WITH unemployment set to go up by at least one million this year, to three million, the government is in a panic.
Its panic is not about what to do to prevent the mass sackings that are already taking place, since that would mean carrying out socialist policies.
It is concerned at taking action to lower the numbers of registered unemployed, to try to make the government look a little better, while at the same time cutting down the expenditure on unemployment benefits, which is set to grow massively.
Minister Purnell is to outline plans today to ‘help people back to work’ who have been out of work for six months.
With unemployment rising rapidly there are no new jobs! The government is planning to put all those who have been unemployed for over six months onto Workfare, where they have to work for a private company for their benefit, and thus come off the register of unemployed. This, at the same time, will undermine the legal minimum wage.
The propaganda spin on this is that the government is determined to avoid ‘writing off a generation if they become long-term unemployed’.
In fact, the government is bringing back the former Health Secretary, Alan Milburn, who will chair a panel of ‘industry leaders’ to supposedly ‘help people from disadvantaged backgrounds progress in key professions’.
Milburn is an arch-privateer and as health secretary was determined to privatise the NHS at a rate that even Gordon Brown was uncomfortable with. He had to go.
He is just the man to hand over the unemployed to private agencies.
Another scheme that is even more blatant is the plan to keep this summer’s 300,000 university graduates off the Jobseeker’s Allowance by offering them internments for three months with major companies for little more than the pittance that students get as ‘grants’.
Additionally, the situation is so desperate that the government has already declined to deny that it intends to raise, as an emergency measure, the school leaving age to 18 years.
The truth is that this government and all of the capitalist governments are fiddling while Rome is burning all round them.
Capitalism cannot provide jobs for either the working class or the youth.
The only way forward is to replace bankrupt capitalism with a socialist planned economy, under which the productive forces are nationalised and under workers’ management, and where the development of production is planned, with the plan is drawn up with the full participation of the working class.
Commodity production for the market is ancient history.
Planned production to satisfy people’s needs on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, on a world scale, is the way forward.
Otherwise, the capitalist slump will lead to a trade war, and then a new imperialist war to redivide the world amongst the capitalist ruling classes.
Immediately, the nationalisation of the banks and the major industries in the UK would lead to a programme of public works, including the building of millions of council houses, to house the homeless, and at the same time provide jobs and skilled training at trade union rates of pay for millions of workers and youth.
The financial and industrial power of the workers state will then be used to develop a series of new industries and technologies, not to satisfy some consumer fads, but to further develop society in a way that capitalism has shown it is absolutely incapable of doing.
The conditions will then be created where the individual will be able to develop fully, as part of the development of the universal, changing it and being changed by it, and not, as is now, be distorted, stunted or destroyed by the ‘Big I’ of capitalism.
Through the socialist revolution, the death agony of capitalism will give way to the beginning of the real history of humankind. This is the way forward.
