The measures and ‘plans’ for the unemployed show that the international bourgeoisie is well aware of the danger posed to it by the constantly increasing mass of jobless workers and is trying to protect itself. The remedy in reality, for the capitalist regime, can only be one: to prevent the mass of the unemployed from realising the identity of its interests with the workers still in production, to ensure that the unemployed truly believe in the possibility of solving their problems as the unemployed, separately from the rest of the working class.

The bourgeoisie’s solution to this problem is illusory. If mankind were not forced to live under the domination of a mode of production, the capitalist mode, in which one only produces insofar as one sells and makes a profit, there would, in fact, be no problem of unemployment. Having produced too much, the world being suffocated by piles of commodities, the solution would be simple: reduce the effort and working hours for all of working humanity, produce less by making the working class toil less.

The problem of unemployment exists and arises only on the terrain of the capitalist mode of production. The product of labour is the monopoly of the class that owns the means of production; this product assumes the commodity-form, that is, in order to be consumed it must be sold and yield a profit without which all interest in production itself ceases for the capitalist class. Consequently, the fact that the world is overflowing with commodities is transformed, for the capitalist mode of production, into the need to intensify competition on the world market in order to snatch away the few remaining consumers, i.e. to lower production costs in order to cheat the competitor, whether it belongs to the same ‘homeland’ or a different ‘homeland’.

First aberrant consequence of the mode of production: the crisis of overproduction is ‘relative’, i.e. it is not that men actually have too many products at their disposal which they are unable to materially consume, which would be solved by simply reducing production. In reality, capitalism only recognises paying consumers and the production mechanism jams due to overproduction, while the mass of men are still deprived of the most elementary means of subsistence. On the one hand a huge pile of commodities that cannot be sold, on the other hand an endless mass of men dying of hunger because they cannot buy these commodities.

Between the products of labour and working humanity stands the monopoly, over the means of production and the products, of a social class, protected by the armed force of the State, by codes, by laws, which is willing to produce only insofar as it realises its profit from production. If this is not possible, and in the capitalist system it becomes periodically and inevitably impossible, the mass of products rots on one side, while the mass of producers starve to death on the other; between the two is the policeman, the court, the judge, ready to defend by every means the sacred right to private property.

Inevitably then, for the capitalist system, the fact that it has produced too much in relation not to human needs or to the material possibilities of consumption of mankind, but in relation to the possibilities of payment and profit realisation for the capitalist class, is transformed into an intensification of competition and into the need to lower the cost of production so that the commodities of the capitalist or capitalist-State can be sold on the market in preference to other commodities produced by other capitalists. But there is only one way to lower the cost of production while keeping the profit of the capitalist class unchanged: lower the cost of raw materials (i.e. pressure on raw material producers, imperialism, colonialism) or lower the cost of labour, i.e. reduce the part of the social product that goes to the workers in the form of wages.

Here is where the phenomenon of unemployment is determined: while exploitation, the pace, the torment of labour intensifies (home-work, ‘informal’ work, extension of the working day, etc.) for a portion of the workers, another part is expelled from productive activity and forced to live on subsidies or starve.

Another aberrant consequence of the capitalist mode of production: in the factory labour effort is intensified, in the factory people die daily in the so-called ‘white murders’ generated by the speed of the machines, by the extension of the working day, etc., that is, they die from overwork; outside the factory, an ever-growing mass of men, who are prevented from entering productive activity. Between the one mass of men and the other, once again, the policeman, the court, the judge, the priest, the tricolour trade unionist, i.e. the capitalist state apparatus on whose banner is written: defence of private property by all means, of the capitalist right to realise profit.

The unemployed person will never be able to solve the problem of his survival as an unemployed person.

If the capitalist class were able to give him the same paltry wage that it gives the employed worker, i.e. the full and complete wage, the very purpose for which the capitalist system produces unemployment would cease to exist, i.e. the need for the capitalist to reduce the cost of production. Consequently, all the provisions, ‘plans’ etc., that the bourgeoisie puts in place, can only be means to keep the unemployed at a level lower than that of the employed worker, i.e. they can only be unemployment benefits, more or less elaborate, more or less refined.

The bourgeoisie offers job opportunities to the unemployed, but always at an overall level lower than the cost of an employed worker. This is implemented in several ways. Firstly by dividing the mass of the unemployed and establishing the most terrible competition within it: there will never be jobs for all but only for a part of them; some will be allowed the ‘privilege’ of being able to work and receive a wage while the mass of their comrades are left to starve. Secondly, employing the unemployed at a lower price than the employed, i.e. intensifying competition between the unemployed and the employed and necessarily driving down the wages of the employed.

The working class is forced to witness this reality in its living experience every day: the mass of the unemployed presses down on the workers in production, who are forced, in the name of defending their jobs, i.e. in order not to be replaced by the unemployed, to see their wages actually reduced, to work in increasingly inhumane conditions and at an increasingly intense pace. The ‘privilege’ of being able to suffer and die every day inside a factory becomes a precious possession for that part of the working class that is ‘lucky’ enough to be able to benefit from it. Who cares about the amount of wages, who cares about safety measures, who cares about working hours, as long as one has the ‘privilege’ of being exploited, of being able to work?

Here is how, if we consider the sum total of the wages paid to fifteen million Italian workers, say, five years ago, we see that this sum total has been enormously reduced despite the increase in production: that is, the Italian working class receives, relative to the total product, an enormously smaller amount of social product than it did five or six years ago. Labour costs have been lowered; Italian commodities enter the world market at ‘competitive prices’, i.e. they can be sold in preference to Japanese or German or American commodities, safeguarding capitalist profit. This is the result that the capitalist mode of production and the social classes interested in its survival intend to achieve.

But the bourgeoisie and its State expect from the separation and competition between employed and unemployed workers another result of a political nature: it knows very well that the crisis of its mode of production will intensify and that it will be forced to crush the conditions of the working class as a whole more and more. It also knows that the working class could find, in this continuous worsening of its material conditions, the impetus to once again attack the bourgeois State, to attempt to break once and for all the social and political monopoly that periodically leads humanity to the slaughter of its energies. Then the crisis would shift from an economic crisis to a social and political crisis, to a violent clash between classes for the preservation or destruction of this infamous way of producing and living. The bourgeoisie tends all its efforts to prevent this transition or, at the very least, to ensure that when it occurs the working class is as weakened and divided as possible, as deprived as much as possible of the possibility to react as a single mass led by a single brain, by a single purpose.

The army of the unemployed also serves this purpose, insofar as it feels separated from the employed workers, insofar as it feels that, in order to solve the problem of its survival, no support can come to it from the employed workers who ‘think only for themselves’, that it depends exclusively on the provisions and handouts from the bourgeois State.

The mass of the unemployed, desperate, reduced to begging for a subsidy or a job of any kind from the bosses and their State, convinced that the employed workers are ‘privileged’ and that nothing can be expected of them, can be mobilised by the bourgeoisie against the working class, can provide the bourgeoisie’s assault troops against the employed’s attempt to resist the crushing of their conditions. The history of the workers’ movement teaches us that a thousand times the bourgeoisie has succeeded in enlisting the executioners of the working class from among the masses of the unemployed, the lumpenproletariat, of the workers who were left with no other choice but to die of hunger or to accept the petty crumbs that the bourgeoisie lavished on them, taken from the super-exploitation of the employed.

In June 1848, the insurgent workers of Paris found themselves confronted not only by the guns of the ‘epiciers’, the shopkeepers, to whom big capital had granted a deferment in the payment of bills of exchange, but also by the ‘mobile guard’ enlisted from among the unemployed workers reduced to the rank of lumpenproletariat. In more recent times, fascism and Nazism drew their phalanxes from the social strata of the semi-ruined petty bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat to strike strong blows against the class organisations of the proletariat.

This is what is at stake for the working class. But the bourgeoisie’s attempt to divide the forces of the proletarian class to its own advantage becomes possible only and exclusively through the truly corporatist policy that political and trade union opportunism imposes on the workers. It is precisely on the problem of unemployment that the bourgeois character of the false workers’ parties, such as the P.C.I. or the social-democratic parties, and the anti-worker character of current trade union policy inspired and desired by them, stands out. This pack of carrion in the guise of workers’ leaders particularly fulfils in this its function as an agent of the bourgeoisie, separating the fate of the employed from that of the unemployed and abandoning the latter to the mercy of the capitalist State. With this it prepares the way for bourgeois reaction against the working class; it prepares, under its ‘anti-fascist’ declamations, the way for fascism. This policy is already being implemented, it is not a thing of the future, but of the present and even of the past.

In all the labour contracts signed this year, and in the latest one for textiles in particular, is contained: 1) The acceptance of overtime work, the principle of the best utilisation of the plant, the possibility for a worker to work 12- or 16-hour shifts. This means the possibility for the boss to achieve the same level of production with a smaller number of workers, i.e. a betrayal of the thousands of workers waiting outside the factory gates. 2) The acceptance of furlough, of the reduction of personnel and their ‘mobility’. This means giving the boss the possibility to increase the number of unemployed. 3) The admission, and even codification, of recourse to ‘third-party’ labour, home labour and other forms of ‘informal’ labour (see textile contract). This means the possibility of exploiting workers reduced to unemployment through forms of underemployment, with starvation wages, with the use of child labour, etc.

While the opportunist policy that directs the trade unions separates the employed from the unemployed, thereby promoting the super-exploitation of both, the unemployed are separated from their comrades even from a physical point of view. The union organisation to which they belonged up to the day before no longer even admits them statutorily, given the infamous method of registration by check-off, which presupposes that the worker can only be a union member insofar as he has a boss, not insofar as he is a worker. At the same time, every effort is made to encourage the creation of a ‘union of the unemployed’, which is supposed to advance the interests of the unemployed, the demands of the unemployed, as if these could exist in themselves without necessarily becoming demands for handouts from the bourgeois State. Thus, an abyss is being dug between employed and unemployed workers, separating the latter even psychologically from the rest of the working class.

But that is not all: when unemployed workers lash out, driven by their unbearable needs of life, against the institutions of the bourgeois regime, then the calm of the employed workers is invoked in order to ‘isolate the provocateurs’ and state repression against ‘violence’ is applauded. It is thanks to this policy that international capital can launch its ‘plans’ for the unemployed, which have only one aim: to set the unemployed against the workers in production from the standpoint of economic competition, to turn the unemployed into a manoeuvring mass against the working class as a whole from a social and political point of view.

The economic crisis, thanks to the predominance of opportunist policy over all workers’ organisations, favours the disintegration of the class into opposing sections. To this disintegration the class can react in only one way: by taking upon itself, as a whole, the defence of the living conditions of employed and unemployed workers. The effective strength of the class lies in the workers in production. The question of the defence of the unemployed must therefore be at the centre of the struggles and demands of the employed workers. They must fight to demand that the unemployed, laid off, and retired be paid their full wages insofar as they are members of the working class; they must fight for a reduction in working hours and labour intensity and against all forms of ‘informal’ labour so that the unemployed, with or without ‘new investment’, are readmitted into production. They must fight against all forms of super-exploitation to which unemployed workers are subjected, demanding that, whenever they are employed in any kind of job, they be employed under the same conditions as other workers.

It must be demanded that the unemployed worker belong by right to the trade union organisation to which he belonged when he was employed, as must the retired worker, and any attempt to exclude him from his category and create the ‘special’ category of the unemployed organised separately from the employed workers must be rejected.

The working class in production must feel and express its solidarity with the episodes of violence that the unemployed direct against bourgeois institutions and it must be the working class itself, which holds in its hands the levers of production, to tell the bourgeoisie that, investment or no investment, profits or no profits, competitiveness or no competitiveness, it will not allow millions of its members to live at the mercy of capitalist handouts.

Full wages to the unemployed. Abolition of all overtime work. Reduction of working hours and workload. These are the demands that unite the employed and unemployed in a single class front against capitalist profit and its preservation that goes by the name of the ‘world economy’.

Certainly these elementary demands go directly against the capitalist economy. It cannot survive, it cannot emerge from the crisis that grips it worldwide if the working class demands the fulfilment of these demands. But this only means that the capitalist regime can only save itself once again by crushing the living conditions of the working class to the point of generalised hunger, to the point of massacre on the fronts of a new world war.

This is the alternative facing the working class today: either to sacrifice itself and its children so that the privilege of the possessing classes survives, or to embark on the hard path of the unremitting defence, by all means and against all, of its living and working conditions, of the reconstitution, on this basis, of its class unions, of the reconnection with the class revolutionary Party. There is no other road, neither for the employed nor for the unemployed.