Finding the right words in the middle of disaster is always hard. What is happening now to the working class may be less loud than the two wars and the recent massacre we have lived through, but it is far more deadly. A huge wave of unemployment is hitting the weak foundations of our lives. Low and unpaid wages are making our small world disappear before our eyes. Our lives are melting like snow under a hot sun.
On one side, capital accumulation investing in the production of goods and services by using living labour has slowed down and stopped because of the logic of profit. On the other side, poverty and the crisis of underconsumption are swallowing workers’ lives. Work and production have stopped in many workplaces. It seems that, in a time of crisis, the lives of boss and worker are tied together. The boss’s profit or loss is presented as the worker’s gain or loss. The worker is told to “learn to see his own luck in the boss becoming richer.” But we will explain that, for the boss, the rate of profit is the mathematics of oppression and exploitation, and “entrepreneurial creativity” means finding new ways to pick our pockets.
A crisis of capital accumulation is always also a crisis for labour. At the very least, if capital does not circulate, the worker becomes unemployed. But our unemployment, our empty tables, and our hunger do not by themselves create a crisis for the boss unless we attack him/her because of hunger. More exactly, from the point of view of capitalists, the main thing that decides whether business is good is the rate of surplus value, or the rate of exploitation. This means the relation between the work a worker does without pay and the work for which the worker receives wages. The source of all profit for capitalists and entrepreneurs is the work for which they do not pay workers, the free labour we do for them. The name of this free labour, which the capitalist takes for themselve, is “surplus value.” For example, if we work 8 hours today, the capitalist has certainly put some of those hours into his/her own pocket. S/he will not pay for them, and s/he will not say anything about it. In fact, the rate of surplus value is a measure of our misery and of the happiness of capitalists. If you are a capitalist, the only issue is an economic rationality that pays no attention at all to our lives.
We must also stress that this is not only true of capitalism in Iran. Capitalism takes different forms, but taking surplus value and stealing from labour through unpaid work is part of its nature. If we look at the rate of surplus value, we see that the more the capitalist forces workers to work for free by paying them less and taking more of their labour without pay, the more successful s/he becomes. In this sense, if the capitalist is left alone, s/he naturally moves toward turning workers into slaves. The only thing that can stand against this tendency is class struggle.
When production falls into crisis, as it is doing now, and businesses shut down, capitalists talk about excuses like “lack of raw materials.” But the main issue is somewhere else. In capitalism, the only force that drives production is profit, meaning the production and taking of surplus value. It may be hard to believe, but production under capitalism has nothing to do with human needs, even if some needs are met on the side! For example, right now in many key factories in the country, all the material needs for production including tools, raw materials, and labour exist. Still, these factories have shut down and fired their workers.
Capitalism and its logic of circulation, i.e. the logic of profit, does not care about people’s needs or survival. Production must be profitable, or else it is better, for capital, to shut it down. We will explain how the current wave of unemployment and the repeated closing of factories push workers deeper into poverty, while saving rulers and bosses.
During a crisis of capital accumulation and the shutdown of production, capitalists try in every possible way to increase the rate of surplus value. They try to escape the crisis by exploiting workers more. The wave of unemployment in society is pain for us, but medicine for the boss. More unemployment means more workers looking for jobs, while fewer jobs are available. The result, as we all know, is that the price of labour goes down, meaning wages fall and the rate of surplus value rises.
So, when the sentence “production is not profitable right now” comes out of the boss’s mouth, what s/he really means is simply that workers must allow them to shove their hands a little deeper into their pockets so that it becomes profitable again. Or, as we said, workers are forced to perform more unpaid labour.
At the outset, we said that finding the right words is difficult. Yet the shameless and unrestrained economists of the bourgeoisie, along with the criminals ruling over Iran, have no trouble finding the appropriate words for such a situation (and, of course, providence always seems to deliver them a witness from nowhere!). Arman Khaleghi, Secretary-General of Iran’s House of Industry, Mine and Trade, presents his solution to the current crisis as follows: “Enterprises can, through agreement with employees and solely with their written consent, continue operations for a limited period, for example four to eight months, with the minimum possible pay, in order to prevent layoffs.”
Workers who are fired, just like workers who still have jobs, are still in practice under the boss’s control. The unemployed form a population that can be brought back to work whenever needed but can also be fired again at any moment and for any excuse. This surplus labour force always acts as a tool of pressure on wages, and to put pressure on the whole working class.
The existence of this “army of the unemployed” allows employers to force employed workers to accept worse conditions: to work for lower wages, without insurance and benefits, and to do overtime without pay. There are no more safety shoes or helmets. Sick leave no longer means anything, and at best, it is counted as unpaid leave. The yearly legal wage increase has become a bad joke. Unemployment always hangs over employed workers like a threat. If workers protest low wages, unpaid insurance, or anything else, they are immediately fired and temporary contracts have already prepared the ground for this. Then unemployed workers, who have no money left to live on and nothing left at home to sell for food, take the same jobs for lower wages.
Firing workers or making them unemployed is not, as the bosses say, only a reaction to war conditions or the result of economic pressure. It is a permanent method for crushing workers. The Islamic Republic also stands beside the capitalist and the employer. It presents this humiliation of workers not as a deep problem, but as a temporary hardship needed to reconstruct the country after war. It changes labour laws, or closes its eyes, that employers can treat workers in any brutal way they want. This is why we say that the Islamic Republic has never retreated from its role as a government serving the preservation of capitalism and confronting the working class and the toiling masses, not in war, not in peace, and not even during a ceasefire.
Capitalism creates ideas in order to turn the world upside down and divide us. These ideas may seem natural and obvious. But Marxism teaches us to take the knife of criticism to everything that has been fed to us as “natural,” “obvious,” and “certain.”
For example, it seems obvious that some people are “middle class.” But in truth, the middle class is nothing but layers between the working class and the capitalists. In the end, these people suspended between two classes are either wage earners who sell their labour while owning no means of production (in other words, workers), or they are owners of the means of production who exploit the labour of others.
In reality, capitalism weakens and distorts workers’ consciousness, self-understanding, and class unity by smuggling sections of the working class into what is called the “middle class.” Capitalism invents this deceptive category precisely to extinguish the engine of class struggle. What was once called the middle class is now beginning to witness the naked reality of capital with its own eyes. Those who used to say, “We are not workers,” are gradually coming to understand what mass layoffs, the absence of contracts, lack of insurance, notices of “redundancy” or “termination of cooperation,” the theft of overtime pay, and similar practices actually mean, things they once imagined concerned only workers.
The Islamic Republic, as a representative of capital, had instilled in this class the idea that if workers lived under such conditions, it was due to their own shortcomings or lack of ability, rather than the system itself. But it never admitted that capitalism has transformed human ability into a commodity to be bought and sold. And prices, including the price of labour power, are determined on the free market. Whoever sells their labour more cheaply is the one who finds a buyer called the employer.
In the next workers’ notes that will be published later, we will try to look at the unemployment crisis in a more real and less theoretical way. We will also suggest ways to fight it. To give a first idea of these ways of struggle, we can say briefly: no idea or thought can become real without preparation and without mediation. If a theory for example, a workers’ strike jumps into action without preparation, it will be pushed around by the dominant current and will fail to reach its goals. Every idea, if it wants to become reality, must cross a strong bridge. The name of this bridge is organizing. And we are preparing to build it.
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