Too often discussion about productivity in Britain is about British workers not working hard enough. But increases in productivity stem from investment, in new plant and machinery and workers’ education and skills. The real story is a capitalist class who have been on an investment strike and a training blockade.
Automation makes work less physically demanding and reduces the labour time needed for production. But greater fixed capital is needed to buy automated plant and machinery; that’s what British capitalists won’t do.
Workers could see increased automation as a road to production based on social needs rather than profit motives, a road to a less oppressive way of working. But the catch for capitalists is that automation reduces the scope for extracting high levels of surplus value from labour. Instead the tendency is for the average rate of profit to fall.
Workers could also use automation to shorten the working day, favouring workers against capital. More fundamental would be to challenge the notion that maximum profit gives the best result, and to oppose allowing productivity to dominate the way that labour and capital are deployed.
The employing class has used productivity comparisons to restrict or even to close down production in Britain. This is not progressive or good for British society, just the opposite. Considering only productivity, without taking into account the impact of restricting or stopping production on working class wellbeing, is socially destructive.
Productivity is used as a weapon against workers, increasing toil and alienation. Turning this round should be the central focus for those who want change – to rid ourselves of economic repression along with its political advocates.
Such a change in working class thinking is not easy to develop. Economics seems too complicated, and too often people lack confidence in their ability to change things. Yet a reluctance to engage allows those wanting to prevent change to promote pretend solutions.
Regional devolution is one example of this pretence. It uses productivity to weigh up regional advantages and disadvantages and then to determine the location – or dislocation – of industry and commerce. But this promotes mindless and damaging regional competition. Highlighting the comparative advantages and disadvantages of one region over another leads to even greater disparity between them.
An integrated unified British economy would be far more socially beneficial. Mutuality would mitigate the advantages and disadvantages of geographic location. Industry and commerce could be more evenly allocated throughout the country.
The same advocates of regionalism are also advocates for the so-called efficiencies of global markets. They think a country or region that trades for products it can buy more cheaply from another country or region is better off than if it had made those products itself.
This type of spurious economics – free trade economics – has laid Britain low, preventing the development of a wide range of skills and factories that would otherwise support British self-sufficiency. Instead industries have been laid to waste. Just look around the country if you think this is an exaggeration – attacks on steel and chemicals production are just the latest examples.
The British working class has to act for its own salvation. In part this entails rejecting economic wrong headedness. The profit motive – fundamental to capitalist production – has become a barrier to social development.
A focus solely on productivity is destructive, unless it is part of a working class determination to work for our own class ends and needs – impossible within the capitalist mode of production. Once workers grasp the consequences, there is nothing to prevent productivity being just one influence in the social regulation of production upon a definite plan, not a justification for closing industries.
The rise of automation has brought us close to the point where social good, not profit, could determine how we run the economy. We say, the working class must seize the opportunity to run the economy.