Too Steep! Crisis and the Co$t of Living

On Monday the 26th of September, Gong Commune hosted a discussion on crisis and the cost of living. The discussion considered how crisis and struggle characterise our present moment.

The past 3 years have seen a widespread re-valuation of work: struggles over essential work and the great refusal of much pointless work, along with a growing emphasis on the importance of care. At the same time, the cost of living has surged, while wages have stagnated for years and the dole remains unliveable. How do we make sense of the myriad struggles and crises unfolding as we speak?

The discussion considered the following questions:

1. What do the ‘Great Refusal’ and other struggles around work tell us about capitalism today?

2. What is inflation, what is driving it, and why is it happening like this now?

3. What is going on in the public sector struggles and why they are important?

4. What can we do to improve our lives together in the near and far term?

Below are the notes from the evening and a link to the recording is below the notes.

What do the ‘Great Refusal’ and other struggles around work tell us about capitalism today?

Discussions about economic crises usually focus on the power of capital, the growing miseries of poverty while profits soar, or austerity budgets like the one Labor is preparing us for while they cut rich people’s taxes. But I prefer to explore the struggles against capitalism and to think about how the ruling class reacts to our power – importantly today, this power is evident in the struggles against capitalist work, such as the global ‘great refusal’, ‘great resignation’, ‘great retirement’ & the decentring of economic values due to increased concerns for health, safety, and care.

Given the recent past, we need to consider how powerful and profound the impacts of the pandemic have been and continue to be. So, perhaps we can start thinking about these concerns in relation to the term – the cost of living. The cost of living tends to suggest that we measure life in economic ways, focusing on finance, debt, money, prices, rent & wages. Of course, these are all important. However, the class struggles of the past decade have increasingly focused on health, safety, care, our relationships with each other, with the world around us, on human life and the existences of other living things. These struggles suggest other ways of thinking about ‘the cost of living’ and pose profound questions about capitalism as a system in crisis – questions like – Is the cost of living that millions of people, especially the most vulnerable, must needlessly die? Or – Is it a ‘cost of living’ that we destroy the environmental basis of life?  As it becomes clear that for much of the ruling class and for capitalism in general the answer to these questions is apparently ‘yes’, why should we? why would we? want to work to reproduce this system?

The basis of capitalist society is the enforcement of work for capital – ensuring that most people, most of the time, are engaged in the daily reproduction of exploitation, in production, distribution & consumption for profit, for the benefit of the ruling class. It often appears that we have little power, and it can be hard to appreciate the power that we do have. While the power of workers is indicated by strikes, pickets and other industrial action, much of our resistance to capitalist work and shit working and living conditions tends to be invisible, neglected, or ignored. In recent years though, especially during the pandemic, the power of work refusal in various forms has been more widely recognised. For example, at the start of the pandemic, many workers stayed at home or refused to go to work, before state movement restrictions were announced, forcing govts and businesses to implement health and safety measures – including increased welfare payments & subsidised wages.

Across the world billions of people have continued to refuse to work in the way they used to, have changed the way they work, and have questioned and challenged what they work for. Work refusal is in the air, anti-work forums are increasingly popular, social media is widely used to encourage various forms of work refusal and the pandemic has changed the way many people think about the time and value of their lives. Yet, although the ‘great refusal’, ‘great resignation’, and ‘great retirement’ have received a lot of attention, most work refusal doesn’t involve leaving your job. Instead, it includes refusing both paid and unpaid work in a more general and often in more micro senses – slowing down, avoiding certain tasks, doing a half-arsed job, staying away from work, taking sick days when you’re sick rather than ‘soldiering on’, or spending work time doing things you want to do. While what today is called ‘quiet quitting’ might appear to involve relatively insignificant individual acts, these acts are being taken by billions of people to exert power over what they do, how they do it, why they do it, and whether they do it.

Most work refusal is relatively ‘quiet’, yet when it’s widespread and commonly practiced it contributes to louder forms, which receive more attention. Today, many workers are refusing work by striking – especially in industries where large numbers have refused work by resigning – such as nursing, aged care and teaching. These strikes have highlighted the financial ‘costs of living’ and low pay because economic crisis forces more and more people to push back, positioning workers as struggling for increased wages. Yet strikers have also focused on health issues, staffing ratios, workplace and public safety, decent working conditions, exhaustion, burnout, and the psychological costs of working.

Meanwhile, bosses and governments are powerfully reacting to the popularity of work refusal. Inflation, high interest rates, low wages, poverty welfare benefits, rent hikes, and price rises are attacks on our standard of living which bosses use to discipline workers, to discourage work refusal, and to encourage people to work more and harder, forcing those who are insecure into greater insecurity and those who have built-up some savings as a protective buffer from insecurity to spend their savings and end-up insecure. The increased focus on paying debts, on inflation, on price rises, on rent, frames the cost of living as about economic concerns, centred on the ‘market’, money, economic growth, productivity, efficiency, and profitability. This decentres the costs of living in relation to the future of life on earth, the health and safety of people, our quality of life, our social connections, or the care crisis, in aged care, physical and mental health care, child care, social care and environmental care. Still, importantly, the pandemic has given many people more time and more reasons to think deeply about the state of the world and many are refusing to return to ‘business as usual’. Instead, they’re seeking to live as if their lives matter, and their actions count.

So, to conclude, some questions I’m wondering about are – given the intensifying costs of capitalism, how can we take back more of our time so we can focus on what’s most important? How can we permanently transform our lives, as capitalism descends into a deepening series of crises? How can we more effectively refuse capitalist work and organise our own collective power – so that living isn’t costly?

– Nick

What is inflation, what is driving it, and why is it happening like this now?

Class politics of inflation

What is inflation?

• There is the storybook/folk story version that most of us know
  • “Inflation is a general & sustained rise in the level of all prices”.
  • Caused by a set of factors/forces: ‘Cost-push’, ‘demand-pull’, ‘too much money chasing too many goods’
• The solution:
  • Central Bank, raises interest rates,
  • This raises the cost of borrowing for banks
  • Cost of credit for business & households
  • ‘demand destruction’
  • slows economy.

• In reality: “There is no true story about inflation”:
  • 1. There is no single instance of pure definitional inflation, each ‘time’ differs, & is inseparable from its causes, & for every example there’s a counter-example.
  • 2. Inflation theories, mathematic models & policy tools are debunked by events consistently, often almost immediately after adoption, & have no empirical provability
  • 3. Understandings of inflation crises are constructed retrospectively: there’s often no conclusive causative explanation of past crises, & many remain contested for decades or even centuries.

• In short: they have no real idea! They can’t predict or forecast inflation, & can’t explain periods of policy success etc. – but this is not the point!
• The point is, unsurprisingly, political:
  • Given there’s “no true story”, obviously the victors define history, & the stories, analysis & tools are based solely on their underlying ideological positions.
  • They work to create the appearance of a uniformity of belief, efficacy of theories & solutions, & that they’re experts in control.
  • They also re-narrate past ideological & policy moves that were actually ad-hoc responses to crisis, as being coherent & pre-ordained by theory, & downplay the extent to which their actions are effected & limited by class struggle & popular resistance

• This work is necessary:
  • Because they clearly understand that Central Bank & state anti-inflation policies generate & deepen distributional inequality by explicitly prioritizing & protecting capital, creditors (lenders), & asset owners, & directly producing anti-labour outcomes
  • & because they have to generate or impose consent for the painful costs of their ‘solution’ to inflationary crises

Generating or imposing consent: during inflation crises is necessary to capture liberals, Right wing deficit hawks, financial capital and bond markets etc., by using fear of “social unrest” & the spectre of progressive redistributive policies, or signalling that they’re willing to administer the ‘bitter medicine’ of interest rates on the population, & to protect the value of capital & assets.

• But most importantly, consent is necessary to:
  • Convince labour, households, population that us bearing the costs of combatting the crisis is natural & unavoidable:
    • This is because interest rates are an inappropriate aggregate instrument that can’t address the problems causing the crisis- which are international, in specific sectors and supply chains- and actually works by deliberately raising national unemployment until labour is weak enough to abandon our wage demands
  • In more explicit terms, right now they’re essentially saying:
    • “there’s an external & sector-specific (energy & supply chain) shock & a resultant opportunistic profit grab by capital, that we refuse to acknowledge, materially intervene in, or control, so… you have to lose your job, decrease your income, and suffer austerity”.
  • In other words: labour & households are used as a macroeconomic shock & cost absorber, & this is because of the relative immobility of labour vs. the hypermobility of capital. Policy can target & control national wages in a way that’s “allegedly” impossible to do for international capital markets & bond holders.

So what can we say inflation is in terms of class struggle?:

• Inflationary crises are periods of instability & social conflict over distribution, & the redistribution of social costs of ‘fighting’ inflation
  • Crises are often created & propelled by a forceful restoration of the value of capital’s profit share, whether it’s declined as result of worker power, a crisis of profitability, energy & supply shocks, or increasingly, climate change.
  • The duration, nature & outcomes of inflationary crises are therefore a barometer of class power.

– Regrette

What is Happening in the Public Sector Strikes and Why are they Important?

Just by way disclaimer, owing to many of the issues we are discussing tonight such as overwork and the pressures of time, the comrades we had invited to speak from direct experiences in the recent strikes, were not able to make it. So, I am filling in for the night and haven’t answered the question posed directly.

The public sector strikes we have seen have been really important and inspiring for a whole range of reasons. We have seen these strikes in hospitals and care industries, in education institutions like the schools, and in transport. There have been other strikes in other areas, but these are the major public sector strikes we have seen.

It was mentioned earlier that in some of these sectors, like health, care and education, that much of the struggle has involved trying to do your job better – better ratios for example. In recent reports I did on the nursing strikes (here and here), talking with nurses at the last couple of strikes you know they haven’t really spoken about their wages so much as other interests, even though there is a wage struggle going on.

It is possible to relate these claims for better ratios, better hours, and so on to issues that Nick raised earlier, about reclaiming time and power within and against work. These sorts of claims are about an assertion of workers’ interests over time – the time of work and time outside of work.

I do think the wage question is important. There’s a cap on those public sector wages and pushing back against that cap is important because these public sector struggles point to a big contradiction between the public financing of the reproduction of capitalist social relations, and the struggles to expand that sphere in working class interests. A lot of what we’re seeing from the state is about clamping down on that sphere of care, health, education and so on.

One last point and I know it’s difficult to think about this from the outside, but one of the things that came up at the last strike in Wollongong was a disconnection between the strikes at different hospitals in the state. At the same time as the strike in Wollongong and elsewhere, there was a community picket at the West Mead hospital, and that seems to me like a important next step in that struggle moving from walking out and having a rally to constituting a space where workers and the community can come together talk about common issues, strategies and tactics, and do things together about what’s happening in the hospitals. To discuss how to win their struggles. What are the things that we can do as participants in struggles to help circulate those sorts of experiences so that as one site of this conflict takes a step forward in terms of tactics and strategy, it can circulate to other sites.

I’m interested what everyone else here thinks about why are these struggles important. I think they’re really important I think the pushing back on the clamping down on the sphere of social reproduction how we organise ourselves in time and space in the city is important and that exposing the way in which the state functions as a way to impose austerity to recuperate profitability and so on and so forth is also exposed in these in these struggles but I’m kind of more interested with everybody everybody else thinks.

– mark

What can we do to improve our lives together in the near and far term?

I was asked to speak a little about how we can work to collectively improve our lives given all the bullshit that is raining down on us at present. For context— in exchange for money, I am a community worker on Dharrawal Country, and with my free time I do a lot of organising around housing, food and educational justice. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic especially, I feel like these community roles have given me a lot of insight into both the particular ways things like changing legislation, housing crises, and the rising cost of living are affecting the people in my community I work and live alongside; but also the ways that peope are trying to build power and respond to these things. 

When we were starting to organise comunity care informed responses to  back in 2020, I think Nick Southall introduced me to the phrase “concentric circles of care”. I really appreciate this framework as we build power in our communities throughout the pandemic and into the future. The idea that our efforts for building other worlds can ripple outwards from our immediate networks is very compelling for me. Many of the strategies for collective improvement of our lives comes through the experience of myself and folks in my immediate concentric circles of care. 

One of the approaches to collective improvement I have been involed in lately have been at my workplace, where I am part of the Australian Services Union (ASU). Very recently, decades of union action resulted in some positive changes for disability and aged care workers— small things, like requiring employers to either pay you or rearrange your shift when a support work shift is cancelled; ensuring workers are compensated for ’split shifts’; and mandating yearly increases as per the award. However, some of these changes have been resisted by workers. Sometimes it’s about job security— as an industry, care workers are extremely precarious, with most of us on contracts tied to the renewal of government funding, and many workers resist award increases for themselves in fear that it will shorten their contracts or make their work even more insecure. Other workers were concerned about the impact that increasing staff wages would have on our clients’ NDIS plans— for example, if a ‘split shift’ levy comes out of a client’s NDIS funding, do they then miss out on other supports? 

I think one way we can move away from these arguments— which are of course fallacious and only serve the bosses/the not for profit industrial complex— is to emphasise how community and care workers’ working conditions are clients’ living conditions. Nurses have been able to make this argument most effectively during their industrial action campaigns over recent years, with calls for higher nurse to patient ratios across hospitals. We have tried to initiate work to rule in situations where disability support agencies put both workers and their clients in unsafe positions by not providing adequate staffing or equipment for physically supporting clients to get in and out of bed, or for personal care. When companies won’t spring for a sling lift, or when they refuse to adequately staff shifts, both clients and workers can get really hurt. By this logic, then, I’ve had discussions with workers around adequate payment for split shifts or even reclassifying some jobs that pay well below what they should. Workers who are stressed about money, or who work a two hour shift and barely cover the petrol they needed to get to the client’s hosue and back— only to do it again in four hours— are not able to provide the care, support and solidarity our clients need from us. 

I think the disability and community work sector is starting to strengthen in its organising too. I’ve done this type of work for nearly ten years, but the first strike of community workers over pay and conditions happened in Melbourne this year, by workers at Launch Housing striking to get their work re-classified so they would be paid adequately for their work. In previous years, lots of community workers have resisted strike action particularly, due to the impact it might have on our clients. 

One pathway I see to collective improvement for our lives in ensuring strike and picket action is accessible to everyone all of the time. Things like strike funds so that casuals can afford to go out on strike, child care collectives so that working parents can both participate in strike action and honour strike action by early childhood educators and teachers, and accomodating our comrades access needs in our strike planning are vitual ‘care infrastructure’ to build into our movements. Building this sort of infrastructure is also prefigurative political action: it means we can build our pickets in the image of new worlds we are hoping to create. 

In my professional and community organising work, I have recently been inundated with issues relating to housing. People on any kind of Centrelink payment are finding it completely impossible to access a private rental; people are being handed no-fault eviction from their rental accomodation seemingly at random; our public housing waiting list is minimum ten years long; the worst-maintained and neglected boarding houses have wait lists. There is little to no emergency shelter accomodation available in our city. Survivors of intimate partner violence are being pushed to start applying for private rentals mere days into their stays in womens refuges. Families of six people are spending months in one room in a hotel. Things are much worse now than even at the peak of the pandemic, when there were at least some (abeit very limited) legislative protections for tenants. 

I, like many community workers/organisers, feel powerless when it comes to housing matters. Shelter is a basic need and yet in the current circumstances it is almost impossible to come by. We are resorting to telling people to remain in their houses as long as possible to delay the inevitable homelessness crisis. I often feel like all I can offer is to be a buffer from the more violent aspects of our housing system, but buffers don’t solve the problem, they just make it hit slightly softer. In the case of so many of the people I work alongside, they are out of options when it comes to the legal system, They are planning on living in cars or tents.

Tenants in private, public and social housing are so vulnerable, and the law protects the landlords. What I dream of here is being able to call on staunch housing defenders when we lose all our appeals at the NCAAT tribunal. I am so inspired by housing defence rallies and pickets of homes in Sydney and Brisbane over the last two years— and by the squatting and eviction-resistance history of social services in Sydney— what I really dream of is being able to physically push away the sherriff with comrades when they come for our community. Maybe we can make it happen. 

I see this housing defence work on a continuum of the mutual aid and care work we are already offering each other, all of the time. Something Dean Spade talks a lot about in their book Mutual Aid, is how the not-for-profit industrial complex establishes a binary of who receives care and who gives care, and by maintaining and reifying this binary, the NFP industrial complex makes it impossible for us to develop reciprocal and self-organised care communities— it keeps us under the thumb of the state. Like the support workers worried about hurting their clients by taking too much NDIS funding, it forces us to accept scarcity as reality.

– What are your dreams for your concentric circles of care? 

– What do you think stops people from actively resisting eviction in your neighbourhood? 

– How do we care for each other when we are all very exhausted, burnt out and grieving?

– Jet

The recording for the event can be found here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mzPEUVyZExVIQsCgIv0H4ss-3xwUeOgl/view?fbclid=IwAR38G4uOtZfxli-3hKhpl4c9jPxdJD1AUd_OiFOfeo4y1IY8VeK8Y0cYrPw