 Weíre talking about this. Iím thinking about who the essential workers are. As Victoria said, when we think of who the essential workers really are, itís those without whom society could not function. If we had no farmers or veg pickers or shop workers, we couldnít eat. If we had no doctors or nurses or surgeons, when we got sick, we could die. If we didn't have refuse collectors, the streets would be piled higher and rubbish. These roles are completely essential for life. Ac mae'r termon wedi bod yn ysgrifennid o'r cyfrannu gwirionedd o'r ysgol iawn, yn gweithio bryd yn gyfrannu gwirioneddol, i roedd yn unig i'r gwrthoedd yn ddysgu'r byw, ynddo chi'n gwybod yw'r fwrdd yn ymgyrchol i gyd yn syniad y byd yw ymgyrchol sy'n ysgrifennid o'r byw, yn ysgrifennid o'r wyf yn gweithio'r cyfrannu gwirionedd. Yn gweithio'r gweithio'r cyfrannu gwirionedd yw'r ysgrifennid o'r helyn. ac mae'n gilydd i gyd yn ysgol yn ychydig o'r hunain bryd, mae'r hunain bryd yn ei wneud i'r oeddau yn yr haf. Rwy'n nhw'n meddwl, ac mae'n meddwl yw'r hyffordd yng Nghymru, oherwydd rydyn ni'n meddwl ar y cyfnod yn ysgrifennu, yn y fawr o gweithio yng Nghymru, a'r wych yn siaradol. A mae'r gweithio'n digwydd, bo'r gallu gyda'r Cyfwyr yn ysgrifennu ar y cyfnod o'r pandemau. Mae'n meddwl i'n meddwl, Hedge fund managers, CEOs, factory owners. If these people stop work, life would go on. The jobs that they do are not essential to living. And yet the latter are enumerated for their work with vast six-figure salaries, while the former are often only paid the minimum wage. And Tesco is a really great stark example of this. So in April they made 10.8 billion in sales off the work of their employees working in unsafe conditions in the shops. And this resulted in a 33% increase in the salary of the CEO. Those on the shop floor, in contrast, earned just 7.42 an hour. And the CEO's basic salary is already 355 times that of the lowest-employed average employee in their workplace. Never mind the millions that he received in extra bonuses. So what we can see with this is that clearly, very clearly, wages do not reflect how essential workers are to our society. Well, what about working conditions then? It's no better. Workers, nurses in particular, are working 12-hour shifts and have a really poor work-life balance. And conditions are actually so difficult since the Tories came to power in 2010. Over 200,000 nurses have left their profession. Shop workers are on zero-hour contracts, meaning that their hours are unreliable and they change every week. And social workers work some of the longest hours in the country. And there was a recent survey that showed about 70% of them don't take a break at all in their average working day. So the conditions for those who work these really essential jobs are tough and they are worsening. And again, the value that the current system places in these essential roles, it's just not reflected in the way that those workers are treated. And of course, all of these difficulties faced by the most needed workers in society are made worse as a consequence of COVID. Throughout the pandemic, those workers who are so essential to work carried on with inadequate PPE, doing longer hours than before and with the stress and threat of the virus to themselves and their families on top of that. Meanwhile, CEOs, the bosses of major companies were relaxing at home in their mansion, drinking wine in the gardens, far from the factory floors where we saw these mass outbreaks and even deaths, examples of which can be seen in the asos of boohoo warehouses, some of which are here in Sheffield and the factories in Leicester that we saw too. But they did get a clap. And that was essentially the only thanks that the workers who have been highlighted as the most essential in society received. And it's now those same exact workers, the ones who are most essential to our society and who were more valued than any others who are facing real-term or actual pay cuts, job losses, work sitting, working conditions, those basically who risked their lives continuing to work in lockdown. And contrast that pain condition that they're experiencing with the MPs who despite having the luxury of working from home throughout the pandemic, not to mention their shambolic failure to contain the virus and protect people, are receiving around about a 4.1% pay rise while NHS staff are receiving between two and three at best. So this question, this essential question that we're looking at is why is it that those who we as ordinary people prize most highly and who we've seen proven through the recent events of the pandemic and really always to be frank to be the most essential in society are paid so little and treated so poorly when those who's absolute complete stoppage of work had no immediate impact on the running of society earning so much, there is a contradiction here and to really answer that question we need to understand the contradictions in the capitalist system itself. Capitalism is not a system for the satisfaction of needs, it's a system that exists for the production of profit and as long as profit exists it will come before all other needs. So we need to look at how profit is produced and why it is such a problem in the way of us having key workers and to understand that we're going to look at the way that we produce of the capitalism to understand this disparity between those who we see as essential and those who are essential to capitalism. So capitalism is a system based on the production of commodities and commodities are items that are produced explicitly for the purpose of exchange, not immediate consumption. So that's basically the difference between you producing carrots to be sold at a supermarket compared to growing carrots in your garden that you're going to use yourself. In the first instance, you're grooming them in order to sell them because you want to sell them, to exchange them and to make money from that and then obviously in the second one it's so that you can use them for yourself. Now the commodities that are produced are generally are not produced because we need them although they do still fill the need as I'll explain in just a minute. They're produced because they're going to bring a profit through the exchange of them for the producer and as a consequence of this type of production which we have in capitalist production, the system is not based on the satisfaction of people's needs. Jobs are not created on the basis that there's a gap that needs filling and products are not created because we have a great need for them in society but because profit can be made through their sale. I think a good example of this is when we look at food, we produce enough food to feed 10 billion people comfortably and yet there are people starving. So there is a need for people to be fed but that need cannot be fulfilled despite having the capacity to do so because it wouldn't turn a profit because those people cannot buy the food that's being produced. I think another good example is that we have no need for more greenhouse gas emitting card but I saw a statistic on just all that estimated there are 20 million unsold cars in the industry at the minute and production continues, although slowed. So as can clearly be seen through I think particularly the example of food need does not come into the question of capitalism. The drive for profit comes before all else and capitalists will only invest their money into a venture if there's a profitable market for those goods so investors can get a return on their money, increase their profit and then turn to the next profitable venture and they have no care within that system and structure whether we need a new iPhone or for example if there's a need in society for ventilators as we've seen recently and this is because if a capitalist didn't invest competitively they would be outcompeted by another capitalist and so that means that only the workers who produce or contribute to the production of commodities that will return a profit for the capitalist so basically only those workers who can be exploited and their labour power used to generate exchange values are seen as productive to capitalism and that's what makes them essential to capitalism. So right now we can all agree that there's a very clear need for more nurses and more doctors for more care home workers, for more social workers and for more teachers in order to ensure that all those who are ill with COVID can be cared for adequately and so that key workers aren't working overtime to cover for these staff shortages but NHS workers only have real value to others people. All those jobs that I outlined only have value to others real people and they're not valuable to capitalists. They cannot turn a profit out of their labour unless they're in private institutions and that really is why we're seeing this big push to privatise large parts of the NHS even in education as well in recent years. I'll come back to develop this a little bit more in a moment but commodities then have this use value that I mentioned I would return to earlier. If a commodity doesn't have a use value it can't be sold so it won't be made. So the utility of a product is essential and this is known as its use value but that utility is not a measure of the exchange value that it brings about although it is essential to it. We can see this through the fact that things with a great use value for example air and water don't bring high exchange values but things with a little use value for example gold can have a great exchange value. So there's no direct link between exchange and use value here. So we exchange these different use values but again it's not the usefulness of a thing that causes the exchange. You don't swap just equally useful things for equally useful or useless for useless. And therefore you can't compare the use of commodities by their use, use value is really subjective. So it makes us really question, okay well how do we exchange commodities if we can't exchange them based on the quality of being useful or not? So there has to be something common to all commodities that enables us to compare and therefore exchange them. And profit doesn't come from just this exchange of the commodities buying something cheaply and selling it on for a higher price doesn't bring about that wealth creation as if the act of the sale is where the profit comes from. Really what's happening is that the capitalist starts with money, they buy their commodities, they sell the product and they end up with more money than when they started. But simply circulating the goods isn't producing the value because what was gained in selling something for a higher value is then lost in buying another product from another seller at the increased cost to making it the same as if the products were just bought and sold at the same amount generally and an overall way of speaking. So where does profit come from then? Well in capital markets states, in order to be able to extract value from the consumption of a commodity, our friend, money bags must be so lucky as to find within the sphere of circulation in the market a commodity whose use value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value whose actual consumption therefore is itself an embodiment of labour and consequently a creation of value. So, as I said, the capitalist must be able to buy a commodity that produces value that creates surplus value through its consumption and this is found in labour power. A worker doesn't sell their labour to a capitalist, they sell their labour power and that's their capacity to work within a set amount of hours regardless of how much they get done which means regardless of how productive they are during that time. And it's then up to the capitalist to exploit the worker in that time to maximise their extraction of surplus value. So it's through the exploitation of a worker's labour power that the capitalist extracts this profit. If, for example, I'm employed to make mugs for eight hours a day, I might have made enough mugs for the capitalist through the sale of those commodities to pay back my wage in three hours but I've still got five more hours to go to work and so all of the time that I labour for after that generates surplus labour and everything produced in that time and then exchange generates surplus value. Value that's been added to the commodity through my labouring on them that's being expropriated by the capitalist. So the more mugs I make, e.g. the more productive I am, the more profit that the capitalist can make. Now there are numerous ways in which the capitalist can extract more surplus value out of a worker and it's in their interest to directly fight to do this. So they can extend the length of the working day, they can cut breaks, they can have the worker do additional tasks on paid overtime, all things that I think will all be very familiar with in our own workplaces in recent years. The other thing that capitalists can do though is that they can invest in machinery and technology to reduce the amount of time it takes the worker to produce a commodity and by doing that, that increases the number of commodities produced by the worker in their given contracted hours. Now capitalist aren't ruthlessly exploiting workers for the fun of it though, they must do this in order to remain competitive, it's not optional. So if one capitalist mug maker invests in a machine and another doesn't, then the first capitalist can sell them mugs far more cheaply because more are being produced, let's say by meeting the same given amount of time. This allows them to undercut the mug competition allowing that particular capitalist to take a larger share of the market and this is what lowers the socially necessary labour time that goes into the production of a product and resulting prices in the market. Now the other mug producers, they must invest similarly or they need to find alternative ways to exploit their workers to extract more surplus value or they would have their profits cut and their ability to invest decreased through that and then the capital that they're going to generate diminishes until they can no longer compete. So it's also this competition to increase surplus value that forces this race to the bottom of workers' rights and conditions. Now the logic of surplus value extracting as much as possible by the capitalist and forced by this competition demands therefore that the workers work longer for less money in order to expand the surplus value of criming to the bosses at the expense of the share going to labour in the form of those wages. We see a great example of this in Amazon. Amazon is obviously the world's most valuable company and yet it has workers on food stamps and that's not an accident, it's the secret of their success and it is essential in the capitalism. Amazon pays its workers the lowest possible wage meaning they're extracting more surplus value from those workers and accumulating the profits extracted from the surplus labour. Boohoo is another good example of this. They use the cheapest possible materials and they pay the lowest salaries and that means that they can extract the largest amount of surplus value from their production, undercut the competition by selling their clothes more cheaply, take a larger share of the market, out-compete their competition and they've done this by exploiting their workers the most. So essentially what we're showing here is that surplus value is the unpaid labour of the working class and that is extracted by squeezing as much productivity out of the workers during their employment as possible. This maximises the use of their labour power and then the products are sold for as much as they possibly can be and this is how profit is made. This is how capitalism works. Now, capitalists and their apologists will justify this extraction of surplus value from the workers by saying that it's acceptable because factory owners and capitalists are taking risks, it's compensation for them providing the means of production and jobs and the means of living towards us as a working class where it's payment for overseeing this process of production and this is the way that we see capitalists justifying those vast six-figure salaries that I talked about of the CEOs and the amount that the owners are keeping in profits from just having ownership of the means of production. But private ownership is not the cause of prosperity for the working class, it's the absolute antithesis of that and through increasingly exploiting the working class there's now more surplus value in society than there has been before but this can't be put to the use of the workers because it's appropriated it in the private hands of the capitalists. So what they're really doing is presenting the issue upside down. They say we need them to produce jobs but the reality is that they need us to produce value. Labour power is the thing that adds value to the object, the commodities that they're buying. The capitalists themselves don't produce any value, they just tap into the unpaid labour of the working class. Workers are essential to them, not the other way round. The capitalist class are essentially just parasites sucking value from the working class and adding nothing to society. It's actually capitalists that are not essential. In fact, their existence is in direct opposition to us having this essential work carried out and workers who do that essential work being paid fairly and with reasonable working conditions to go inside it. Now, I want to return to NHS at this point because this is something very starkly raised in our society right now. We have a great need for healthcare and it's probably the most highly prized institution. These jobs are the most highly prized in the UK. The NHS is a massive source of pride in the working class and it's actually the biggest single employer in the country. Yet it's failing. The needs of the population here are at odds with the needs of capitalism. Now, of course, healthcare and the workers that are involved in that, they do assist the capitalist in a number of ways. They keep the workforce healthy and able to continue doing the rest of their jobs. But ultimately these NHS workers and care workers don't contribute to the production of profit but therefore a drain on surplus value that could otherwise have been invested to generate more capital. So a nurse unless employed in the private sector cannot be exploited in the same way as a shop worker, for example. Yes, they can still have their working conditions worsened. The hours can be lengthened and the wages cut. Their labour power can still be exploited but the labour is not productive. It doesn't contribute to the production in exchange of commodities. So a health workers wage is paid by the state, meaning that their wage comes from a cut of surplus value that's already been extracted from the workers and collected through the taxes that the state collects. So these types of workers are facing worsening conditions. They're overstretched and this is because budgets are being cut. They're under-prepared for the pandemic and the level of doctors is lower than it should be so that they're working longer hours. There simply aren't enough of them basically. And the NHS, which is so important to us as ordinary people, is only good from the perspective of capitalism if it can be used to produce a profit. And that's why we've seen cuts to NHS spending, a disintegration of the health service that we had and then the use of that to push for its change or its modernisation, basically to push for more privatisation to solve this problem that underfunding and austerity has caused which has been essential under capitalism. I think it's clear, very clear to all of us that we need a free NHS for all workers and we need for the NHS to have decent working conditions. We need workers to have enough rest and to be paid fairly. But again, this can't happen under capitalism. There's another contradiction and again it just points to that contradiction between our needs and the needs of capitalism. So a really great example for this is when we look at employment in the NHS. So there's currently a shortage of nurses to the tune of 44,000. And as I've said, many are leaving due to the poor work-life balance or ill health. That's consequential to the job itself. We need more of these essential workers but the government have previously removed the bursary to help people trained to get into those essential jobs. So here we have a huge gap, a massive need that needs filling. 4.1% of the population are unemployed and that looks likely to set, I think it will jump between 9.7 and 13.2% and estimates are saying currently by 2021. So we've got jobs that need filling and workers that need to have work to do. And yet they're not able to fill those jobs because they can't afford the £90,000 fees to train into this job. And even when they can afford those fees, they're not staying in that role because the working conditions are so difficult. The government have removed this bursary and they're not going to pay for workers to be trained as nurses because it is not a profitable job in the public sector. But also the money doesn't exist in the state's hands to pay for this when it's privately operated. This is compounded by the necessity of austerity which has led to these years of underfunding in the NHS. And basically manufacturing this problem long before the pandemic actually hit. And we can see this in the fact that UK health spending has been at historically low levels in recent years and we have the lowest number of intensive care beds in the whole of Europe. And what this has meant is very stark as a consequence of a lack of preparation for the pandemic and limited spending. Over 620 healthcare workers have died as a direct consequence of inadequate PPE. These are completely preventable deaths of so-called essential or key workers. Capitalism has killed those workers. And this comes, I think, really, we can go quite far back to look at the roots of this. And ever since that to introduce these market forces into the NHS in the 1980s, key services have been increasingly handed over to private contractors. The claim is that this reduces government's funding. Now, the government is using the pandemic as a cover to rush through greater privatisation through the back door, placing public health in the hands of profiteering private sector patrons, essentially. Ministers have used special powers that have been granted to deal with the virus to bypass normal tendering processes, awarding NHS contracts to a whole host of private firms, to the tune of a billion pounds. And everything now, not literally everything, but a huge majority of things from lab testing facilities to the nightingale hospitals that have been created to even the supply of PPA has been outsourced to these private companies. And we've seen the results of that outsourcing and this profit making. Nightingale hospitals have been closed and some didn't even admit a single patient, despite the fact that we have tens of thousands of people dying in care homes. And I think what's clear through this blunder, which isn't really a blunder, is by design, is that the government is more interested in awarding these contracts to their wealthy donors, allowing them to make huge profits from the healthcare crisis than they are interested in protecting the general public and ensuring that the virus is properly contained. Private companies are not prepared to efficiently carry out the tasks required to contain this virus that only interested in their own profits. Now, we need to reverse all of this privatisation that outsourcing in the NHS, in local councils, and in our public services more widely. Essential services to deal with the pandemic should be brought under private ownership and they should be democratically managed by the working class in the interest of the public good, not profit making. Here, though, we can see clearly how the profit motive is in the way of the needs of society. But there's no way around this within capitalism. The needs of the people are subjugated to the needs of capital. We need free healthcare in normal times and we need it now more than ever, and we need healthcare workers who are paid and treated fairly. But this is impossible to happen to the current system. And this is why we're facing this vile dichotomy in the news of saving the economy or saving lives. But within the logic of capitalism, that has to be the choice that's put towards us on the table. If we say that these workers are essential, as they so evidently are, and if we say that the current system cannot give us what is essential, then the current system isn't fit for purpose. And if the system can't afford us the things that we need, then the answer is really quite simple. We need to do away with the system, which is a barrier towards us progressing as a society and providing people with basic necessities. We need to do away with private ownership and production for profit. So we come back around to the question of what is essential, which we should frame around the perspective of essential to who. What is essential, e.g. productive for the capitalist is work that produces communities that through exchange can generate huge profits. What's unproductive is using money that could have been used on capital on the wages of workers and nurses and teachers, for example. So that which produces profit, that which produces surplus value is productive and essential, whereas anything else, however essential for human life, is unproductive. Now, surplus value is not just created on the factory floor, like the carrots and the mugs that I was talking about, under capitalism to create a need and to circulate the vast amount of commodities that are produced. There are plethora of jobs that are needed from property lawyers to actuaries to all the auxiliary jobs that serve those people in their roles, including sandwich shops and the city centres. That these roles seem completely non-essential towards an unproductive compared to the jobs that I started talking about, the key workers. But within the logic of capitalism, they are actually essential. A worker doesn't need to produce a product to be productive and generate surplus value for the capitalists, as well as the jobs that I've talked about. There are jobs such as advertisement, marketing, sales, managerial roles. Jobs that David Graeber, who is an anthropologist and an anarchist academic, wrote about and he said that three-quarters of the UK's recent job market are in these types of roles, jobs that he called bullshit. Now, any good or service that satisfies a need can be solved. Shifting money to marketing is done in order to gain a greater share of the market and it doesn't help the population, but it is serving a need. McDonald's is a great example to look at the amount spent on these bullshit jobs. So in 2019, they spent US$447.3 million on advertising globally and that was out of total expenditure of $2.23 billion. That's 20% of McDonald's total expenditure being spent on advertisement alone. Red Bulls is similar, but even more star, they spent 40% of their total expenditure on advertising and what that equates to, really, is more money being spent on marketing than on the development of their products. And this clearly evidences the importance of advertising and all those associated jobs. It's more important than developing the product itself. Now, it seems to us that this is utterly wasteful. You think what could have been, that money could have been spent on if it were up to us to choose how to spend it. It's estimated that £220 million was spent on the Nightingale hospitals. Well, with McDonald's spending on advertisement alone, we can almost double that amount. Think of the labour power that's being used up by workers employed by McDonald's to advertise. Their labour instead could be put to use as something essential to our society, filling the 100,000 unfilled posts in the NHS for a start. Well, people do feel that these jobs are true. You know, if you're in these jobs, you do feel like you're not contributing to society in a meaningful way. They really don't feel that they're essential to normal life or to productive to normal life. And that is really in a way true because those jobs are just contributing to the growth of capitalism. And what that really points to is the problem with the capitalist system again. The reality is that doing these jobs is actually very important to capitalism. They're contributing to private profit. These jobs are not bullshit from the point of view of capitalism because they contribute to the capitalist competing to take a bigger share of the market and increasing their profits. Here's another contradiction. People are employed, not doing very much, not contributing to the meaningful way to society, pushing paper, as Graeba would say, but on the other hand they're providing an invaluable service to the production of profit. So clearly capitalism is in the way of us having fulfilling jobs and contributing productively to society. And it puts us in this position that we're in now where CEOs earn so much more than nurses. Basically, things that seemingly don't make sense, such as this disparity in wages and working conditions of those who are most valuable to us, compared to the jobs that do not take society forward, make sense under capitalism because fundamentally the needs of the capitalist system are at odds with the needs of the population. Now, Graeba stated, according to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to work as they don't really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens. While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things. Through some strange alchymuno and can quite explain, the number of salary paper pushers ultimately seems to expand. But the truth is there isn't some mystical reason as to why capitalist employees so many workers in the service sector, as I've just explained, it is explainable and it is when we look at the way that production happens in a capitalist system. Now, another reason that we've seen an increase in these types of jobs is a consequence of the decrepidity of the capitalist system. In the present epoch, there's been a general shift in economic activity from industrial production to service industries and finance capital. This deindustrialisation came about after World War II and was epitomised by Thatcher on her short-sighted profit-seeking She was attempting to rebuild the position of British capitalism through services and banking. That deindustrialisation of Britain over the last 30 to 40 years has weakened British capitalism. We're now faced with the problem of limited markets due to this internal contradiction of capitalism, surplus value and overproduction, compounded by the 2008 crisis. The essence of capitalist production means that workers are always getting less. They can never buy back the full amount of the commodities they produce because the capitalist is expropriating the rest. This whole process is exacerbated by monopoly. Now, monopoly is inevitable and should have picked easier. It's an inevitability under capitalism. As small companies compete, you naturally get market leaders. As these companies get larger, they become more efficient at producing their goods and services. They invest in mass production techniques in order to produce goods more cheaply than their competitors. They buy raw materials at cheaper prices because they buy in bulk. And they also copyright and patent their work, which prevents rivals from using it. So the bigger you get, the easier it is to make money and small companies cannot compete with this. Consumers therefore are benefiting less today from competition between capitalists than they ever have before. All we get is more advertisement and therefore this rise in bullshit jobs. These jobs are actually more valuable to capitalism than NHS jobs and the jobs of essential workers. So resources are poured into advertisement, having no value towards ordinary people that could instead be being put to use to improve health care, education, investing in the green energy, just as some examples. So again, we're seeing the capitalist system at odds with the needs of society. Now, one thing that's compounding the rise of bullshit jobs is the fact that many primary producers, primary productive jobs have been automated. With increased automation, Graver said that we should have seen a reduction in the working day of sharing out of the workload. We very evidently have not. And the reality is that in coming years, we'll see the automation of the paper pushers, too, with predictions suggesting that 30% of all jobs will be automated by 2030, including insurance and customer service roles. But reducing the amount or the number of hours work by workers is impossible in the capitalist system. With increased automation in the system, workers lose their jobs and there's cuts into effective demand, which cuts into the market and further destabilises itself. Under capitalism, we have this contradiction that with the ability to reduce the working day, but at the same time possible for capitalists to continue functioning effectively when that does. When workers are replaced by machines, it puts this downward pressure on wages and it forces those in work to work harder for fear of losing their jobs. And then the harder they work, the more the others need to be laid off. And it's the pressure of the reserve army of labour that puts this downward pressure on wages. And as if this wasn't nonsensical enough, there's the added contradiction that the automation of menial tasks is also stalling. Currently, it's not worth it for the capitalist to invest in constant capital, this machinery and technology, when they can't sell the products in the market. Instead, they're crushing the workers and exploiting them all. So automation hasn't led to a decrease working hours. Capitalists are not investing because there's no guaranteed return. And instead, they're exploiting labour. So even when they automate, it leads to rising unemployment, fewer workers working longer and more people in poverty. Automation should be benefiting ordinary people, but under capitalism it's having the reverse effects. Capitalists are basically competing constantly to lower the cost of their production in order to extract more profit. So the reason we're seeing these pushes to increase productivity, the workforce, when they should be having their hours cut is because it's not profitable for capitalists. Yes, it's cheaper and easier to maintain machines at normal times, but with soaring unemployment and a downward pressure on wages, some jobs are not being automated because labour is cheaper. So instead of making life better, automation is actually making life worse. And we're seeing rising unemployment due to automation on the one hand and fewer jobs being created because as more jobs are automated, fewer workers have work and demand decreases because machines can't buy back commodities. So we've got this situation where more products are being created, but no more wealth is going to the working class. It's increasing profits, but living standards aren't going up. So as Engels correctly points out in socialism, utopian and scientific, reason has become but unreason. We have the ability to make life so much better for workers, and yet that's not happening. It's not being done because profits are locked in private hands. And what I think is being traced through this is the fact that it's not just immobile what's happening is completely illogical. Thus, we have workers who are forced to be more productive now than they have at any point in history. Is any of that benefiting the working class? No. The productivity of the workforce is being squandered on these, you know, bullshit type jobs in order to maintain this decrepit capitalist system and artificially prop up a broken system. And at the same time we're seeing rising inequality. There's a vast amount of wealth that exists in society and a huge amount of labour being employed by workers to produce that benefits from that are inaccessible to the majority because of the capitalist system itself. And really these jobs are essential to capitalism. They're just not essential to life. And in the current system again we come back to this idea that social needs are subjugated to those needs of the capital. So what we can conclude from this then is that we can only have the really essential jobs being done and shared amongst the population for the advancement of living conditions when the anarchy of capitalist production for profit is replaced by a planned economy. Now what's essential here is the removal of the drive for profit specifically which conditions everything in our society. Even the capitalists are tied into this drive compete for higher profits and exploit workers as much as possible or be outcompeted. And a further consequence of this and therefore another way in which capitalism is in actual fact killing those is the impact that this type of production has on the planet, something that we'll be able to discuss in one of the sessions later today. But briefly, the drive for profit is going to destroy the planet. The planet from which profits are actually made which is an utter contradiction from the point of capitalism as a whole because it'll destroy the capacity for future profit making. But from the point of view of an individual capitalist it is the right thing to do and it's the only thing to do in order to stay in business. So the creation of needs to buy products to create profit is poisoning the planet destroying things with huge use value to us such as the air and the trees. And again, clearly we conclude that the economic system that we live under is in contradiction with the basic needs of humanity for the majority. There's this fundamental contradiction then between social production and private appropriation. The division of labour means that we produce what we need as a society socially. I teach someone else's farms, someone else produces the products, someone else distributes those products and none of this can happen individually. But the proceeds of the sales of those products are privately appropriated through the extraction of surplus value as profit which then sits in the individual capitalist hands and cannot be utilised for the good of the majority. And the jobs that are most essential that don't produce a surplus that can be extracted such as nursing are not being invested in. Exchange value comes into conflict with use value and that's why we see the most essential roles with the greatest use to us but the least used to profit making so poorly treated and underpaid and those who generate the biggest exchange value so highly prized. So what's the solution? Well, for Marxist, the solution to this contradiction is clear. We need a revolution in production, in ownership, control and organisation, a revolution in how societies run. We need to abolish the laws and illogic of the capitalist system and we need to replace that with a set of economic laws. Ones that are based on common ownership, a rational plan of production and democratic control and management and a planned economy would change the motive to produce from profit to need. But if we want to have control over what money is spent in our economy and ensure that the productivity work is put to use advancing society and our living standards and to reducing the working day, we have to have this planned economy and to control and plan, we have to have collective ownership of everything that's produced. Through this we'd be able to produce and plan in the interests of the need and the needs of the money rather than the profits of a few individual capitalist tonnes. The first step to this will be expropriating the commanding height of the economy. That's the land, the banks, the utilities, the infrastructure, the largest companies, all to be placed under the democratic control of the working class as part of the planned economy. Now we can see a glimpse of what's possible with the USSR which wasn't successful in bringing about socialism, but what it did do was create a planned economy and the results of this can be seen in the transformation of Russia between 1913 and 63 following the 1917 revolution. In that period, the country went from being more economically backward than Bangladesh is today to being the second most powerful nation on earth. Industrial output rose 52 times in comparison to the USA which rose six times and two for Britain. Productivity of labour raised by 1,310% which again contrasts to 332% in the USA and 73% in Britain. If this was achieved in 20th century Russia which was a backward, almost feudal country at the time which has also been devastated by two world wars and a civil war and as well as suffering under the Stalinist bureaucracy, imagine what a democratically planned economy in Britain and the rest of the economically advanced world in the 21st century could actually achieve. The result of such planning combined with the distribution of labour between everyone capable of work instead of what we see today where you've got some people doing two or three jobs and some people completely unemployed would mean a reduction in the length of the working day with no loss of pay becoming possible. As I discussed earlier with regard to automation this is something that cannot be achieved in capitalism. Therefore we have to demand full employment and decent living standards for all. A planned economy would also win this bogus choice between saving the economy or saving lives that's posed right now. It's disgusting that people will face death by the virus or potentially death by unemployment in impoverished conditions where so much wealth is existing in society right now. But by democratically owning and controlling that wealth we could eradicate these bullshit jobs ensure people can stay safe at home and still provide for people. Right now I think we can all agree that shielding is the most important thing for vulnerable workers. Instead of dicing with death in workplaces that they don't need to be in creating adverts for an already infamous global brand and pushing paper around an office so that they're at liberty to spend their wages in their lunch breaks on overpriced sandwiches in order to keep the economy going. We should be shielding workers insisting that they stay at home and stay safe. We should provide the NHS with more than it needs to give health workers and care workers rest and PPE and give them a civilised existence. But instead the government are actually discussing if people who are at severe risk should be going into the office so that they can buy sandwiches or not. The working class needs health care and their health care needs to be prioritised. But we aren't getting that under capitalism. If workers have remained off workers happened during the lockdown only individual private profits would have suffered. Simply capitalists have to have workers in work because they have to continue turning their profit and attempting to keep their system limping on. Profits in the system are more important in people's lives. And this contradiction shouldn't exist. Capitalist profits are the only thing that risking keeping us off work. But it doesn't need to be like that. It's only the capitalist system and capitalist's incessant drive for profit that makes it so. Socialism on the other hand means the end of a society in which humans are being oppressed and exploited by all the human beings for profit and an end to their labour being squandered. And an end to the fruits of our labour being privately appropriated by a tiny number of private hands. It means an end to private property on a grand scale and an end to private profit and the anarchy of the free market that it brings about. But a rational planned economy can only be achieved by the working class taking into control the banks and the commanding heights of the economy and democratically planning the economy. The working class have to have direct involvement in this in deciding its direction and in prioritising what is essential. The bottom line is that capitalism is literally killing us. We need health workers, we need care workers and social workers and teachers and all of the other jobs that are genuinely essential to living and that we're not getting because they're not profitable. There's a clear need in society that the system that we live under cannot provide for us. And the answer therefore is simple. We have to smash the capitalist system and create a socialist system with a planned economy that produces for need rather than anarchically for profit. It's all well and good to talk about this though, isn't it? You know, the problems with these bullshit jobs and pointing out the waste of labour power that's going on. But to ensure that we are only carrying out working society that's actually useful that's essential or fulfilling. We need a revolution in order to take power to abolish this private property and exploitation and to put the productivity of workers and the natural resources of the planet to benefit everyone, including the planet itself. So what that leads us to conclude is that in order for workers to live, this current system has to die and it's not going to wither away on its own. Capitalism will limp and claw and ride on its way continuing until it is overthrown and that puts the task on us comrades. It's essential. We have to fight to overthrow capitalism.