A MULTI-MILLIONAIRE Australian property tycoon, Tim Gurner, speaking at a property summit on Tuesday, spoke out clearly revealing the contempt these mega rich bosses have for workers and the vision they have of a very near future where the working class is forced, under the whip of mass unemployment, to passively accept poverty as the price for keeping the bosses and bankers in profit.
Speaking at a summit organised by the Australian Financial Review, Gurner places the blame for the capitalist crisis firmly on the working class saying: ‘I think the problem that we’ve had is that people have decided that they really didn’t want to work so much any more through Covid.
‘And that has had a massive effect on productivity. You know, tradies (skilled manual workers) have definitely pulled back on productivity. They have been paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years and we need to see that change.’
This is the dominant outlook of the ruling class, reflected throughout the Tory press in the UK and across the world – the working class should have been driven back to work during the pandemic, regardless of the risk to their lives and health, in order to keep the profits flowing.
He rails against the money that capitalist nations were forced to pay out to workers laid off by the pandemic. Exactly the same anger directed at ‘lazy’ workers who lack enthusiasm for slaving away in low paid jobs and fighting for pay increases, that at least go some way towards matching the spiralling cost-of-living increases driven by inflation, is to be found in the pages of the bourgeois press every day in Britain.
Gurner is clear that what needs to be done is to discipline the working class with the whip of mass unemployment.
He bluntly told his audience: ‘We need to see unemployment rise – unemployment has to jump 40 to 50 per cent in my view’, adding: ‘We need to see pain in the economy.’
Pain for the working class and their children of course, not pain for the bosses and bankers.
Gurner made it crystal clear the outlook of the multi-millionaires, who regard their wealth as a right and the working class as little more than slaves with no rights except to be exploited for the profit of the capitalist class.
He told his audience: ‘We need to remind people they work for the employer, not the other way around.’
Having torn aside the mask of a benign capitalist system where workers and bosses exist in a state of mutual cooperation, Gurner openly revealed that far from ‘growing the economy’ to escape capitalist crisis, in fact governments ‘are trying to increase unemployment to get some sort of normality’.
Gurner’s comments provoked a tsunami of anger when they went viral on the internet, causing such a storm that the next day he was forced to apologise saying he ‘deeply’ regretted having made them.
What was really regretted was making public the intention of the capitalist class to turn to mass unemployment to smash the working class and its trade union organisations.
With recession gripping the world capitalist system and inevitably leading to economic collapse into a Great Depression, the bosses and bankers are increasingly preparing the ground for mass unemployment as weak companies go to the wall and only the strongest have a hope of surviving.
That hope is pinned on the ability of capitalism to drive workers into accepting absolute poverty, a return to the days of the 1930s Great Depression where workers held hunger marches in Britain to plead for relief for their families from starvation.
The powerful working class today will never accept being driven back to the ‘hungry 30s’.
Capitalism is in its death agony, not fit to survive any longer and the working class is the only force that can put it out of its misery through socialist revolution.
This is the time to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to provide the revolutionary leadership necessary to put an end to capitalism with the victory of the world socialist revolution.