This was the right invoked by a leader of the European employers’ association to justify Renault’s decision in March to close its factory at Vilvoorde on the outskirts of Brussels, throwing 3,100 workers out of a job. The French President. Jacques Chirac, was equally explicit. Factories closing, he said, was ‘‘part of life". All this is very true. Under capitalism firms owning factories and other means of production exist to make a profit.They don’t exist to provide jobs for workers. Firms will only go on investing their capital in production if they calculate this will bring them a profit at the going rate.
If they don’t make profits, or calculate that they wouldn’t, they will hold part of their capital in liquid form, either as cash or as money lent for short periods or used for currency and other form of speculation. They will lay off workers and, if things are really bad, they will close down factories, “disinvest". All this is part of normal life under capitalism.
Things have been bad for Renault. There is overcapacity in the European car industry. In other words, all the car firms taken together have overinvested in facilities for producing cars in relation to the market demand. This has led to intensified competition between them. But who says competition says losers as well as winners. And Renault has been one of the losers.
Its sales have fallen and its share of the market, even in France, has fallen. In 1996 it made an operating loss of £200 million. Under these circumstances it had no choice but to disinvest, to cut back on its productive capacity. This was the only chance it had of staying in the running and of restoring its profitability. The French Stock Exchange understood this. The day after the announcement that the Vilvoorde factory was to close, the price of Renault shares went up.
The workers concerned saw things rather differently: that they had been used and then thrown away, just like a Kleenex as they put it. Naturally they protested. So did other workers, who knew what they meant. On 16 March some 70,000 trade unionists, including 5,000 or so from France, marched through the streets of Brussels.
This march was basically a plea by workers to be treated as human beings and not as commodities. But this is not going to happen under the profit system where workers, or rather their working skills, are commodities, bought by employers whose aim is to make a profit out of them.
The view that the present economic system puts profits before people is in fact more widespread than even socialists sometimes think. An opinion poll carried out in France for the magazine L’Evenement de Jeudi (13/19 March) found that to the question "When you think of the economic system as it operates at present what does that incite in you?”, 41 percent replied fear and 31 percent replied revulsion. Seventy percent thought the economic system "considered the human person as a commodity” and 80 percent disagreed that it "prepared well the future of our children".
No doubt this explains the popularity of a recent book by the novelist Viviane Forrester entitled L’Horreur economique—a title that needs no translating—which mercilessly criticises the present economic system for the way it throws people out of work and leaves them to rot.
The hope must be that this disaffection with the profit system will not be channelled into futile attempts to humanise it—that reformist project has been tried many times this century and failed.
Adam Buick
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