[Translated from broadcast by Gegenstandpunkt Marburg on 7 April 2004]
For the entrepreneurs the worker is first of all the beautiful source of profit. Therefore they can never get enough of the work they buy: The longer, faster, more productive, more flexible the work is, the larger the saleable product that belongs to the company. The worker is secondly an annoying cost factor. In the interest of their profit, companies keep the total wages they pay as low as possible. They employ only the absolutely minimum number of workers necessary for the output, and they then use them to the fullest. At the same time they constantly reduce this minimum by applying new labor saving technology. And then they pay as little to the people they still need as they will put up with. In the effort to press down wages, they pit workers against each other, nationally and internationally: They always take the cheapest and most willing and lower thereby the living conditions of all.
The state does not take exception to the exploitation of its working citizens, but on the contrary: The profit-creating work that the entrepreneurs organize and the employees perform is its basis of existence. Like the entrepreneurs, the banks, the stock exchange and others, the state also lives off the fruits of the work that is managed out of the wage dependent. With taxes it takes part of the profit of capital and the wages of the wage dependent; and if it finances its budget with debts it helps itself to the success of financial capital. Economic policy aims to promote the profitable application of work, this source of wealth and power for the state, and increase its yield. The government always wants more growth from capital than it can manage by itself. It always promotes investment conditions and lures -- at the expense of other national locations -- as much capital as possible to its own territory.
In previous times the welfare state was part of attractive investment conditions -- in times when it was a matter of producing a work force useful for capital. In opposition to the entrepreneurs who killed their workers by starvation wages and endless workdays and against the class fighters who wanted to overthrow these conditions, the government authority ensured the durability of capitalist exploitation. It forced upon the entrepreneurs a limitation of the working day and similar measures. It obligated the workers to pay contributions into compulsory insurance. Since then the working class as a whole finances the survival of its members in their states of distress when they do not earn money because they cannot give work to capital. For state power it was never a question of forbidding the entrepreneurs from making their ruinous calculations with work or forcing them to pay the living expenses of their employees when they cannot work or be allowed to work. Provision for the foreseeable emergencies in the wage laborers’ existence was impressed upon the affected persons by compulsion. Otherwise, as every social-minded politician knows, they would not take precautions at all because they cannot afford to do so with the wages that they earn, i.e. normal wages are not enough for a voluntary formation of the necessary reserves. That means: wages are truly not enough to finance a whole worker’s life. Only by forced redistribution among the insured is it enough. Today this grand benefaction is dismantled.
For years the government was dissatisfied with the performance of its source of wealth: capital does not grow in the country, and if it does then not as quickly as somewhere else. The politicians fight this evil and improve investment conditions for capital by leading a comprehensive fight against wages. If using the millions of unemployed does not promise the entrepreneurs a profit, then they probably must be too expensive and achieve too little. Perhaps with a generally lower wage level they would find more demand -- and if not, the profits of those enterprises that do use workers would rise anyhow. The government is sure that it does not overlook anything in the economic situation if it impoverishes the working majority and relieves capital with thousands of different cuts in secondary and primary wage costs. In times in which there are more than enough workers for all the needs of capital, in all occupations and qualification levels, who are available and look for work, the social considerations of former times are regarded as superfluous.
Millions of unemployed persons show their usefulness for capitalist society if they threaten the social situation of the employed. The threat teaches them that they should not demand anything; that they can calmly sacrifice still larger parts of their take home pay for health, education, and old-age pensions; and also that one does not immediately starve with much less unemployment benefits and pensions. The government relies on this when it criticizes the achievements of the welfare state, which once were supposed to make capitalism bearable for the workers, as an expensive, erroneous trend and rolls it back. The country must no longer afford labor costs as before; and it cannot afford it any longer if it wants to be the winner of globalization. The employees must become poorer so that capital grows faster and the nation advances in the international competition. The wealth of the nation is based on the poverty of the masses.
Actually, the opposing side leaves little room for illusions. The entrepreneurs are uncompromising. Mercilessly they thrash out the lesson that nationally, as well as internationally, there are too many applicants for the few jobs they have to give away, and push through ever-shabbier wages. The representatives of the state are just as uncompromising: They say to the people that there is no alternative to their impoverishment and that it is useful.
Anyone who orates to “stand up, so that it gets better,” answers the bluntly announced conflict very “asymmetrically.” The protest does not fight against the hostile interest and the political power that openly declares it, but against the alleged misunderstanding of the powerful that their interest needs the irreconcilability that they actually show. Labor unionists demonstrate their willingness to compromise against the refusal to comprome of the other side. They declare themselves in favor of the “necessity for reforms,” and know thereby precisely what “reforms” mean today, and demand only that they should not fall so radically and completely on one side, burdening the busy and unemployed wage laborers as they do.
They condemn the latest deterioration and express their agreement with the socially regulated exploitation of former times. Don't they notice what a devastating judgment they express about their source of income if they demand the funding of the welfare state, which they cannot live without? It is a confession that that they cannot pay for themselves and their family from the wages that the entrepreneurs pay for their work – and they can’t support a long life anyhow. If they demonstrate for state protection and social security benefits, they assume that working for the profit of capital makes the working poor and the unemployed open to extortion and wish only that the unemployed persons, the poor, the sick, and the elderly experience a somewhat more sustaining treatment and a little welfare service in their emergencies. Because -- does one have to remind of this? – the welfare state never abolished poverty even in its best days.
The organized workers now experience the state as an enemy that creates its progress from their poverty. They appeal to this enemy as a bad helper in their emergencies that should improve itself -- and which also could improve itself, in their opinion, without damage to its program. They do not want to believe that the goal of the government -- making the nation the strongest growth area on earth in the international location competition -- excludes consideration for working people. They want to know nothing about the announced purpose and the appropriateness of this politics; they criticize it as inadequate, unnecessary, blinded by “neoliberalism” -- and position themselves in no way for the irreconcilability of their vital interests with the success of the nation. Instead their opinion leaders recruit for the protest with the twisted logic that their requests would fit the course of the nation just super, “alternatives are possible” and the nation would have to sacrifice nothing if it would treat its employees better: not growth, not victory in the location competition, not a strong currency and a world power. There they are wrong.
An improvement of the social situation is not to be expected from “stand up, so that it gets better!” which does not want to know an enemy and put an end to it. Of course “another world is possible” – but without tangling with the world-political ambitions of the state and the basic math of capital, this does not go.