An aggrieved billionaire this week lamented that workers had grown lazy and "arrogant" during the coronavirus pandemic and that many of them needed to be made unemployed for the situation to improve.The Australian Financial Review reports that Tim Gurner, the founder and CEO of the Gurner Group, exp...
I remember when I was younger, having low unemployment was considered a good thing, universally desired it seemed. Only in late stage capitalism is it a requirement that we have people who can’t find a job so the working class doesn’t get too uppity.
Reactionary take in response to billionaires being put in their place by a working class that is gaining back the union culture of the 20th century and pro-labour fervour of the 19th, assisted by the technology of the 21st.
More people are supposed to not have jobs, but at the same time, not be collecting unemployment or public assistance. So basically… go panhandle, live in a tent city, go to prison, or I guess just die is their suggestion.
If they died or went to prison then unemployment would go back down. The truth is they have no intelligent solutions and their economic beliefs are all make believe.
I thought of that but considered maybe they just want people to die, anyway. Agreed, I don’t get the impression this guy is super good at societal engineering or economics, other than as such might benefit people like him in the short term.
This effect was analysed in great detail by Marx in the 19th century, so it’s not a characteristic of late stage capitalism, just of capitalism.
His term “Reserve army of labour” refers to the unemployed.
From Capital by Marx
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour
This is where you realize that capitalists don’t care about improving society, they just care about maximizing profit.
Full employment means full utilization of the productive forces of say society, but it also means there is a high demand for workers and a low supply thus the price of labour increases which is bad for business.
When an industry reaches a certain stage of development, capitalists make agreements with each other (economic cartels) effectively turning into monopolies and begin the cycle of destroying productive forces to increase profits. They reduce labour cost by doing massive layoffs, inflate the price of goods by decreasing production, etc… A very clear example of this is the oil cartel (OPEC), but it happens silently in every single sector.