The myth of new jobs

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THE Tories are going into the election with an official jobless figure of over 3 million, a real total of 4 million or more, and official predictions that the dole queue will continue to get longer. Yet they still have a good chance of winning.

Why? Because they have convinced many people of their line on jobs - that no short term measures will do any good, and in the long term the only answer is to sweat it out and improve British capitalism's competivity. As industries like steel and cars dwindle, new ones will rise to take their place.

This is an old theory — part of Thatcher's 'return to Victorian values'. There is also a long-standing reply to it from a working class point of view — by Karl Marx.

It is true, said Marx, that as the process of profit-making expands, so also, in general, does the employed working class. But the process, by its very nature, goes in fits and starts.

"The enormous power inherent in the factory system of expanding by jumps, and the dependence of that system on the markets of the world, necessarily beget feverish production, followed by over-filling of the markets, whereupon contraction of the markets brings on a crippling of production" . And the whole cycle "depends on the constant formation, the greater or less absorption, and the re-formation of the industrial. reserve Moreover the specifically capitalist nature of the way it is done for profit and not for need technical progreśs becomes a positive agent for "Machinery not only acts as a competitor who gets the better of the workman, and is constantly on the point of making him superfluous. It is also a power inimical to him... weapon for speed-up, for increasing employers' control of the work process, and for depriving skilled trades of their positions Thus little credit can be given to the bourgeois economists' faith that capitalist development will eventually produce compensation for the misery, the sufferings, the possible death of the displaced labourers during the transition period that banishes them into the industrial reserve army.

"The demand for labour is not identical with increase of capital, nor supply of labour with increase of the working class... Capital works on both sides at the same time...

«'The overwork of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of the reserve, whilst conversely the greater pressure that the latter by its competition exerts on the former, forces these to submit to overwork and to subjugation under the dictates of capital. The condemnation of one part of the working class to enforced idleness by the overwork of the other part, and the converse, becomes a means of enriching the indiThe last 15 or so years - with improved transport technology, more refined division of labour, and the fuller development of conditions for capitalist manufacturing in the Third World - have seen productive capital more and more operating in terms of a world industrial reserve army. Thus the masses of unemployed in the Third World become a weapon used by capitalists to enforce speed-up world-wide - and conversely, super-exploitation of employed workers in the Third World becomes a weapon to increase unemployment world-wide.

What consolation remains in "the hideous theory... that after a period of growth and transition, even its crowning success, the factory system based on machinery grinds down more workpeople than on its first introduction it throws on the None of this is inevitable. It is a result of the system of production for profit, and can be fought just as that system can be Public service jobs can be defended and expanded. A shorter working week - work-sharing under workers' control - can be imposed without loss of pay. Factories where closure or mass redundancies are announced can be occupied, to demand nationalisation under workers' control. The big banks and monopolies can be taken into common ownership (without compensation), and production organised according to a democratically-organised plan rather than the fluctuations of profit.

The alternatives exist. The problem is to mobilise the labour army"' of the unemployed.

production -- means. that expanding the 'reserve army'.

of strength. vidual capitalists….' streets"?

fought. novement to fight for them. Peoples march for jobs AGWU TOP TORY

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Peoples march for jobs