by A.D. Nachalo
From 2021 through part of 2023 the capitalist ruling class in the United States could not stop bemoaning a so-called “worker shortage” when in fact more people were employed than in pre-pandemic years. What was taking place was not a shortage of workers but an overproduction crises exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. The capitalists had produced more equipment that the workforce could reasonably operate. When not in use, all the things required to make things drain the profitability of what they are still able to be used to produce, causing a tendency for falling profits.
The capitalists at this point entered a hiring frenzy to get their machines in operation. They also increased the hours of exploitation of their existing workers, and they conjured up the myth of a worker shortage to cover up the crises they caused.
During this period, food and rent costs were sent soaring—the real wages of the workers could not keep pace. So while wages formally increased in the so-called “workers’ market”, there was only an illusion of workers’ abilities to negotiate a better rate for the sale of their labor-power. In reality, the increased wages could not purchase the same amount of necessary goods and services as the lower wages could before the crises developed. In this process, the larger capitalists, the monopolies who could suffer the lean times, reaped massive profits by crushing small businesses, increasing the rate of exploitation via the increased concentration of workers, and raised the prices of everything from food to vehicles to reap maximum profits during the crisis. The rising prices ensured that wages had to slowly rise behind them so that there could be workers to operate the capitalists’ levers.
The capitalist is a bloodsucker compelled to increase profits for themselves constantly to avoid becoming like their victims and getting eaten by a larger bloodsucker. This is intrinsic in the capitalist mode of production. To combat the fall in profitability and to halt the modest increase in wages, even wages which are really worth less than they were before, the capitalist is compelled to do away with the overproduced machinery and equipment that tends to collect dust and drain away profitability. Added to the overproduced means of production is also infrastructure and the commodities which cost money to store and distribute.
As the capitalist comes to destroy the overproduced items the prices do not immediately go down, but wages do, and the worker is again forced to maintain jobs they are unhappy with, losing the ability to quickly find better jobs—scarcity of job options is what is meant by a “cooling labor market.” Wages are driven down by more workers competing for the same jobs, combined with the current increases in unemployment, and what follows is a fall in prices as the profit rate stabilizes. This means hardship for those who work and more decadence for those who do nothing but make money through the exploitation of work.
Cyclical economic crises like the one we see now have a specific negative impact on women workers. In spite of the ruling party’s infrastructure plans, available childcare has significantly diminished. This has forced over six million workers out of employment, most of them women who have returned to the chains of house, hearth, and family.
The capitalist’s economists argue that rising prices for services like child care are directly caused by rising wages—it is actually the other way around. When the price of necessary services and goods is increased by the capitalists to compensate for the fact that they have overproduced, the wages of the workers tail behind these, because in order to work one has to have the minimum of sustenance. However, not all workers need to survive and reproduce for capitalism to survive and reproduce, so many lose wages or fall out of employment and into poverty altogether.
The lack of a well-organized left in the United States has resulted in no great efforts to combat rising prices, to prevent firing and layoffs and to combat unemployment and the hardships imposed on those thrust into it. The opposite can be seen in other imperialist countries like France, which maintain stronger working class traditions, as millions take to the streets to combat the government over the increase in retirement age.
To survive the coming adjustments in the current economic crisis it is imperative that workers increase their solidity and organization, that those less aware of how capitalism works are informed by those with a better understanding and brought along to begin confronting it. Newspapers like The Worker exist to help with these tasks.
The way out of the crises of overproduction and falling profits for the capitalist is privation and misery inflicted upon the masses of workers as the means of production, including the workforce itself, undergo destruction. For the workers, the way out is fierce class struggle, forging their own leaders to conduct this struggle in their interests. It is necessary to link every crisis to the instability of the capitalist system, and to rally workers to the necessary task, the reconstitution of the Communist Party, for socialist revolution, full employment and a society driven by common well-being which produces in this interest instead in the interest of chasing profits at the expense of the people.
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