Ilias Ioakeimoglou
The rate of long-term unemployment in Greece is very high
The capitalist class maintains the right of private property to determine where, for what purpose, how much and above all how the country’s productive system will be used,i.e. the machines and tools, the building facilities and generally everything that is used in order to carry out the production of material products and services. It is the production by which the rest of us also live, whether as employees or as consumers, and therefore its realization is a fundamental material condition of our lives.
From this right of private property (to define where, for what purpose, how much and above all in what way we will produce) derives the right of capital to destroy enterprises or parts of them when they do not perform the desired profit. It therefore retains, implicitly but in a very clear way, the right to destroy the material conditions of our lives when they do not function satisfactorily as capital, that is, when they do not yield the profit that these capitalists themselves have decided is satisfactory. And in neoliberal capitalism, profit is satisfactory not only when it is high, but also higher than last year. (This, indeed, is not just a choice, it is an obligation vis-à-vis finance capital, one function of which is to punish those firms that show below-average profitability).
The right upon the conditions of our livesis practiced by the capitalist class in post-Memorandum Greece in a particularly transparent way: the size of the production system decreased from 2008 onwards and with it the maximum number of employees who have the possibility to work has decreased. In more detail, those who are not necessary for the utilization of the reduced capital stock in Greece, are not able to sell their labor skills, they are surplus, because their skills cannot be sold in the business sector except under the condition that they can to exploit capital, to generate profits – that is their utility to capitalism, to private sector enterprises, to economists and ideologues of the system. Thus, the maintenance and reproduction of the working classes is not carried out or is carried out incompletely, partially, for the simple reason that there are portions of these classes who are deprived of their only or main income.
In such a situation, where the reproduction of capital cannot include in its movement the reproduction of portions of the working classes, they are excluded from the world of work, partially or completely, temporarily or permanently. When their exclusion is partial or temporary, their knowledge and skills are not destroyed, and so they remain in the state of working reserves that remain available for exploitation. Conversely, when the exclusion from the world of work is complete and of long duration, the unemployed pass into the state of a unusable population which loses its knowledge, its skills and its ability to produce.
The mass of those unemployed who do not have the opportunity to work even when the productive system is fully employed, amounts to 400,000 people in Greece. Of them, 2/3 are long-term unemployedwhich are already on the way to the redundant population, because it is very difficult for an employer to hire an unemployed person who has been out of work for two or three years or more, assuming that the unemployed person has lost both his work skills and social his skills, those necessary for his inclusion in the collective worker.
From unemployment to long-term unemployment and from there to excess population and poverty, the road is wider the faster the production system shrinks and this is exactly what happened in Greece from 2008 onwards. At the end of the road is its large tank overpopulation, unnecessary for the capitalist economy and by extension for society to the extent that it is organized based on the values of bourgeois culture.
The production of this redundant population, the increased rate of unemployment and the excessive long-term unemployment, in Greece (see in the diagram), go back to the shrinking of the productive system and this in turn goes back to the peculiar regime of labor exploitation that has arisen with the implementation of the three memoranda and thanks to the maintenance of the euro as the national currency. It is a regime of exploitation which yields, to the class of capitalists, especially after 2020, high profits by degrading or destroying, without the slightest hesitation, the life of the subordinate social classes.
Published in the PRIN newspaper on the 6-7/4/2024 sheet
2024-04-11 10:43:42