- by Marcus Browning
- The Guardian
- Issue #2159
“Each commodity represents a single unit of capitalist production; each is embedded with the congealed labour power, from the hands and the muscles and the minds of those who made them.”
Marx
The productivity roundtable is a response to the global economic crisis. Workers around the world are being reminded that capitalism is an unplanned and crisis-ridden economic system. Employers always chase maximum profits. The roundtable is about using the new technologies to cut the cost of labour and increase output, lower wages, abolish benefits and cut working conditions. Globalisation has allowed capitalism to double its global workforce. It has also created worldwide wage competition and many living wage jobs have been destroyed. Worldwide, production has rapidly expanded.
Because workers are not paid the full value of what they produce, but only enough for them to survive, the world’s working people cannot buy back all the goods and services. This is the situation we are in now – an economic crisis of overproduction. Working people did not create the crisis, but they bear most of the hardship.
The present crisis has been made worse by the financiers and speculators syphoning off billions of dollars from the real economy of production and consumption and putting it into the casino economy to make quick gains from speculation and gambling on the stock market, adding nothing to the real economy.
Markets cannot be left to function on their own. Deregulation and privatisation have failed because they are anti-people. Profiteering has brought the world to the brink of economic collapse. It’s time to put a halt to these unbridled speculative activities and for governments to re-regulate economies. Put people’s needs first.
It is the Albanese government’s intent to impose the demands of big business on working people.
Capital demands the following: economies deregulated, public enterprises privatised, government-run services contracted out, government controls over investment removed giving capital free movement globally to seek low-wage, and non-union labour to exploit. These policies must end. They have brought misery and hardship.
One of the purposes of the productivity roundtable is to give employers even more freedom to cut wages and conditions and sack workers at will. Here the government’s take-over of the CFMEU serves as a reminder that anti-union laws will be used against workers in this crisis.
The productivity roundtable is a response to the crisis that includes slashing government spending on public services and infrastructure, sackings, wage cuts, evictions, and similar measures pursued by governments and employers. The buckets of public money handed over to bail out financial institutions divert money from the real economy and leaves those who contributed to the crisis free to carry on as before.
The priority of governments should address the needs of people who did not create the crisis, but are its victims.
Immediately raise pensions, wages, unemployment and social welfare benefits.
Increase spending on the public sector and infrastructure.
Create public sector jobs and stop privatising essential services.
Establish a government-run national superannuation scheme paying defined benefits. Investment from this scheme should go to social projects and to build infrastructure.
No evictions. Substantially increase the available public housing.
End restrictions on trade unions.
Cut military spending and scrap the AUKUS war-making pact and the nuclear submarine deal.
Establish a government-owned people’s bank.
Re-regulate the financial sector.
