Sociopath Businessman Tells The Truth About Capitalism

the last few years haven't been easy on anyone first we had a once in a century pandemic then a war in Europe fueled inflation everywhere but according to one wealthy businessman the workers of the world have got it too easy I think the problem that we've had is that we've you know we we have people decided they didn't really want to work so much anymore through covert and that has had a massive issue on productivity you know tradies have definitely pulled back on productivity you know they they have been paid paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years and we need to see that change we need to see unemployment rise unemployment has to jump 40 50 in my view we need to see pain in the economy we need to remind people that they work for the employer not the other way around I mean there is a there's been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them as opposed to the other way around so it's a dynamic that has to change we've got to kill that attitude and that has to come through hurting the economy which is what the whole Global you know the the world is trying to do the governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment to get that to some sort of normality and we're seeing it I think every employer now is seeing it I mean there is definitely massive layoffs going on for people might not be talking about it but people are definitely laying people off and we're starting to see less arrogance in the employment market and that has to continue because that will Cascade across the cost balance that was Australian millionaire property developer Tim gerner speaking to a conference for investors now it's pretty shocking and it's gone viral lots of people saying he comes across as a complete sociopath which I think he does I'm actually quite appreciative um though that he said that because I do think he is essentially articulating what is the dominant consensus among policy makers in the capitalist world right and it's especially interesting because he was basically repeating verbatim a theory put forward by one of the 20th Century's most influential leftist economists so this guy called Michelle kolecki he was a Polish Economist and a contemporary of John Maynard Keynes but he was more skeptical of the promise of capitalism than John Maynard Kane so Keynes he believed that smart governments could manage capitalism so that full employment would be maintained and inflation would be kept low and so you could have Harmony between capitalists and and workers essentially you could make capitalism work for everyone Keens was a big supporter of things such as the New Deal under FDR so you sort of pump money into the economy to maintain full employment businesses still make profits workers are getting decent wages unemployment is low everyone's happy that was Kane's idea I mean I'm probably you know to somewhat uh to some degree simplifying it but that's the the long and short of it kalecki though disagreed he doubted that capitalists would ever accept this deal now in his classic 1943 essay political aspects of Full Employment kalecki wrote this full employment would cause social and political changes which would give a new impetus to the opposition of the Business Leaders the sack would cease to play its role as a disciplinary measure the social position of the boss would be undermined and the self-assurance and class consciousness of the working class would grow discipline in the factories and political stability are more appreciated than profits by Business Leaders their class instinct tells them that lasting full employment is unsound from their point of view and that unemployment is an integral part of the normal capitalist system so Collective is saying that while full employment might be technically possible within capitalism so that's a sort of Keynes line the politics of it won't work and that's because bosses need to be able to control their workers and they can only control them with the threat of unemployment and ultimately the threat of poverty now if you threaten your work with unemployment but you've got quite generous unemployment payments then yeah that's not going to be a particularly effective disciplining mechanism but if you threaten your workers with unemployment and also you have low unemployment benefits then yeah they are going to find it a little bit scary to stand up to you right so basically you want to put workers in a vulnerable in a precarious situation precisely so they don't get ideas above their station precisely so they have to listen to the boss and not speak back and it's for that reason not necessarily because of technocratic reasons such as inflation so often you'll hear sort of there's this trade-off between inflation and unemployment and that's why we can't have full employment or we can't have employment to a a very high level all the time what kalecki is saying is hasn't really got anything to do with a technocratic issue about inflation what it's got to do with is politics it's got to do with power it's about the power of the employer vis-a-vis the worker and that's why under capitalism you'll always have precarity because they need it now rivka I've always loved kalecki's theories and that property investor to me um you know lots of people criticizing him but to me he's demonstrated the logic of kalecki better than any leftist academic might be able to and for that I'm somewhat grateful to him it's interesting that there's been so much outrage at his comments you know it's a mask off moment they expose the way in which capitalism normally operates but it kind of in a way shows how much Faith people put in the system day to day there's only at these moments when some random Australian dude with like a massive forehead kind of just lays out how the system works that people are so um aghast um I think I think what's interesting is this came up actually a couple of weeks ago I think when I was um on the show when we when we talked about the statistic that half of renters or more than half of renters in the UK at the moment are one paycheck away from homelessness and I argued and I would argue all them also in relation to this clip that that's by Design the Tories want a housing crisis where we are all on the verge of homelessness because that disciplines the workforce and that disciplines private rental uh private renters incredibly effectively because if we're constantly um you know lying awake at night worried that we might be made homeless or redundant or be fired then we're not going to ask for a pay rise we're not going to ask for a rent reduction it works fantastically well I mean kalaki um is is has theorized this um tremendously well and and I think it's really interesting some of the stuff you've quoted there but it's also like Marx you know marks laid out the fact that integral to capitalism was this idea of surplus or what he called Reserve Humanity people that capitalism didn't need within the workforce um itself but did need in order to to discipline the working class I mean he he argued that they were part of the working class but also kind of like almost a shadow working class there in the background to remind you that this is what you could be um if if you don't get on with your work and if you if you try and ask for more I was actually reminded of a conversation that I had with um a family member recently we were in central London and we walked past a homeless man we kind of had a discussion about um whether there should be homelessness in the UK and whether we should try and alleviate it by giving people money um and she was arguing you know if we didn't have what would be the point of wanting to have if there weren't any Have Nots and I think that's exactly she had internalized the logic of capitalism she was effectively saying it works on me there being people in society who you are marginalized you are unemployed who are homeless makes me afraid enough to to work harder and so in a way what Tim Gunn is saying is is exactly correct this is integral to the function of capitalism that there's a surplus section of humanity that's there in the shadows waiting as a kind of grim reminder of what happens if you try and unionize if you try and do a rant strike if you try and organize in any for any kind of um people power um but you know it's worth remembering that whilst this guy is getting a lot of heat on Twitter this is exactly what central banks and uh you know the bank of England is saying that it's doing the Australian Reserve Bank for example has recently said that it wants more unemployment the bank of England raising interest rates is in part to encourage a squeeze on demand including in the labor force that will create more unemployment you know our governments are are you know claim to think of um employment as some great social ill that needs eliminating but in truth in truth if there weren't any people unemployed in society the system wouldn't work and so they create they intentionally encourage and create unemployment in order to discipline us who are in the workforce it's worth noting this isn't the first time that property developer Tim Garner has caused controversy with comments which sound wildly out of touch and somewhat sociopathic even if they do just reflect um the real interests of capital um in 2017 he told a reporter this we are coming into a new reality where first home buyers second home buyers and a lot of people won't own a house in their lifetime that is just the reality of where we're going so you think that young people have now got the prospect of never owning a home absolutely when you're spending forty dollars a day on smashed avocado and coffees are not working I of course absolutely now I looked at the average price of an apartment in Melbourne it's about 800 000 Australian dollars to afford that you'd have to save forty dollars every day for 55 years that is not a good strategy to get on the housing market and of course that's assuming that there are actually people paying 40 a day for avocado one toast and coffee which seems a little bit implausible to me of course um Tim Garner has less need to say for his first house because you guessed it kind of got on the property ladder with loans from his boss who also happened to be his grandfather so this is who we're taking Financial advice from everyone else needs to get a little bit poor and a little bit more desperate so they work harder for their bosses this guy gets to get on the property ladder by borrowing money from his granddad

Channel: Novara Media

Views: 305,292

Keywords: socialism, politics, Novara Media, Novara, current affairs

Id: aJHP0VfeOrU

Length: 10min 7sec (607 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 14 2023