Commentary
Is Full Employment Possible in a Capitalist
One of the great contributions of Karl Marx was to prove that the scourge of unemployment could never be eliminated under capitalism. In fact, he proved that a constant army of unemployed workers is absolutely essential for the capitalist system to function, both to drive down wages and maximize capitalist accumulation, as well as to provide an adequate supply of workers during the “boom” periods of the capitalist business cycle. Furthermore, as the period of the building of socialism in the former Soviet Union and countries of people’s democracy showed, unemployment is not automatically eliminated with the overthrow of capitalism, but requires the most careful economic planning to ensure that, on a continuous basis, more wealth is invested in a country’s economy than is taken out.
In recent weeks, one political commentator has postulated that by mobilizing the will of the nation this economic law discovered by Karl Marx can be overcome. This commentator points to the experience of the Second World War as evidence that when the full resources of the nation are mobilized the rate of unemployment can be drastically reduced. Of course, the commentator ignores the fact that during the Second World War the full resources of the nation were not mobilized to solve the problem of unemployment. Rather, the full resources of the nation were mobilized in order to ensure the supremacy of one section of monopoly capital in its competition for world domination with another section of monopoly capital.
In the course of this
inter-imperialist conflict, which also had the aim of destroying socialism in
the Soviet Union, over 50 million people – mostly non-combatants – were killed
and tens of millions more were left maimed and destitute. In addition, the
industrial capacity of whole nations was reduced to rubble and hundreds of
millions of people were left without a means of earning a livelihood. On the “bright
side”, unemployment was virtually eliminated in
The experience of the Second World War does not prove that the scourge of unemployment can be eliminated through the mobilization of the nation. On the contrary, it proves that under capitalism unemployment can only be eliminated on a temporary basis in certain countries through the militarization of the capitalist economies and the destruction of vast amounts of labour and capital through war. (Which, in less polite terms, means the murder of tens of millions of workers and the bombing of their factories.) In fact, many economists and historians have argued that the capitalist crisis of overproduction which gave rise to the Great Depression of the 1930s could not have been overcome except through a world war and the resulting massive destruction of the world’s excess productive capacity.
Given the current crisis of overproduction that is gripping the entire world the real lessons of the Second World War should be remembered. As this crisis develops, not only will the inter-imperialist contradictions become more and more exacerbated, but the necessity to destroy the world’s excess productive capacity will also intensify. Just as a world war became necessary during the 1930s and 1940s for the survival and renewal of the capitalist system, so too today such conditions are emerging on a world scale. This underlines the dangers inherent in presenting the Second World War as a model for the elimination of unemployment.