back production means they need fewer workers, so unemployment increases and fewer workers are able to buy the things they used to buy. Then capitalists cut production further, in a vicious circle that can lead to a prolonged recession. New technology also means unemployment. Not because it should. Ideally, new labour-saving technology should mean that everyone can work less and still have the same income. But in the hands of the capitalists it’s introduced only to lower the wage bill. Often, new technology results both in increased unemployment and longer working hours for those who aren’t sacked.

An Irrational System

Already there exist the wealth, technological and productive power and creativity to provide for every human being’s basic needs: food, shelter, health care, safety and education. In fact, there’s more than enough. The world’s productive capacity (its farms, factories, assembly lines, transport networks, communication and information media, housing projects and public works infrastructure as well as its technical and scientific knowledge and capabilities) has developed to such an extent as to be able to provide for global abundance. In grain alone, the US annually produces enough to feed all of sub-Saharan Africa for 30 years. So developed are humanity’s productive capacity and knowledge that it opens the possibility of a massive leap in science, art, culture, environmental sustainability and human solidarity. But for capitalists, wealth is "wasted" if it is used for anything except increasing their profits. Fulfilling human needs is a "luxury" the capitalist system can’t afford. Instead of using this fantastic potential to improve human life, the capitalists and their governments use it to kill. New technology and science are used to produce weapons to defend the interests of the rich at whatever cost. The nuclear mushroom cloud is a symbol of how horrifically destructive the capitalist system has become and how urgent the struggle is to get rid of it.