대규모 실업은 자본주의의 실패 Mass Unemployment Is a Failure of Capitalism

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MAY 11, 2020

대규모 실업은 자본주의의 실패
Mass Unemployment Is a Failure of Capitalism

by RICHARD D. WOLFF


Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

자본가에게 노동자의 해고와 고용의 기준은 이윤
The difficulties caused to workers by record unemployment during the pandemic are a product of capitalism. Most of the time, employers decide to hire or fire workers depending on which choice maximizes employers’ profits. Profit, not the full employment of workers nor of means of production, is “the bottom line” of capitalism and thus of capitalists. That is how the system works. Capitalists are rewarded when their profits are high and punished when they are not. It’s nothing personal; it’s just business.

해고는 불가피한 것이 아니라 자본가의 선택
Unemployment is a choice mostly made by employers. In many cases of unemployment, employers had the option not to fire employees. They could have kept all employed but reduced their hours or days or else rotated off-work times among employees. Employers can choose to retain idled employees on payrolls and suffer losses they hope will be temporary.

자본주의 하에서 대량실업 사태는 주기적으로 발생
However, unemployment is received almost everywhere and by almost all as a negative, unwanted experience. Workers want jobs. Employers want employees producing profitable output. Governments want the tax revenues that flow from employees and employers actively collaborating.
So why has the capitalist system periodically produced economic downturns wherever it has settled across the last three centuries? They have happened, on average, every four to seven years. The United States has had three crashes so far this century: “dot-com” in 2000; “sub-prime mortgage” in 2008; and now “coronavirus” in 2020. Thus the United States conforms to capitalism’s “norm.” Capitalists do not want unemployment, but they regularly generate it. It is a basic contradiction of their system.

자본주의가 시간이 지남에 따라 실업을 생산하고 재생산하는 데에는 충분한 이유가 있다. 그렇게함으로써 이익을 얻습니다 (물론 손실을 겪기도 하지만). “실업자인 (산업)예비군”을 재생산함으로써 자본 투자의 주기적인 급증으로 임금을 올리지 않고도 더 많은 직원을 유치할 수 있습니다. 그러한 급증이 있기 전에 모든 근로자가 이미 완전히 고용 된 경우, 임금 상승과 그에 따른 수익 하락은 투자 급증에 동반될 것입니다.
There are good reasons why capitalism produces and reproduces unemployment over time. It draws benefits (as well as suffers losses) from doing so. Reproducing a “reserve army of the unemployed” enables periodic upsurges in capital investment to draw more employees without driving up wages. Rising wages—and thus falling profits—would accompany investment surges if all workers were already fully employed before such surges.

실업은 또한 노동 계급을 훈련시킵니다. 실업자는, 종종 일자리를 얻기 위해 필사적인데, 고용주에게 기존 직원을 더 적은 임금으로 일하고자하는 실업자 후보로 교체 할 수있는 기회를 제공합니다. 따라서 실업은 임금과 급여에 대한 하락 압력으로 작용하여 이윤을 증대시킵니다. 간단히 말해서 자본주의는 실업을 원하기도 하고 원하지 않기도 합니다. 그것은 지속적으로 유지하고있는 실업자 예비군을 주기적으로 늘이기도하고 줄이기도 함으로써 이러한 긴장을 표현합니다.
Unemployment also disciplines the working class. The unemployed, often desperate to get jobs, give employers the opportunity to replace existing employees with unemployed candidates willing to work for less. Unemployment thus operates as a downward pressure on wages and salaries and thereby a boost for profits. In short, capitalism both wants and does not want unemployment; it expresses this tension by periodically adding to and drawing down a reserve army of the unemployed that it continually maintains.

그 예비군은 이데올로기적 광택이 완전히 지우지 못한 냉혹한 현실을 드러냅니다.
That reserve army exposes a stark reality that no ideological gloss ever fully erases.
실업은 자본주의에 도움이되지만, 사회에는 도움이 되지 못합니다. 오늘날과 같이 실업률이 매우 높을 때, 그 주요 차이점은 가장 눈에 띄게 나타납니다. 오늘날 많은 실업자 수백만 명이 생산의 대부분을 중단한 동안에도 소비를 계속 유지하고 있는 것을 고려해보세요.
그들은 사회적으로 생산 된 부에서 소비 수단을 계속 사용하지만, 더 이상 고용되어 있을 때처럼 사회적 부를 생산하거나 추가하지 않습니다.
While unemployment serves capitalism, it does not well serve society. That key difference is most glaringly in evidence when unemployment is very high, as it is today. Consider that today’s many unemployed millions continue much of their consumption while ceasing much of their production. While they continue to take their means of consumption from socially produced wealth, they no longer produce nor thereby add to social wealth as they did when employed.

따라서 실업은 부의 재분배를 수반됩합니다. 여전히 고용된 사람들에 의해 생산된 부의 일부는 그들로부터 떨어져 나와 실업자에게 재분배되어야 합니다. 세금은 그 재분배를 공개적으로 달성합니다. 누구의 세금으로 실업자의 소비를 위한 자금을 조달하는가를 놓고 고용인과 고용주, ​노동자와 자본가는 투쟁을 합니다. 이러한 재분배 투쟁은 종종 가혹하고 사회적 분열을 야기하게 될 수도 있습니다. 개인의 가정에서, 고용인의 소득과 부의 일부는 마찬가지로 실업자에 의한 소비를 가능하게하기 위해 재분배됩니다: 배우자 간, 부모 자식 간, 친척 친구 이웃들 간. 노동 계급은 자본주의가 정기적으로 그들에게 부과하는 실업에 대처하기 위해 항상 그들의 소득과 부를 재분배해야 합니다. 이러한 재분배는 일반적으로 노동 계급 내에서 많은 긴장과 갈등을 야기하거나 악화시킵니다.
Unemployment thus entails wealth redistribution. Part of the wealth produced by those who are still employed must be redistributed away from them and to the unemployed. Taxes accomplish that redistribution publicly. Employees and employers, labor and capital struggle over whose taxes will fund the consumption of the unemployed. Such redistribution struggles can be and often are bitter and socially divisive. In the private sphere of households, portions of the incomes and wealth of the employed likewise get redistributed to enable consumption by the unemployed: spouses share, as do parents and children, relatives, friends, and neighbors. Working classes always redistribute their incomes and wealth to cope with the unemployment capitalism so regularly imposes on them. Such redistributions typically cause or aggravate many tensions and conflicts within the working class.

국가가 실업 문제의 해결사로 나서야 한다
Many public and private redistribution struggles could be avoided if, for example, public re-employment replaced private unemployment. If the state became the employer of last resort, those fired by private employers could immediately be rehired by the state to do socially useful work. Governments would stop paying unemployment benefits and instead pay wages to the re-employed, obtain in return real goods and services, and distribute them to the public. The 1930s New Deal did exactly that for millions fired by private employers. A similar alternative to private capitalist employment and unemployment (but not part of the New Deal) would be to organize the unemployed into worker co-op enterprises performing socially useful work on contract with the government.
This last alternative is the best because it could develop a new worker-co-op sector of the U.S. economy. That would provide the U.S. public with direct experience in comparing the capitalist with the worker-co-op sector in terms of working conditions, product quality and price, civic responsibility, etc. On that concrete, empirical basis, societies could offer people a real, democratic choice as to what mix of capitalist and worker-co-op sectors of the economy they prefer.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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Richard Wolff is the author of Capitalism Hits the Fan and Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens. He is founder of Democracy at Work.