Article by Rui Paz, collaborator of the International Department
In Germany, the capitalist system crisis, bursts into a more and more brutal form. The production breakdown and unemployment increase is shocking. Just in January, the official number of unemployed increased more 387 thousand relatively to the previous month, completing the total of 3 million and 489 thousand. But these statistics do not include the 200 thousand compulsively retired workers over 58 years old, for being unemployed; the 300 thousand who were forced to work for an euro per hour; the 400 thousand with incomplete work schedules and reduced salaries owing to the production breakdown and which number does not cease to grow; the hundreds of thousand young people looking for their first job; the 7 million Germans who live on 345 euros per month coming from social security and the "Hartz IV" measures , socially excluded and with no hope of a better future; the millions who work but do not earn sufficiently to live. According to the National Statistic Institute, in 2004, even before this new wave of economic devastation, 10,6 million people already lived in poverty, that is, 13% of the German population, whilst the financial companies liquid profit increased 42% between 2000 and 2005. The car industry is well elucidating of the presence of a capitalism insolvable central problem, within the system’s framework.
Winterkorn, Volkswagen Chairman, recently revealed, that the productivity in the Wolfsburg and Zwickau factories had risen, respectively, 10% and 15%, on the turn over, from model Golf V to Golf VI. This signifies that, to assemble the same number of cars, 10 to 15 workers are to be dispensed. In BMW, Mercedes and Opel, the productivity increase reached 20%. As there were no reductions on work schedules nor equivalent salary increases, these amazing productivity rises did not bring benefits for the workers, but only for the stockholders, which, not knowing what to do with such accumulated capital and in the impossibility of investing within the productive sphere, owing to the extended misery and to the loss of the purchasing power, turned to financial speculation.
Currently, Opel’s sales breakdown is 36% and VW 19%. Here is the result of years and years of monitored policies towards the interests of the markets oligarchy, conducted by unscrupulous leaders and submitted political forces to the great capital, which, proclaiming false theories, have imposed salary stagnation, State goods privatization and dilapidation, handing over millions and millions of taxes to multimillionaires, liquidating labour and social rights and obscenely made possible the increase of profits and the monopolist bourgeoisie incomes, while poverty and unemployment spread. The more astonishing is that those who set the fire to economy in the name of the market infallibility, such as Merkel and the Schroeders, in Germany, the Socrates and the Barrosos, in Portugal, are the very same ones, who, today, cry out, shamelessly, that the house is burning, in order to oblige the workers to pay for the crisis misdeeds, to pillage the State and continue to reinforce the power of the great capital.
