The Bank of England’s ‘chief economist’ Huw Pill announced recently that workers should stop seeking pay increases and pushing prices higher”. (Britons ‘need to accept’ they’re poorer, says Bank of England economist, The Guardian, 25 April 2023)
For information to those who don’t yet read Marx, this hoary old myth about high wages being the root cause of inflation was debunked 150 years ago.
All bourgeois economists since Marx’s time have been engaged not in furthering our understanding of how capitalism and economics generally work, but in hiding the fact that the system’s secrets have been revealed – and that the truth is not compatible with continued bourgeois rule.
All capitalist economists since Marx’s time have been engaged not in furthering our understanding of how capitalism and economics generally work, but in hiding the fact that the system’s secrets have been revealed – and that the truth is not compatible with continued bourgeois rule.
What a colossal waste of human energy and activity. What a colossal waste of human potential.
Imagine if we lived in a world where scientific discoveries could simply be acted on, in the interests of the people, with no concern about whose vested interests or profit margins might be affected …
Meanwhile, workers are dealing with 17 percent grocery inflation in supermarkets – across the board. And we know that the prices of budget essentials are rising faster than those of the higher-end staples. So real inflation for the poorest workers is far higher than that average figure, and it’s rising all the time.
Wages or profits?
The truth about wage rises is that they reduce profits – they effect a change in the proportion of wealth (wealth which has all been produced by workers’ labour!) that is allocated to workers’ wages as opposed to the proportion that is allocated to capitalists’ profits.
When they tell us not to struggle for higher wages, the employers are telling us to accept impoverishment in the interest of the ‘greater good’ of capital accumulation.
When we struggle for higher wages, we are not bringing down the whole system, we are merely fighting for our right to survive in something approximating human conditions. If we don’t fight for that, starvation level is where we will inevitably end up – with our whole families working 12-14 hour days and dying from exhaustion at the age of 35, as was common in British industry before the passing of the various factory acts in the mid-19th century.
If we want to escape this endless battle of the classes; if we find it ridiculous to endlessly fight merely so that we can sink lower at a slightly slower rate, then we have no choice but to organise ourselves to bring down the whole rotten edifice.
The only escape from such irrational and antihuman conditions is a workers’ state with a planned economy. That’s called socialism.
Start by reading what Marx revealed in 1865 about the relationship between wages and profits.
And then join us!
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