Written by Jehu
Eaves of Charley2U. This was sent by email to me and many other left activists
worldwide, with an appeal to share far and wide.
We are urgently
calling for a shift in the strategy of all communists that takes into account
the new reality created by the emergency measures imposed by the state on the
capitalist accumulation process. Because of this pandemic, the state has been
forced to shut down the capitalist accumulation process. Workers are off
the job not because of a general strike, but because the state has closed all
non-essential businesses.
There are
millions of workers who are now set free from productive employment; they are
unemployed. We need to fight to convert this huge mass of unemployment into
free time for every member of society. The alternative will be total class war,
the likes of which has never been seen in the whole of the history of
capitalism. It will unfold against the backdrop of extreme deprivation and
barbarous competition for jobs among the working class as the state tries
desperately to re-establish the old relations of production.
It is essential
that prominent communist thinkers today take the lead in urging communists
worldwide to shift their focus to the urgent need for a radical reduction of
hours of labor. This will be necessary if we are to prevent savage competition
among the proletarians over jobs when nation states attempt to restart the
capitalist accumulation process with billions still unemployed.
The failure of
communists to take urgent action right now will result in unnecessary suffering
by the working class of every country.
1.
The pandemic
public health emergency is NOT a crisis. According to Marx, “crises are always
but momentary and forcible solutions of the existing contradictions” within the
mode of production. They arise from the working out of the contradictions
within the mode of production itself. This emergency is obviously external to
the mode of production. Based on reports, it began with the emergence of a
viral infection of unknown origin in the People’s Republic of China, which
rapidly spread to engulf most of the world market. The pandemic soon forced
most nation states to take aggressive public health measures to contain it.
Among these measures were so-called social distancing to slow the spread
of the virus. These measures led states to close down many so-called non-essential
business operations and confine citizens to their homes.
The public
health measures thus interrupted both the sale of labor power and the
circulation of capital. To implement a necessary public health measure to
contain the spread of a deadly disease, nation states were compelled to
interrupt the global capitalist accumulation process itself; they were forced
to shut it down.
Now, some may
think the mode of production can be restarted. We question this assumption. It
is not as simple as they think to restart the capitalist accumulation process.
For one thing, no one knows the value of anything. Capital is value in motion,
self-expanding value. What is the value of capital that is no longer
self-expanding? What is the value of labor power that cannot be sold at any
wage? These questions are not settled on a spreadsheet, but in a competitive
struggle between and among classes. When people are told to go back to work,
that competitive struggle will begin. It likely will not end with the
restoration of the normal operation of the capitalist mode of production.
2.
The emergency
measures necessary to slow the spread of the contagion has led to the
interruption of the process of capitalist accumulation as millions of workers
were directed to stay at home and non-essential capitalist firms were forced to
close. This has produced an economic contraction that is likely larger than any
previous contraction in history. As a result, the various nation states have
been compelled to step in and implement assorted relief measures to replace the
wages of the working class -- lost because of social distancing measures -- and
to bail out idle and failing capitalist firms that are teetering on the edge of
collapse.
These
interventions nation states have made to contain the pandemic have given
communists the world over the opportunity to approach the coming crisis with a
degree of coordination that is far greater than anything seen in recent years.
The working classes of every country now face almost the exact same set of
difficulties -- massive unemployment and lost wages. This calls for the same
response: a dramatic reduction of hours of labor in all countries.
The alternative--massive
stimulus and relief measures--just will not work for most countries. The
capacity of nation states to implement relief measures designed to replace the
wages of the working class -- lost because of social distancing measures -- is
not uniform among nation states. The United States, of course, can operate
rather freely, since it controls the world reserve currency. Similarly, nations
states, like Germany and China, who have accumulated large reserves of foreign
exchange, can, if they choose, expend some of these reserves to maintain their
national capitals on life support for some time.
Aside from
these few countries however, the ability of most countries to run the massive
deficits necessary to finance these interventions are questionable. Some countries
have standing to borrow in a pinch, but the capacity to maintain their national
capitals on life support for long periods of time is circumscribed by foreign
and domestic creditors. And at the bottom of the pyramid are the vast majority
of nations that have few resources and are utterly dependent on foreign
assistance. Communists have to offer an approach that works not just for the
rich countries, but for all countries -- even, and especially, the poorest.
3.
To paraphrase
that American officer in Vietnam, the fascists found it necessary to destroy
capitalism in order to save it. At a minimum, it is obvious that capitalist
accumulation has largely come to a standstill. But here is the thing: capital,
as we all know, is value in motion, self-expanding value. How does value in
motion come to a standstill? What happens to capital, when value itself no
longer circulates as self-expanding value? Can one simply turn capital off,
like a light switch, for weeks, or even months, and turn it back on again, once
the “All clear” has been given by the public health authorities?
Communists
should not be so quick to answer, “Yes.” We have never been here before. And,
largely, our immediate actions will be determined by the answer we give. If we
assume capital is dead, we will act one way. If we assume capital is alive and
just waiting to spring back into action, we will act another way. The unusually
swift action that led to the adoption of a relief package in Washington
suggests the fascists do not think capital is as resilient as communists seem
to think it is.
The Federal
Reserve has predicted that as much as 30 percent of workers will be displaced
from their jobs as a result of this emergency. It is difficult to tell how much
of this has already been realized, since the archaic unemployment reporting
system completely broke down in this emergency, according to one media outlet.
Basically, the March monthly non-farm payroll report, which tells us how bad
unemployment has become, shows that overall unemployment in the United States
fell only 701,000 persons (although millions already have lost their jobs over
the last two weeks). The reasons for this is the way the data is collected and
published by Washington. (The Economic Policy Institute has an article on the problem.)
The horrendous
damage actually done to the productive forces by this emergency may be hidden
from official unemployment statistics for a month. This is a problem. Often,
reality is only real for communists if the government reports it and the
media echoes it. But the way the U.S. government collects data is deliberately
designed to blunt public perception of things like rising unemployment and
inflation (for obvious reasons).
However, we do
have access to slightly more reliable proxies. There is the
BLS weekly initial jobless claims report which shows unimaginably huge
jumps in jobless claims over the last two weeks of nearly 10 million persons.
This is more jobless claims than the whole of the 2008 financial crisis.
We have other
indicators that suggest massive damage as well: the auto industry remains
completely shut in, subway ridership is down 75%, airline travel is down 93%,
and retail foot traffic is down 97%.
Beyond this,
the European services purchasing managers index (PMI), a forward looking survey
of purchasing managers in the services sector, is near apocalyptic levels.
Italy has fallen from 52.1 to a deeply contractionary reading of 17.4; Spain
has fallen from 52.1 to 23; France collapsed from 52.5 to 27.4 and Germany
plunged from 52.5 to 31.7.
Taken together,
these assorted proxies suggest the public health measures to contain the
pandemic are inflicting savage and ongoing damage to the capitalist accumulation
process.
Another, less
direct reason to expect unprecedented carnage to the productive forces is that
we suspect the terrain of the world market has been prepared for this event in
the same way years of drought prepares a region for uncontrollable wildfires.
The literature has long marked the accumulation of a very
large mass of superfluous capital and a very large population of surplus
workers, resulting from the transformation of agriculture and the improvement
in productivity of social labor in industry, combined with state efforts to
engineer continuous expansion of empty labor in the tertiary sector, through
massive deficit spending.
The measures
taken in the present emergency appear to have punctured a bubble that has been
at least nine decades in the making — back to the Great Depression. We cannot
over-emphasize how significant this situation is. We already have accumulated a
huge surplus population from previous economic contractions that have not been
absorbed back into productive employment from both the 2001 and 2008 crisis,
respectively. The emergency measures taken in response to this pandemic will
easily increase those numbers by a magnitude at least. And it is likely that
profound changes in the economy predicted to take place over the next decade,
(e.g. widespread automation), may now be realized in a matter of months or even
weeks.
You do not have
to be a catastrophist to understand what has happened here. In two short
weeks, capital values have been destroyed and workers have been set free from
production on an unimaginable scale seldom seen in a full-blown economic
contraction lasting years, perhaps decades. And this has occurred not just in
one or two countries, but in almost every nation on the planet and all
together. We hardly think anyone contemplating this situation can operate from
the baseline assumption that capitalism has survived.
This suggests
our options as a class going forward will be to accept an attempted restoration
of the capitalist accumulation process by the state or press ahead with
fundamental alterations of all existing relations.
4.
The state is
determined to restore capitalist accumulation. They will not let anything
prevent the return to the pre-Covid-19 status quo. They will throw the kitchen
sink at the problem, but we don’t expect much original thinking here.
On track one,
we think the state will follow the standard Keynesian recession/depression
playbook. That means a huge fiscal/monetary stimulus bolus and massive tax cuts
targeted to businesses and the very wealthy. The Democrats and the Republicans
will argue as usual over who gets how much of what — as if it makes a
difference under wage slavery which slave master gets the actual subsidy.
Following the United States, Japan has announced a relief package said to amount to 25 percent of GDP. Italy
has proposed a stimulus plan that amounts to an astonishing fifty
percent of its GDP. Spain has floated the idea of a universal basic income --
but they have been saying the same thing for at least four years.
Anyone
expecting any creativity here is likely to be disappointed. We haven’t seen
anyone thinking outside the box so far, when it comes to “getting the economy
back on its feet.” If creative thinking is going to happen, it will happen only
when this uninspired stuff fails. The Obama administration, for instance, never
attempted to recover any of the jobs and output lost in the 2008 crisis over
its eight years. It just let all of that lost output and those lost jobs go. We
expect the Trump administration will do the same.
Meanwhile, on
track two, the state will roll out the notorious class warfare wishlist. This
starts with elimination of things like the minimum wage, OSHA, and various
labor protection laws, as well as some federal version of a right to work law,
etc. NLRB, as useless as it is, will likely be abolished or just gutted. (In
this vein, Trump’s NLRB is making it almost impossible to unionize in the United States.)
This will be
total class war, the likes of which has never been seen in the whole of the
history of capitalism. It will unfold against the backdrop of extreme
deprivation and barbarous competition for jobs among the working class. Even as
we speak, the plans are being laid for this total class war in the White House.
5.
The only way to
prevent capitalist accumulation from restarting is to immediately reduce hours
of labor. We need to replace the present emergency shutdown of non-essential
businesses with a strict reduction on hours of labor of a similar magnitude. By
radically reducing hours of labor and imposing compensation through a dramatic
increase in the minimum wage, we can at least impose severe restrictions on the
scale of any future attempt to re-establish capitalist accumulation.
How this works:
It is estimated
that this emergency shutdown of non-essential businesses will eventually lead
to roughly 47 million workers being unemployed, furloughed or otherwise idled. This
translates into an estimated reduction of GDP by about 30-35% and actual
employment by about 30%. The approach we advocate is simple: since we are
already looking at a large drop in GDP and employment, we should convert this
drop into a dramatic reduction of the 40hour workweek to 24 hours per
week. This would impose a reduction of hours of labor on a scale that is
similar in scale to the 30% unemployment already made necessary by the public
health emergency.
There are five
advantages to this approach.
First, the
absolute accumulation of excess capital and a surplus population of workers has
been stopped for the most part, globally. By locking in a deep reduction of
hours of labor at this point, we prevent the capitalists from restarting it. We
could go further and reduce hours of labor still more to 15 hours or even 10
hours — imposing draconian limits on accumulation and forcing introduction of
automation to compensate for a rapidly shrinking labor pool.
Second, as satellite data is showing, the present level of
employment hours is having a dramatic impact on global climate change.
Reduction of hours of labor has an immediate impact on this problem that can be
visualized noticeably. We would be doubling down on this positive development.
Third, we
produce a labor shock effect: as the labor hours supplied to the market fall,
wages rise. Writers also are beginning to note that reduction of hours of labor
has a positive impact on the cohesiveness of the working class and their
ability to organize. This is, by far, the most important factor for communists
to think about. Reduction of working hours undercuts competition and fragmentation
within the working class by reducing the aggregate amount of labor supplied to
capital.
Fourth,
reducing hours of labor, especially in the rich countries, will, naturally,
cause capital flight. As bizarre as this sounds, this is actually a good thing.
Africa, Asia and Latin America need investment. They will not get it unless
capital currently locked up in the rich countries is forced to flee to the less
developed regions of the world market. A dramatic reduction of hours of labor
here will accelerate this process.
Fifth, reducing
hours of labor will accelerate automation. There is no better way to force
capitalists to introduce improved methods of production than to dramatically
drive up labor costs. Reducing hours of labor can do this by increasing the
cohesiveness and bargaining power of the working class — just as leaving 47
million workers unemployed can weaken the working class, by leaving it
balkanized and fragmented.
Finally, we
want to warn those who are complacent about an attempt by the state to restart
the capitalist accumulation process that the damage done to labor markets in
this period is unimaginably extensive. Once this pandemic emergency is declared
over, people will be told to go back to work. Millions will already have lost
their jobs by then. To give an example: retail brick and mortar is likely never
coming back.
That’s one out of every four workers in the United States. Where
will those workers go for jobs? Forty-seven million workers frantically looking
for work at the same time is not something we should ever want to see happening
in the United States. But this is exactly what is likely to happen if the
emergency passes and restoration of the status quo ante is attempted.
6.
People
should be clear that the emergency measures taken to control the pandemic are
not the actual crisis. They are only the trigger to the actual crisis. The crisis, i.e., the sudden and
forcible adjustment of the global labor market, will begin once the emergency
measures to contain the pandemic are relaxed and workers are told to go back to
work.
Forty-seven
million have been unemployed in the United States — billions worldwide. This
implies competition on a scale that is unimaginable to us today. All this has
been prepared by the impact of the emergency measures taken to contain the
pandemic on capitalist relations of production.
When people are
told to get back to work, millions of workers in the United States and billions
more around the world will no longer have jobs and no prospect of finding a
job. Capitalist relations of production will experience a sudden, sharp and
forcible adjustment to this new reality (again, the likes of which we have
probably have never witnessed in the history of the mode of production.)
As those who
are familiar with Marx’s theory are aware, a crisis is not some sort of magic
carpet ride to communism. It is a violent eruption that cannot, of itself, go
beyond the limits of the mode of production. We believe this will be the
granddaddy of all crises.
7.
There is one
idea communists must work on now to prepare. It is extremely important to forge
solidarity between workers who are still at work and the millions who have lost
their jobs. This effort must be given the highest priority by communists now,
before the emergency is declared over and workers are forced to return to the
labor market looking for jobs.
We suggest
communists everywhere at least form mutual aid funds of workers helping workers
to provide mutual aid between the employed and unemployed -- no state, church,
NGO or charity involvement! (We would even discourage labor union involvement,
since they are often controlled by the fascists.) Efforts should be made to
take up collections of money, food and clothing at your workplaces to aid the
unemployed.
This campaign
should be a pure worker to worker mutual aid effort. Committees should be formed
covering both workplace and community. People need to facilitate it by doing
research in their communities to find out who has already lost their jobs in
their community, collect names etc. We want to build ties of solidarity within
the class outside the state, church and charities. If these ties are not forged
between the employed and unemployed, workers will be set against one another
when the crisis hits.
We are urgently
calling for a shift in the strategy of all communists that takes into account
the new reality created by the emergency measures imposed by the state on the
capitalist accumulation process. Because of this pandemic, the state has been
forced to do what communists have been aiming to do since the time of the
Communist Manifesto: shut down the capitalist accumulation process.
Admittedly, it
has happened in a way we did not expect. The impact of the public health
measures taken to respond to the pandemic on capitalist relations of production
turned out to be a black swan. And it takes a second to wrap our heads
around the fact that it happened. Workers are off the job not because of a
general strike, but because the state has closed all non-essential businesses.
This did not happen the way we expected it to happen. But it happened! The accumulation
process has been shut down. This is actually where we are now!
The state has
been forced, very much against its will, to shut down all non-essential
businesses; to shut down the accumulation process itself. What can we do this
very instant to keep it shut down? There are millions of workers who are now
set free from productive employment; they are unemployed. We need to fight to
convert this huge mass of unemployment into free time for every member of
society. The alternative is one relief bill after another as the state tries
desperately to re-establish the old relations of production.
We cannot let
another opportunity pass us as happened during the Great Depression when
capital ground to a halt and workers fought for a shorter work week, but were
given the New Deal, Auschwitz and World War II instead.
