Billionaires want to see more suffering
How the ruling class benefits from greater unemployment
[Section of an etching by
]“We need to see pain in the economy.”
- Tim Gurner, Australian real estate mogul, 2023
In the rare moments in which they speak honestly, billionaires and their representatives can sound rather sadistic. They speak of the need for pain, hardship, even trauma. Trump recently admitted that his tariffs plan would yield “short term some little pain,” adding that “people understand that.” In late October of last year, just over a week before the election, Musk—a big fan of the libertarian Javier Milei whose presidency in Argentina more than doubled the poverty rate in less than a year—stated that Americans would have to experience “hardship” if Trump wins the election. Russell Vought, one of the architects of Project 2025 and who Trump appointed as director of the Office of Management and Budget, was recorded last year describing his Project 2025-oriented plans for getting rid of public employees: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work […] We want to put them in trauma.”
Generally, apologists of capitalism tend to preach a rosy picture of a future of prosperity ushered in for all, via the “hidden hand” of the free market; a rising tide that lifts all boats—and, remember, there’s no alternative! But it appears now we have the richest people ever to have lived leveraging their power in order to take away basic social safety nets, hell bent on pulling out the rug from under low-income communities in the U.S. as well as foreign victims of U.S. imperialism, by targeting agencies that provide even the most modest of resources. Meanwhile, tech bro billionaires like Zuckerberg are announcing mass layoffs as coders are replaced with AI. And despite such promises of economic pain and hardship, despite their plan to attack all sorts of benefits for working class families and to liquidate masses of public sector jobs, Musk and sycophants like J.D. Vance want you to have has many babies as possible. They want to see those birthrates up! (at least as long as you’re white).
Why are they so compelled in such a barbaric direction? Is it purely and simply greed or ideology? No doubt, these representatives of capital are extremely greedy and harbor terribly fascistic ideologies, but their dark, cold rationale is also quite squarely based in the needs of capital.
If we look back just a couple of years ago, 2022-23, there’d been tendencies of unemployment falling and wages rising. During the pandemic, millions of workers from the late baby boomer generation opted for retirement, while a lot service industry workers became fed up with the work conditions and left those industries altogether. Those who remained recognized more than ever their exploitation and working-class position, and thus, we saw large segments of this industry succeed in forming unions.
In addition to impacting the flow of money into their pockets, these sorts of developments no doubt made the ruling class feel uneasy about their level of domination over the working class. All sorts of CEOs and business owners were crying that, nobOdy wants to wOrk anymOre! In September of 2023, Tim Gurner, Australian real estate mogul—witnessing a slowdown in growth in the construction industry—apologized after receiving widespread backlash for saying the quite part out loud in a video that went viral:
We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. There’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around. It’s a dynamic that has to change.
With a level of unsurpassable irony, Gurner one of the richest people in Australia, explained that “They have been paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years, and we need to see that change.” He really must have been working hundreds, even thousands of times as hard as those he was chastising! And given his own devotion to grinding, he found it upsetting that people were adversely affected by working under the conditions of a pandemic: “I think the problem that we’ve had is that people decided they didn’t really want to work so much anymore through COVID.”
Gurner reasoned that the unemployment rate in his country needed to increase to lift productivity and to curb that awful working-class arrogance he couldn’t stand. Simply put, he wanted workers to be put in their place; to be reminded who rules society, who the despots of the workplace really are.
The industrial reserve army
As cruel and arrogant as Gurner is, he was accurate about a certain dynamic of capitalist economies, regarding the relations between unemployment, wages, and productivity—articulating a dynamic Marx explains in Capital. Describing the supply of unemployed workers on the labor market in terms of the “relative surplus population or industrial reserve army,” Marx explains that:
The industrial reserve army, during periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active army of workers; during the periods of over-production and feverish activity, it puts a curb on their pretensions. The relative surplus population is therefore the background against which the law of the demand and supply of labor does its work. It confines the field of action of this law to the limits absolutely convenient to capital’s drive to exploit and dominate the workers.[1]
During “periodic changes of the industrial cycle” when new technical means of production are implemented—say, for example, if vast swaths of computer coders are replaced with artificial intelligence—then those workers are expelled to the reserve army. Thus, there is also the immiseration and possible deaths of those expelled: “the misery, the sufferings, the possible death of the displaced workers during the transition period when they are banished into the industrial reserve army.”[2]
The process also results in divisions between employed and unemployed, whereby those employed become compelled to work more or more intensely by “the pressure of the unemployed” which empowers capital in its domination over labor:
the pressure of the unemployed compels those who are employed to furnish more labour, and therefore makes the supply of labour to a certain extent independent of the supply of workers. The movement of the law of supply and demand of labour on this basis completes the despotism of capital.[3]
Thus, realizing this situation, a key point of resistance, a point of leverage for the working class, is to organize across the lines of employed and unemployed. As soon as the workers learn how all this works—how wages and productivity are affected by the relative size of “the reserve army” of unemployed—they begin to organize, Marx explains, via trade unions and other organizations, to develop cooperation between employed and unemployed “in order to obviate or weaken the ruinous effects of this natural law of capitalist production on their class:”
As soon as the workers learn the secret of why it happens that the more they work, the more alien wealth they produce, and that the more the productivity of their labour increases, the more does their very function as a means for the valorization of capital become precarious; as soon as they discover that the degree of intensity of the competition amongst themselves depends wholly on the pressure of the relative surplus population; as soon as, by setting up trade unions, etc., they try to organize planned cooperation between the employed and the unemployed in order to obviate or to weaken the ruinous effects of this natural law of capitalist production on their class, so soon does capital and its sychophant, political economy, cry out at the infringement of the ‘eternal’ and so to speak ‘sacred’ law of supply and demand. Every combination between employed and unemployed disturbs the ‘pure’ action of this law.[4]
However, while they are quick to call foul against the organizing of the working class, the capitalist class is more willing than violate that “sacred” law and to use force in order to create a sufficient reserve army of unemployed if and when the supply does not meet the demand of capital. Whenever the reserve army is insufficient, as “in the colonies, for example,” and thus the dependence of the working class on the capitalist class is not absolute, capital combines with some populist (or pseudo-populist) sidekick—or as Marx figuratively describes them, capital’s “platitudinous Sancho Panza”—“and tries to make up for its inadequacies by forcible means.”[5]
Resisting the despotism of capital
Gurner’s demand for pain in the economy, “to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around” and to increase productivity, no doubt exemplifies the kind of scenario Marx describes, when capital is ready to violate the “sacred” law of supply and demand to regain its despotism over labor. And the Musk-Trump presidency and assault on the U.S. administrative state, an agenda which has clearly been backed by all the billionaire tech bros who lined up together at Trump’s inauguration, this “band of warring brothers” as Marx would call them, and backed by all the other ruling class representatives of capital funding the many far right organizations that drafted Project 2025, no doubt resemble, in a grotesque form, the forcible means situation under which an industrial reserve army is to be made “sufficient” to capital’s demand.
Moving forward then, a great point of leverage remains organizing across lines of employed and unemployed, not allowing capital’s despotism to divide us across such lines, not allowing such divisiveness to disturb our ability to see ourselves in others across these lines. If they can violate the “sacred” law of supply and demand, we sure as hell can too. It’s time to get organized—whether in a union, a socialist organization, or simply volunteering to help feed the poor at a local church. Don’t forget that you and I are far closer to being homeless than we are to being a billionaire.
For further reading, here below are a few great articles relevant to the topics in this piece, from organizing across the lines that divide the working class (), to resisting the onslaught of the current administration (), to the ways in which capitalist apologists regularly lie to us about how capitalism has supposedly lifted masses of people out of poverty ().
Notes
[1]. Marx, Capital: Vol. One (1990 [1867]). trans. by Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books), 792.
[2]. Ibid, 793.
[3]. Ibid.
[4]. Ibid, 793-4.
[5]. Ibid, 794