Economic Recovery And Our Jobs

The news of the day is that the economy is bouncing back. You will be forgiven if you have heard this before and not seen evidence of a recovery. You will also be forgiven if you have gone tone deaf to news items announcing or predicting a recovery just about any day now.

Economic output fell by 6 percent in the US and Europe in late 2008. Japan took a 12 percent hit and South Korea took a 20 percent hit. Financial assets worldwide may have declined by $50 trillion. The banking sector talks about its losses in the trillions, just as the US government talks in the trillions when it comes to recovery packages and funds needed to keep the financial sector solvent. Global job losses may hit fifty-one million this year. The new issue of International Socialist Review has an interesting article by Greg Albo dealing with this situation.

So what are the signs of economic recovery today? The stock market is doing better, the pace of the loss of the US gross domestic product slowed to 1% in the last quarter, there is a decline in business inventories and government spending increased. Government spending may result in some jobs being created, or in stopping some job loss, but none of the other indicators mean that employment will pick up. As we have said before here, we can have a "recovery" without job creation.

The roots of our crisis are certainly in the worldwide financial crisis and the defaults in the US subprime mortgage market starting in 2007, as Albo says. But even before then there were signs that economic activity was slowing. We think that the cause of the crisis lies in the demands by the capitalists and the capitalist governments that a new global division of labor be put in place, that production and distribution of goods and services be further "rationalized" along the lines of lean production, that consumption patterns be changed and that government services be either contracted out or abolished entirely and that the real costs of reproducing and producing labor power be shouldered in greater measure by workers and the poor globally. The point or intent of the crisis has been precisely to reshuffle the deck so that fewer of us are working and able to afford all that is being produced for a time. "Recovery" might well bring fewer jobs, higher prices, different methods of production and different means for distribution and consumption and radically different national and class divisions.

As if to prove our point, there appeared in The Wall Street Journal last Friday a letter from Bill Burbage of Cayce, S.C. Mr. Burbage is apparently fond of quoting Adam Smith. Burbage says, "No entrepreneur has ever had an objective of 'creating jobs.'" He goes on to say, "People go into business to make a profit. If any jobs are created in the process, they are created because there is no way to avoid it. Employees are expensive."

My favorite sentence in the letter is this: "To create more jobs, the sovereign must remove as many obstacles as he can between the entrepreneur and his ability to make a profit. No other stimulus is necessary."

"The sovereign" is an odd turn of phrase. Are capitalists becoming so backward- looking that some are adopting the titles of another era and other nations? It's odd and dangerous enough that a particular capitalist might assume the trappings of other times and places, but the mind boggles with what might happen if more of them take up this practice.

So--no matter what your wage, your sovereign looks at you as an expense to be eventually eliminated. It was never his idea to employ you in the first place. You are, at best, an inconvenient coincidence in the bigger picture of his economic project. Your best hope in this bigger picture rests with your sovereign being able to get all of the money he can in his hands as quickly and with as little problem as possible.

Here comes the recovery. It's right around the corner.