– Workers Party Press Release
As the recession bites, workers are again carrying the heaviest burden.
The layoffs just announced at Silver Fern Farms’ Belfast plant are another sign that the current parties have nothing left to offer workers. The Workers Party thinks jobs for all should come before profits for private companies and supports action by workers to keep their jobs, including occupations of workplaces threatened with closure.
As a first step, the Workers Party of New Zealand will abolish GST because it is a regressive tax that hits workers particularly hard.
We are launching our Christchurch Electoral campaign at 7pm on Monday July 28th. The campaign launch will be held in the WEA at 59 Gloucester St.
The Workers Party is standing two candidates in Christchurch electorates: secondary school teacher and former meat worker Paul Hopkinson in Christchurch East and retail worker and student Byron Clark in Christchurch Central. We also have candidates standing in Auckland and Wellington.
If elected, WP candidates have pledged to use their parliamentary resources to support workers’ struggles and campaigns. Workers Party policy is that candidates accept a skilled worker’s wage for themselves. The remainder of the inflated MP’s remuneration will contribute to a fund to support such struggles.
The Workers Party is a party of workers, for workers. We are campaigning for the complete freedom of movement for workers through a policy of open borders, and for freedom from all anti-democratic laws such as the Terrorism Suppression Act, the Electoral Finance Act and the current Bill to amend the Immigration Act. The Workers Party stands for jobs for all, a shorter working week and no restriction on the right to strike. The Workers Party also aims for a workers’ republic.
The Workers’ Party intends to be registered on the party list, giving every voter in the country the opportunity to vote for a party that stands firmly for workers.
Would full employment not increase inflation, thus eroding the wages of all workers?
The idea that prices are dependent on the amount of money (whether in the form of wages or other forms such as bank loans) in circulation is the fundamental basis of modern bourgeois economics, however it was disproved long ago by Marx who pointed out that the real cause of rising prices was a fall in the value of money:
“Thus, when the industrial cycle is in the phase of crisis, a general fall in the price of commodities is expressed as a rise in the value of money, and, in the phase of prosperity, a general rise in the price of commodities, as a fall in the value of money. The so-called currency school concludes from this that with high prices too much, with low prices too little money is in circulation. Their ignorance and complete misunderstanding of facts are worthily paralleled by the economists, who interpret the above phenomena of accumulation by saying that there are now too few, now too many wage-labourers.” [Capital, Volume I, Chapter 25]
The most common way in which the value of money is undermined is through the creation of “Fictitious Capital” i.e. money or credit which is created without any commeasurate increase in the number of commodity values in circulation.
We can see this at the moment with the bursting of the speculative bubble on the world financial markets, which although it manifests itself to most people in the form of higher property or oil prices is at the end of the day actually a reflection of the declining value of currency, rather than a change in the value of those commodities (food prices are a little more complicated, because although food prices are artifically high in NZ this is because of the relatively lower labour inputs in agriculture in this country compared to say Europe).
See further:
http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm
http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch02c.htm