Editorial 1st Quarter 2025

                             FIRE MAGAZINE, THE MOUTH PIECE OF AILRSA

                                        Editorial February 2025

 

                                                      Chief Editor  Thota Hanumaiah.

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                         The Assault on Working People

Under the capitalism, there is an assault on the working people  worldwide, not just in the third world but in the advanced capitalist countries as well. This assault is at three levels, economic, political, and ideological.

The assault at the economic level has been much talked about, and is the outcome of both higher inflation and greatly much increased unemployment that currently afflict the capitalist world. The higher inflation was started by a spontaneous increase in profit-margins administered by big capital in the United States in particular, which then spread all over the capitalist world and the enhanced unemployment is the conjoint result of both world capitalist crisis, and of official attempts to curb inflation everywhere at the expense of the working class by deliberately cutting back on employment. The official hope is that the workers’ bargaining strength gets sufficiently lowered by having greater unemployment so that they cannot bargain for higher money wages to compensate for the price-rise, because of which inflation would eventually peter out.

Capitalism in the early years of the Industrial Revolution in Britain,  was characterised by a rise in poverty; likewise late capitalism is also witnessing today,   an increase in the level of absolute deprivation for the working people. The average real wage of a male worker with the current inflation would be much lower than in the past decades. There can be little doubt about the increased impoverishment among  workers, even in the advanced capitalist countries. For countries like India and the rest of the third world, there is clear evidence of a decline in the nutritional level of the population, as measured by the declining per capita absorption of foodgrains, in the period since the 1980s. From this, one can infer an unambiguous increase in the absolute level of poverty among the working people. It follows therefore that the economic assault on the working people in the capitalist world, above all the working poor, remains ever growing, unabated.

Such an economic assault however is impossible to sustain without curbing the political rights of the working people; that is, without a simultaneous political assault on them. And this political assault has taken the form of neo-fascism that has emerged in a big way all over the capitalist world. Neo-fascist regime is heading in many countries now, and in many other countries neo-fascist formations are waiting in the wings to take power.

The political assault on the working people unleashed by these neo-fascist formations combines outright repression of workers and trade unionists, and a statutory abridgement of workers’ rights, with a change in discourse by “othering” a hapless vulnerable section of people and creating hatred against them, among the majority, on the lines of divide and rule. Such a change in discourse, not only pushes issues of everyday material life of working people to the background, but  also divides them along religious or ethnic lines, so that they are not able to mount a united resistance against the economic deprivation which has been inflicted upon them.

What becomes particularly striking now, is that quite apart from this economic and political assault on the working people, the ideological assault is aggravated.   This too is not confined to occasional odd comments made by this or that person. Such anti-working people comments are being made all over the world, which suggests the rise of a conjuncture of ideological assault on the working people.

In India, in the face of this economic deprivation, various political formations, attempting to acquire political power within an economic regime incapable of producing larger employment, have been offering transfers to the people. These transfers, too small to nullify the economic impoverishment of the working people, have nonetheless been attacked by the ruling neo-fascists and the heads of the government labelling it as being “freebies.” Although the ruling party itself has now been forced by electoral compulsions, to offer such transfers to the people, this attack on transfers has now been taken up by others. The business executive who had recently asked for a 90-hour week for workers, has jumped in, claiming that such transfers, or “freebies” as he too has chosen to call them, induce people not to work. And now a Supreme Court judge too has joined this chorus, suggesting that transfers prevent people from working since they can just sit at home, do nothing, and still collect their “freebie.” Had the Supreme Court judge made it mandatory on the government to provide decent jobs to people in lieu of transfers, then the matter would have been different; but his remarks were made only against transfers, not for providing decent employment.

Of course, such people would argue that jobs are there but they are going abegging; but they provide not only no evidence for such a claim, but also no evidence on the level of wages that are being offered for such jobs which they claim are going abegging. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) itself has found that in India there is a severe lack of decent employment opportunities. The government’s employment data are seriously flawed because they show women’s unpaid work in family enterprises to be growing, and this growth is counted as growth in employment; but this growth is reflective of a lack of gainful employment elsewhere and hence constitutes what economists generally call “disguised unemployment.”

The same ideological assault on the working people is occurring in the US as well. Elon Musk who heads the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) set up by Donald Trump, is likely from his remarks to effect cuts in Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security benefits for the poor, an apprehension expressed by Senator Bernie Sanders, recently. And this attack on transfers to the poor is being carried out, according to Sanders, so that money can be diverted towards granting tax-cuts for the rich, among whom are people like Musk himself, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg.

This is an ideological offensive with a vengeance, which conforms to the tenets of the so-called “supply-side economics.”  John Kenneth Galbraith, the liberal economist, had said that the essence of “supply-side economics” was the proposition that “the rich work better if they are paid more while the poor work better if they are paid less.” This is being propagated now, widely.

There is however an irony here. The pursuit of this ideology that seeks to justify taking money away from the poor and giving it to the rich, will only accentuate the capitalist crisis even more. Since the poor consume more out of a Rupee that comes to them compared to the rich, such redistribution will only mean a further shrinkage in aggregate consumption demand; and since capitalists’ investment depends on the expected growth of the market that in turn depends upon the actual experience of market growth, simply giving them tax-breaks will not increase their investment one iota. The net result will be a reduction in aggregate demand (taking consumption and investment together) which will only worsen the crisis.

John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s, who was a defender of capitalism and was afraid that something like the Bolshevik Revolution might overtake capitalism in the West, had suggested that for saving the capitalist system it was necessary to boost aggregate demand through government effort; but what we are witnessing in contemporary capitalism is the very opposite of this, which will no doubt have far-reaching political implications. In the result the poor and working class may have to face a miserable life.