This month, thousands of unemployed people will ignore the call to link Hands Across Britain. The last thing they want to do is to draw attention to the fact that they have no jobs. Instead, they will be quietly returning to the Mediterranean for the spring. The winter sports are now well behind them. The hunting and shooting seasons are over. And they are coming back to their yachts and villas and hotels in the better class resorts all around the shores from Portugal to Greece.
It does not worry them that they are without jobs. They do not suffer depression through feelings of uselessness or lack of purpose in life. They do not fret that their skills are being superseded by new technology. Their self-respect is not damaged in the slightest because they do not work. In fact, they would be insulted if you seriously suggested that they might need to.
The reason for this, of course, is that they are not members of the working class. They do not queue to sign on at the Unemployment Benefit Office. They are not concerned about being credited with their National Insurance contributions, or obtaining Supplementary Benefit, or Rate Rebate, or Rent Allowance, or any of the other scraps of relief for destitute poverty which are becoming essential for a growing percentage of working class people. They have ample wealth. The dividends, rent or interest on their investments flow into their bank accounts in what must seem like a natural stream needing only occasional tending by their stockbroker or accountant. The necessities and even the ordinary comforts of life arrive as a matter of course, so that they are free to get on with the business of living an interesting life.
Nearly all of them are born to this life style, and see nothing remarkable in it. Their family lives and public schooling, followed by the hectic club and social life of Oxford and Cambridge, have given them the confidence and social polish to live like "ladies and gentlemen", receiving courteous service and luxurious surroundings as their due.
In very different surroundings, thousands of youngsters born into the working class in the last twenty years have begun to accept a dole from the state as their due. Finding no employer to buy their working abilities when they have left comprehensive school or university. they have reconciled themselves to a low effort existence on a low standard of living. If they have left their parents' home, as many have, they live on scratch meals in cold, damp rooms and enjoy wearing second hand clothes. They get up late in the morning because the occupation of doing nothing is warmer and less boring when done in bed.
The forthcoming Conservative election manifesto promises to put an end to this. What concerns Conservatives, however, is not the boredom and frustration of a life of poverty, but the possibility that these youngsters, like their social betters, will grow up with no wish to work. According to Lord Young, the Employment Secretary, the manifesto contains plans to prevent workshy adolescents going straight from school to dole. Those who fail to get a job must accept a place on a Youth Training Scheme. If they refuse, their payments will be stopped. He was asked in a BBC radio interview in March if this scheme really amounted to conscription of the young unemployed. He said. “I would call it the conscription of common sense. I don't think many young people would say, 'I am just entitled to get money and lie in bed.' " But, of course, that depends on whether the young people belong to Lord Young's class or ours.
The Youth Training Scheme, like the succession of schemes launched during two Conservative governments, have almost no organised training in them, because the facilities simply do not exist. The merits of the schemes from the government's point of view are mainly twofold. In the short term, forcing people into workplaces has the effect of exerting a downward pressure on the wage levels of those who are in work. The long-term purpose, however, is to provide work experience. If working class youngsters are to be worth employing the next time industry is ready to make a profit out of them. they must be accustomed to the world of work. They must knuckle down to the discipline of obeying orders and accepting the hierarchical structure of management and bureaucracy. They must come to accept as a fact of life the discomfort and grime and squalor that exist in so many thousands of workplaces. They must get used to the boredom of endlessly repetitive or meaningless operations. They must fight the daily fight to get to work on time, to punch their clock card before they incur a pay stoppage. They must develop a tolerance for the length of the working day. They must get into the rhythm of the working week. And they must learn to look forward gratefully to a lifetime of this stultifying drudgery as being far preferable to being unemployed.
This month, Lord Young and the wealthy unemployed class he represents must all be gratified to see that they have continued support in their schemes to keep the British working class keen to be exploited by them. Support from whom? From the British Labour movement and the political parties of the Left.
Hands Across Britain is a campaign that pleads for jobs. Like the Right To Work marches of a few years ago, it is a thoroughly pro-capitalist demonstration.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!" they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wages system!" (Karl Marx: Value, Price & Profit, 1865, sometimes entitled Wages, Price & Profit).
Marx demonstrates repeatedly in his writings that it is not any malfunctioning of the capitalist economy that causes working class people hardship and distress. It is the very system of employment itself: the core of capitalism. Members of the capitalist class are able to spend the spring yachting or gambling on the Riviera only because, somewhere. there are workers producing the wealth that flows into their bank accounts. And their bank accounts accumulate into vaster and vaster fortunes with the onward strides of technology because they own all of society's means of production and distribution and administration. All the new advances and inventions and constructions created by the workers belong, according to the rules, to the owners.
Because the great majority of us do not own this sort of wealth we have no choice but to try to sell them our ability to work for the greater part of our waking lives. Whether they buy and what price they pay depends on the market and our power to bargain. But on average it will be the cost of our keep. When we can not produce an acceptable level of profit for them, they do not buy — we are unemployed.
Margaret Thatcher and other members of the present government have repeatedly outlined what they see as the solution to this problem of unemployment, of not being able to sell our working abilities: we should drop our prices (wages). To encourage this, they have started a scheme which subsidises, at £15 a week, employers who pay less than £55. But it is happening, in any case, in those parts of the country where unemployment levels are high. In Sandwell in the West Midlands, for example, an 18-year-old hairdresser earns £31.75 gross for a 50-hour week. Low pay in this area has become just as much a scourge as unemployment. And it has a long way to go yet if market competitiveness operates fully in determining wages.
Factory workers in South Korea were featured in a television programme earlier this year. In the clean, modern Samsung factory making television receivers the women assembly workers worked a 12½ hour day for 26 days a month for $250, which works out at about 48p an hour. South Korea has a booming economy. The South Korean government, which viciously controls its workers, has also imposed very strict controls on the foreign capital from all over the world which is clamouring to invest there. The Korean capitalist class, and the American companies like Ford, General Motors, IBM, which have ties with Korean companies, do not want to let outsiders share in their exploitation of these new and defenceless recruits to the world's working class. Accordingly, foreigners may invest only through special Korea Funds and Eurobond issues. In this way, Korea gets fairly cheap capital by promising freer investment opportunities in the future.
It is not unemployment but employment that sucks the life blood of Korean workers. And it is the lack of any other means of making a livelihood which forces them to submit to it. They would be worse off if they were unemployed but not much. For them — as for us — unemployment is one of the features of the employment system. What really matters to workers, in or out of work, is how big a fraction of the wealth which they have produced they can get for themselves. Trade union organisation and years of political activity in the older capitalist nations have achieved some modest and precarious safety margins. But the rise of new industrial nations like those of Eastern Asia, while old industrial nations like those of Europe decline, demonstrates the weakness of this way of trying to combat the power of capital. It also demonstrates very forcibly that the working class has got to organise worldwide (as capital does) if we are to avoid being repeatedly outmanoeuvred and used to defeat each other.
While the working class accepts employment we shall inevitably get periodic high unemployment with it. as one of its phases. But what we really want to achieve is freedom from employment. What prevents us is not a shortage of wealth, but the fact that the capitalists own and control all the means of making wealth. And they won't — can't — let them be operated unless they yield a profit. And the logic of profit is a 325-hour month in Korean sweat shops while there is 12 per cent unemployment in Europe.
In human, social terms, this is idiotic. The waste is colossal. The quality of life for most members of our class is poor if not abysmal. We are quite capable of producing ample wealth for everyone — but not until we have got rid of employment and begin to work for ourselves.
Ron Cook
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