WHY ARE GOVERNMENTS WORLDWIDE RAISING THE MINIMUM WAGE?

Bolsonaro in Brazil and Tsipras in Greece, Ramaphosa in South Africa and Macron in France,
Costa in Portugal and Sánchez in Spain ... wherever we look they are raising the minimum wage
or establishing it for the first time. Why? Is capitalism seriously looking to stop the
impoverishment of the great majority?

Crisis, inequality and impoverishment

GDP PER
CAPITA IN SPAIN 1960-2017

The crisis of the last ten years, including the brief pause now coming to an end, strengthened an
old trap that paralysed the struggles of the 70s and 80s: "if capital has no profits, there is nothing
to demand." This was the politics of "rigour", "austerity", "you cannot spend more than you
have". A wave of precarity and pauperisation hit a working class that, confused, atomised and
fearful, agreed to restrict their needs to the limits required by accumulation ... when it was
precisely accumulation that did not give nor gives anymore. What happened was not that the
workers consumed what had not been produced - that would obviously be impossible - it was
not that we had "consumed more". On the contrary, it is the broken mechanism of the capitalist
economy that squanders and destroys productive capacities starting with the main one: human
work. That is what the mass unemployment which has been entrenched for a decade means.
What was their solution? The financial crisis had closed the typical "exit": to increase credit, to
kick the can down the road in hopes of obtaining - by hook or by crook - some new market to
sell products.
The "Keynesian" way out, producing money and having the state buy surpluses by letting
inflation erode wages while earning time, had been closed off by the system in the design of
central banks because of its costs for long-term investment. Overall, with a disorientated
working class, it was not necessary. They could lower wages and "increase competitiveness"
without resorting to subterfuge. But in reality, lower wages could only worsen the accumulation
process. How were we going to buy what we produced ourselves if we had less and less to pay
for it? The result was an even greater precarisation of work and consequently a massive
pauperisation.
But pauperisation was not homogeneous. The more precarious a contingent of workers, the more
atomised, the more capital devalued their labour. Those who earned least lost proportionally
more - up to 27% of their salary - while the corporate petty bourgeoisie, well entrenched in the
structures of large companies, suffered practically only symbolic income reductions: 0.6% on
average. Moreover, the absence of markets and productive placements of capital has turned the
large stock markets of accumulation into fictitious capital, money that is reproduced in
"markets" that are, really, betting houses. And with the financial markets turned into
bookmakers, the differential between a good bettor and a mediocre bettor is gigantic. The
"good" speculators, the "financial wizards" who managed to reproduce capital in the midst of
widespread devaluation, multiplied their share of the total. The greater the overaccumulation the
greater the tendency to concentration of wealth. The logic of accumulation is that even when
there is no increase in real production, capital reproduces, "it must be reproduced." It does not
matter that this comes at the expense of wages. It does not matter that its profitability is greater
than a production that has become negative. This new distribution between capital and labour
was hidden under the measure of an inequality that climbed for months. They all put on
offended faces and proposed tax measures "against inequality" that did not really affect capital,
only middle and high wages, that is, the traditional sectors of the working class and the
corporate petty bourgeoisie, the foremen of the business structure.

The class struggle and the "ways out of the crisis"

Since the end of the reconstruction that followed the world war, capital had never maintained
such a deep and sustained offensive against such ample social sectors, including the petty
bourgeoisie. Neither did the latter manage to recover promptly. The fractures within capital
became deeper and deeper. The wrath of a cornered petty bourgeoisie served to open up new
opportunities for the bourgeois sectors of the major powers that proposed to use all the resources
in their hands, from emergency clauses of free trade treaties to open military force to
"repatriate" production by revitalising the consumer base and giving oxygen to the petty
bourgeoisie and the industries that remained within the country. That was Brexit. That is Trump.
That is Salvini. And that has also been the programmatic base where the petty bourgeoisie has
not found allies in central sectors of the bourgeoisie, from Catalonia to Germany. That is the
appeal of the new "populism" and emerging nationalisms: "let's save national capital ... at the
expense of others rather than the domestic market." It is not a valid solution for capitalism as a
whole and obviously can only produce an increase in global war tension. But within the
framework of the acceptance that "there is no alternative to capitalism" it is "all that can be
done" ... approaching the abyss at a more moderate pace. That, where it was imposed -USA,
Italy, Brazil, Hungary, Poland ... - where not, as in Spain, France or Germany, even Britain, it
only became a stick in the wheel that paralysed or paralyses still, the political apparatus of the
bourgeoisie,
without going anywhere. It is this picture of political paralysis aggravated by the immediacy of a
new wave of the crisis, which has imprinted a sense of urgency on all the national bourgeoisies.
Some need to show that the paths of trade war and militarism "pay." Hence the despair of Trump
when the federal reserve undermines his raising rates policy. Others, like the Spanish or the
French, need to show that "it is possible to distribute better", fearing that, given the impasse of
the revolts of the petty bourgeoisie, the phantom of the working class will finally materialise.
That is Macron yielding to the "yellow vests" and that is the king of Spain on national TV
demanding policies for young people from the politicians.
The blind alley in which global capitalism stands is demonstrated by the fact that policies
"against inequality" are based on increasing precariousness. From the German "minijobs" to the
Italian "citizen income", they do not stop pauperisation at all, they normalise the wages of
misery and increase the atomisation of the workers, opening the way for new attacks. Among all
these policies, raising minimum wages, bringing them closer to the poverty line, is the favourite.
Not only do they not weigh much of the debt of the states, but even within the framework of the
euro, they produce immediate results against "inequality" without calling into question the
distribution or the capital-labour relationship. In fact, by "making more flexible" the battle
against inflation in Europe - and in the US if the Fed ends up following Trump's guidelines -
raising the minimum wage would serve to increase the number of workers with lower wages,
giving a little more to the small corporate bourgeoisie and much more to capital, which is
exactly the result of Trump's economic growth in the US.

Translated from the original https://nuevocurso.org/por-que-suben-el-salario-minimo-los-

gobiernos-de-todo-el-mundo/