If workers had control of their money paid into their pension funds, they would be far more likely to see the benefit of using that money to actually invest in real capital accumulation, the use of the money to buy additional machines and buildings, and to employ additional workers, rather than to simply inflate existing asset prices.
They might, of course, use that money to finance the expansion of worker-cooperatives, especially as the shareholders that control corporations have been more concerned to inflate their own share prices, and to use that control to hand money to themselves than to invest in real capital accumulation. So, its no wonder that the ruling-class has created a legal structure that prevents workers from exercising their legitimate, democratic right to control their own pension funds, blatantly in defiance of even basic bourgeois norms of property law. Now that would be a struggle to “take back control” that would be worth supporting.
Its not just that workers having control of their own pension funds would expose all of the things described above of the vast sums siphoned off as fees and commissions, of the fact that shareholders have preferred to inflate asset prices rather than invest in real capital accumulation and so on. Even without control of our pension funds, a basic democratic demand, here, should be to “open the books” of those pension funds, and all of the banks and finance houses that control them. A Workers Inquiry would itself be a mobilising process, because we all know what kinds of practices would be uncovered by it, as even the Panorama investigation all those years ago lifted the lid on.
Workers, in a large company, might, of course, begin to ask the question why, when that money is available, the company directors do not use it for such expansion, but even if, at first, they don't ask that question, a labour and cooperative movement utilising such funds, of itself, exposes the reason. As I have set out elsewhere, one reason that the vast amounts of money tokens/credit thrown into circulation by central banks, to prop up asset prices did not lead to commodity price inflation is precisely that all this liquidity was diverted, directly, into the purchase of those existing assets. Indeed, the very fact of those inflating asset prices, over the last forty years, and actions of central banks to maintain it, created not just moral hazard but, also, a fear of missing out, in which currency was drained from general circulation into this speculation.
If all of the additional liquidity that found its way, for example, into a demand for existing houses, and so hugely inflated their prices had, instead, been directed into the building/supply of additional houses, so raising the supply rather than the demand, the astronomical rise in house prices would not have happened. In fact, analysis shows that contrary to popular belief – which also fuels racist claims about migrants taking houses – the number of homes per head of population is greater today than it was in the 1970's, before house prices began to soar.
As Moneyweek point out,
“The population has gone up, of course. But the housing stock has risen too. In fact, according to an interesting report from economic research group Fathom Financial Consulting, while the rate of building decreased over the last decade, the quantity of ‘housing per person’ has risen by nearly 50% since 1970, and is still increasing.!"
The astronomical inflation of house prices is not the result of physical supply not rising enough to meet population growth, or new household formation – and is certainly not caused by migrants taking up these already overpriced homes – it is the result of speculative demand for existing houses, driven by the huge liquidity injections that central banks have made since the late 1980's. House prices did not rise because the value of houses, as a commodity rose. Indeed, as with all commodities, on average, the unit value of them falls over time, as a result of rising social productivity. Nor, indeed, as set out above, did they rise because the physical supply did not rise in the same proportion as the physical demand from population growth. They rose, because of a huge rise in the monetary demand – as Marx notes in Capital, the only effective demand is monetary demand – a demand that was inflated, by repeated depreciation of the currency/standard of prices. The price of houses rose, not as a commodity, but as a speculative asset, just like money flocking to the purchase of shares, bonds, Bitcoin, or paintings.
No comments:
Post a Comment