Speaking at the public session “Salaries, prices and profits – a current issue” organized by the PCP and which took place today in a hotel in Lisbon, Paulo Raimundo said that there was “the mystification that the reduction in prices would be achieved with the reduction of taxes”.
“The reduction of the ISP on fuel, or the measure of zero VAT on various foods, reveal the misconception of this conversation. All these measures have not stopped the rise in prices in these months, it has only reduced tax revenues and ensured for the scandalous profits of the group’s economic institutions and multinationals,” he criticized.
In this approximately 15-minute speech, the PCP leader addressed a text prepared by Karl Marx, entitled “Wages, Price and Profit”, for a lecture in June 1865, at the meeting of the First International.
At that meeting, said Paulo Raimundo, there was a person named “Mr. Weston, who defended that it was not worth the workers to fight for wage increases, because this increase would increase the price of goods”.
The leader of the PCP criticized “the fallacy of this argument” and, quoting Marx, concluded that, rather than raising commodity prices, “a general increase in wages would result in a fall in the general rate of profit.
Paulo Raimundo transposed Mr. Weston’s theory to the present, opining that “it is curious that after more than 150 years there are people in this world, including in Portugal”, who still practice it.
“As we see every day, Mr. Weston has left many heirs here: from Costa to Montenegro, from Lagarde to Ursula Von der Leyen, from Centeno to António Saraiva,” he stressed.
Paulo Raimundo warned that “the people and the country are being shocked by higher inflation than has been admitted, longer than some have announced and certainly more unfair in the distribution of the consequences” than they would have “lead to believe”.
In this context, the leader of the PCP defended that the “wage rise is a national emergency” and criticized the new labor law, entitled “Agenda do Trabalho Decent”, as it is a “new tool to deepen the exploitation”.
“The PS government, like PSD, CDS, Chega and IL, rejects all proposals that could confront the interests of capital, opting for specific and welfare measures, small support measures that, useful to those who receive them, solve the problems of soil ‘ he criticized.
The PCP general secretary maintained the need for a policy that defends the interests of workers by “confronting the interests of economic groups and multinationals”, the “break with the economic model based on low wages” and the “immediate increase of the national minimum wage to 850 euros”.
On the other hand, the leader of the communists also defended the intervention of the state in the market “not to favor the great interests as it has done”, but “to protect the population and workers from inflation”.
“The regulation and price control of essential goods and services is possible and necessary in the current context. This is what we propose with regard to food and the margins of large-scale distribution, energy, telecommunications, housing, bank loans that most one million and one hundred thousand families with the deterioration in interest rates,” he said.
Paulo Raimundo stressed that the country is in “growing dependence” on foreigners and is in a position of “submission to the euro”, which has turned “Portugal into a country increasingly peripheral and exposed to the instability that the international characterizes the economy”.
“This path, more than the ‘protective insurance’ some advertised, has made our country one of the weakest links,” he said.
Source: DN
