Capitalism Cannot Cure Unemployment
If you vote for the Tories, the Liberals, the Labour Party or any Party which is prepared to continue the capitalist system, you are voting for unemployment, along with the rest of the ills of capitalism.
It is an insult to your intelligence to ask you to believe that any of these Parties can cure unemployment. If they could, why haven’t they done so before?
Except during wars there never has been a time when there was not unemployment, and every time capitalism lurches into one of its periodic industrial crises, unemployment mounts to staggering proportions.
Under the Liberal and Tory Governments which were in office during the nineteenth century, unemployment was continuous and at times of crisis it got worse. They always promised to abolish unemployment, but all they ever did (and that very tardily) was to make mean, provision through Unemployment Insurance Acts to prevent the unemployed from starving.
Unemployment increased after the last war. It will increase again after this war.
Here are official figures of unemployment under various governments after the last war.
In 1921, under Lloyd George’s Tory-Liberal Coalition Government, unemployment rose to over 2,500,000. Nearly one in four of the insured workers were out of work.
In January, 1924, under MacDonald’s Labour Government, unemployment was 1,374,200.
Under the Tory Government in January, 1928, it was 1,260,506.
Under the Second Labour Government, in January, 1931, it rose to 2,662,842.
In January, 1933, under the National Government, it was 2,955,448.
The spokesmen of the capitalist parties tell you there won’t be unemployment because of the need to repair the destruction caused by the war. They told you the same after the last war.
Speaking about the period after the present war, Mr. A. S. Comyns Carr, K.C., made the following pronouncement: —
“He believed that the problem of post-war unemployment did not exist. On the contrary, the problem of employment after the war was going to be how to find enough people to do the work.” (Speech reported in the Times, March 8th, 1943.)
Exactly the same fallacious promise was made after the last war by Mr .J. R. Clynes, one of the Labour leaders, who was a Minister in the Lloyd George war-time Coalition Government. He said : —
“If there ever was a risk of over-production, causing unemployment, there is none now. For at least a dozen years there must be conditions of shortage which, with the best energy and effort, cannot be removed. We are in arrears. We need have no fear of the supply exceeding the demands.”—(Reynolds Newspaper, November 30th, 1919.)
At the time Mr. Clynes made his statement, unemployment was 500,000. By the middle of 1921, less than, two years later, it was over 2,000,000. Then it; declined but remained well over 2,000,000 until the crisis of 1931 when it slumped to record levels.
This will happen again if the working class continues to vote for the candidates of the capitalist parties.
Under capitalism, goods are not produced solely for use (as they will bs when you decide to vote for Socialism). They are produced for profit. If the manufacturer cannot make a profit, he curtails production or else he tries to cut his costs by reducing wages or installing “labour-saving” machinery. Either way the result is the same—unemployment. The capitalists of all countries are always striving to capture markets from each other. It is impossible for them all to sell their products at a profit because the wages received by the workers are not sufficient to buy the great quantities of goods produced by modern mass-production methods.
The Labour Party claims that higher wages is the solution (though when they were in office in 1931 they cut the wages of government employees and allowed employers generally to do the same). The Tory Lord Beaverbrook now puts forward the same empty policy. His newspaper, the Sunday Express, May 27th, 1945, reports him as follows: —
“His policy for the abolition of unemployment was to raise the standard of living in every country in the world by international agreement, so as to increase the consumption of goods.”
In the first place, there is not the slightest possibility of effective international agreement to raise wages. Even the Allied Governments, within a week of the ending of the war with Germany, were demonstrating their inability to agree with each other on all sorts of problems about European governments and frontiers. Even if ihey did put their signatures to some pions declaration, it wonld never he enforced. Every worker knows that in times of bad trade many employers are able to force individual workers to accept less than agreed rates of wages, even in industries such as agriculture where the minimum is supposed to lie enforced by law. In face of an international agreement to enforce higher wages, some countries would simply ignore it and employers everywhere would protest that they could not afford it. International agreement to reduce wages is a much more likely eventuality.
Note, too, that Lord Beaverbrook, who for years opposed any kind of international agreements and backed his policy of Empire isolation, now talks of international action !
But the basic fallacy of the whole policy is that agreements about wages leave untouched a major cause of unemployment, the introduction of labour-saving machinery. At all times, employers are scheming to get the same output with fewer workers, by introducing new machinery and more efficient methods. During the war this has been enormously speeded up. Coal, cotton and agriculture are three of many industries in which new machinery and methods are going to displace hundreds of thousands of workers. It is estimated that “British agriculture should have no difficulty in producing half as much again as it did before the war with a substantially smaller labour force paid at twice the pre-war rates.”—Manchester Guardian, May 15th, 1945.
How will international wage agreements find work for these armies of redundant workers?
Capitalism cannot exist without unemployment, without the exploitaion of the workers and without trade rivalry with foreign capitalists. Capitalism will go on producing unemployment, crises and wars. It makes no difference whether the Government which administers capitalism is Tory, Liberal, Labour, Common Wealth or Communist. Only Socialism will solve the problem. Through the international action of the working class of all lands capitalism must be abolished and Socialism established in its place. Then the means of production will be owned and democratically controlled by the whole community. Production for profit, trade rivalry and unemployment will be no more. Goods will be produced by the co-operative efforts of all the able-bodied population and will be available freely to meet the needs of all.
Increased production will result not in unemployment, but in increased consumption and greater leisure.