Finland – Punalippu: How Real is the Economic Growth Promised by the Bourgeoisie?
We hereby share an unofficial translation of an article published by Punalippu on September 18.
Over the past few weeks, the bourgeois media has more than once reported on the emerging economic growth. For example, according to an article produced by Yle, Nordea Bank forecasts that the economy will grow by about 1.7% by next year and that by 2027, economic growth will reach as high as 2%. Nordea’s economic forecast gives outlines of the components of this economic growth: investments in “defense technology,” demand for semiconductors driven by the growth of artificial intelligence, and the related infrastructure construction. Every single one of the above mentioned serves above all the capital of Finnish imperialists, and not the people, as Nordea’s forecast indicates that unemployment is expected to decline next year from the current 10.5 percent by just 1.5 percent, showing that the working class will be left only with crumbs from this so-called “economic growth.” Economic figures have also improved slightly due to large cruise ship orders placed at the end of June.
In addition, the growing defense investments can seemingly be used to artificially turn economic forecasts upward. Militarization is part of the growth of the share of useless, unproductive work typical of imperialism. Everything else is being cut, but defense spending is being ramped up in heaps, as we have written about in detail, for example, in our article discussing the government’s latest budget framework negotiations.
A significant portion of the promised economic growth comes from the data center projects recently reported in the news and Google’s massive 13-billion-euro investments in Finland. It is quite telling that at a time when high electricity prices are putting a strain on the public, the conservatives want to build electricity-guzzling data centers that serve no real social need, but rather imperialist speculation. Data centers are part of the artificial intelligence bubble, which is bound to burst sooner or later. The “economic growth” they bring is built on very shaky ground.
In reality, data centers worsen further the employment situation and the status of workers. Juhana Brotherus, CEO of Association for Finnish Work, argues that it is becoming less and less profitable for companies to hire workers, because advances in artificial intelligence will ultimately make it unprofitable to hire new employees if AI will be capable of doing their jobs in just two or three years. AI is being used, in particular, to increasingly subordinate intellectual labor to the logic of capital, so that the workforce can be reduced, and work becomes simpler and lower-paying. Google’s massive investments in Finland and the direction of AI development are yet another example of how the much reported “economic growth” serves large international corporations around the world as well as Finnish imperialists and their investments at home—but not the people in either case. The “trickle-down” of wealth generated by these investments to the Finnish working folk, in the form of construction taxes, job growth, and other crumbs, is a deception aimed at tricking the Finnish working class into supporting economic policies that oppose the interests of their own class.
Jobs are more insecure than ever, and this development is not going to change. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find permanent jobs. Growth companies are hiring “project workers,” and college interns are being put to work in unpaid slave labor. Jobs will become even scarcer in the future, as evidenced by the recently reported unemployment among highly educated graduates. In addition, the cuts to the public sector – such as education and healthcare – approved by the bourgeois Parliament are driving an increasing number of people, particularly women, into temporary work and unemployment.
High unemployment and job insecurity benefit the imperialists by driving down wages and weakening the position of workers. It intensifies the competition between workers for dwindling jobs, thereby undermining class unity. This development serves, above all, Finnish imperialists. The internal logic of imperialism also entails recurring crises, each one deeper than the last, driving working people into ever tighter straits. The current crisis is always followed by a new one, and during these crises, the imperialists further monopolize their production chains by buying up bankrupt competitors and seizing their markets. The bourgeoisie’s “economic growth” is therefore manifested primarily as the accumulation of capital in the bank vaults of those who already own it, as increased monopolization, and as the ever-worsening impoverishment of the people. Finnish imperialism feels it necessary to constantly make promises to the people about economic growth, but if economic growth that benefited the people was real, it would surely speak for itself.
