Editors’ Note | Tomorrow, Sunday morning at 7am, the Mayor’s Encampment Committee is going to try to evict the tent city at Oppenheimer park. Homelessness is increasing because rents are too high, wages and welfare are too low, and the city/developers are gentrifying the Eastside. Highlighting the colonial expansionist aspect of this ongoing process, here is a statement from the residents of the park, Salish peoples and community supporters.
Sa nakalipas na ilang taon ang Mainlander ay nabuo bilang isa sa mga tagapagtaguyod ng progresibong pagsusuri ng mga munisipal na pulitika sa Vancouver. Isa sa mga orihinal na layunin ng Mainlander ay “isalin ang mahirap unawain na wika at madalas na nakaliligaw na mga dokumento at mga patakaran ng local na munisipyo sa wika na maaaring maunawaan ng tao.”
Labour market management: Controlling the ‘surplus population’
Managing the labour market is a major function of bourgeois governments in a capitalist economy. This means maximizing the rate of exploitation of the working class while mitigating resistance, rebellion or disruption to capitalist accumulation.
In a monopoly capitalist economy, high rates of unemployment and underemployment are considered normal and desirable. Unemployment has an active function, operating as a downward pressure on wages and a fetter on the rate of inflation. The rich want inflation kept low because when it rises it erodes their accumulated wealth. Moreover, monopoly capitalism as a system tends not to reinvest the surplus (profit) extracted from the working class in job generating activity, instead sinking a high proportion of the surplus into socially harmful activities like advertising, speculative financial activities, real-estate and the war economy.[1] Monopoly capitalism therefore generates high rates of unemployment and, particularly in its neoliberal form, fewer and fewer stable, ‘well-paid’ jobs.
