Daily Times

It would have been hilarious were it not so devastating. The only panacea the Pakistani religious and liberal political elite and their intelligentsias are united on is the policy of sustaining this decaying capitalist economic system by subscribing to cruel Thatcherite economic doctrines. Corporate investment has been declared the ‘economic miracle’ for growth, development, poverty alleviation, employment generation and the cure for all ills tormenting society. The exact opposite is the truth! This is not only flawed but has disastrous ramifications for the working masses. What these masters of our destiny do not want to admit is that the coercive capitalist system, which they serve and whose vicious exploitation they perpetuate, is historically redundant and economically bankrupt. In countries like Pakistan it has been putrid and has been ravaging society for generations but now, even in the most advanced countries, it has become an absolute fetter to sustain social development and improve living standards for the vast majority of the population.
In their lust to increase the rate of profits they can go to any extreme, from devastating wars to the most excruciating forms of squeezing human labour at minimal costs and in the shortest possible time. They are using the most modern technological developments and creations for this and only this purpose. In the last few decades, corporate investment has radically shifted its character from labour intensive to capital intensive methodology. With new capital investments and privatisations, ever-fewer workers are being employed and are being replaced by robots and other modern gadgets to reduce the ‘variable’ capital costs and hence rocketing their profits, leading to massive redundancies and swelling unemployment to unforeseen levels.
The top multinational corporations have been cutting jobs ferociously in the last few decades. At its prime in 1988, Kodak, the iconic US photography company, had 145,000 employees. In 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy. The same year Kodak went under, Instagram, the world’s newest photo company, had 13 employees serving 30 million customers. The ratio of producers to customers continues to plummet. When Facebook purchased WhatsApp (the messaging application) for $ 19 billion last year, WhatsApp had 55 employees serving 450 million customers.
In the automobile sector, Daimler Chrysler cut 6,000 jobs in 2006 and this process has continued ever since. Ford Motor Company fired 30,000 employees in 2012, shutting down 14 plants. The electronic giant Sony cut 20,000 jobs in 2006 in a ‘cost-cutting’ exercise. Sanyo, its main rival, reduced its workforce by 14,000 in the same year. In the steel industry, the largest steel producer, Alcelor-Mittal, owned by India’s billionaire magnate Laxmi Mithal (who has not built a single steel furnace in India till last reports) has boosted profits by cutting labour costs. From 2005 till 2010 it had sacked 45,000 workers from its factories worldwide. In the InfoTech industry, Oracle Corporation started with 5,000 redundancies in 2005. Its rival, Hewlett Packard, reduced its workforce by 19,500 in the same year. The CEO of Procter and Gamble and Gillette Corporation, James M Kilt, boasted on March 31, 2005, “We have taken the company from 40,000 employees to 28,000.”
In the banking sector, the Bank of America Corporation netted a profit of $ 21 billion and acquired one of the largest credit card providers, MBNA, with a $ 35 billion cash and stock deal in 2006. Yet it fired 6,000 employees shortly after the merger. In the telecommunications sector, during the merger of AT&T and SBC in 2005, SBC announced plans to eliminate 7,500 jobs while AT&T cut 5,100 workers’ jobs. In the media industry the story is no different. As AOL acquired MCI Corporation on February 14, 2005, 7,000 workers were laid off.
In an article on the World Economic Forum website, Robert Reich wrote, “It is now possible to sell a new product to hundreds of millions of people without needing many, if any, workers to produce or distribute it. New technologies aren’t just replacing labour. They’re also replacing knowledge. The combination of advanced sensors, voice recognition, artificial intelligence, big data, text mining and pattern-recognition algorithms, is generating smart robots capable of quickly learning human actions, and even learning from one another. If you think being a ‘professional’ makes your job safe, think again…The two sectors of the economy harbouring the most professionals — healthcare and education — are under increasing pressure to cut costs. And expert machines are poised to take over…This is obviously fanciful, but when more and more can be done by fewer and fewer people, the profits go to an ever-smaller circle of executives and owner-investors…Meanwhile, the rest of us will be left providing the only things technology cannot provide — person-to-person attention, human touch and care. But these sorts of person-to-person jobs pay very little.”
A future of almost unlimited production by a handful for consumption by whoever can afford it is a recipe for economic and social disaster. This crisis-ridden capitalist economy is lurching towards a situation in which more and more is generated by fewer and fewer people who reap almost all the rewards, leaving the rest of society without enough purchasing power to keep the economic cycle moving. It simply cannot function indefinitely. In the 10 years since 2005, there has been the biggest financial crash in 2008 in the history of capitalism alongside high unemployment and deprivation. The exploitation of labour has increased manifold with this burgeoning crisis of capitalism. The corporate CEOs and owners have increased their wealth astronomically inspite of the crisis and the crash. The crushing drudgery of the workers is also increasing in the largest capitalist economy in the world, the US.
According to Forbes magazine, “In 1950, the average US factory worker produced $ 19,500 of output, and by 1976 this had doubled to $ 38,500. The output per worker doubled again to $ 74,400 by 1997 (21 years later) and then doubled again to $ 152,800 by 2010 but it only took 13 years for the last doubling because worker productivity has been accelerating. Last year, manufacturing output per worker increased to a new record high of $ 156,500 and almost 10 times the output per worker in 1947.”
If such is the gravity of the situation in advanced capitalist countries, the exploitation and coercion of the toilers in countries like Pakistan is harrowing. Yet the politicos and experts have the cheek to talk about foreign investment and privatisation as remedies for this catastrophic crisis. A morally sick and obsolete system is the only choice being put forward to the oppressed masses by these reactionary rulers at the helm of politics and the media. To talk about the transformation of the economy from its current traumatic market basis to a planned economy is venomously rejected by the so-called ‘learned’ of the land. To counterpose scientific socialism or communism as a way out of this misery has been made a social taboo: insanity. Yet socialist revolution and a planned economy under workers’ democratic control and management, in which all production is not for profit but fulfilment of human needs, is the only solution.

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com