http://www.pyr.org.ar/spip.php?article623
Monday, December 22, 2008
VILLA CONSTITUCION - SANTA FE
¡Sí, se puede! ¡Sí, se puede! ¡Si una mujer avanza ningún hombre retrocede!”
The chant by the women from Paraná Metal, growing ever stronger, was heard in the Villa Constitución Plaza on December 19. The drums stopped beating so the 5,000 people present could hear: “Yes, it’s possible! Yes, it can be done! If a woman steps forward, no man retreats!”
They are the wives, sisters, mothers of the Paraná Metal workers. They are the women of Villa Constitución, members of the Women’s Commission.
When the Paraná Metal bosses decided to suspend more than 1,300 workers without paying them their wages and stop production, the workers responded. They are at the factory entrances with a tent, taking shifts in the factory to prevent it from being stripped. They are demanding what is theirs.
On December 19, an historic day, they marched from the entrances of Paraná Metal to the Villa Constitución Plaza in a big workers’ and popular contingent, generating support from the entire community of Villa, with businesses closed, with neighbors applauding from balconies. The column grew larger as it proceeded, and workers from Acindar, from Tenaris, from the workshops, hospital workers, teachers, housewives, neighbors joined.
The women of Paraná Metal have gotten organized and already had two meetings of the Women’s Commission in the auditorium of the Villa Constitución UOM [metalworkers' union]. Last Saturday, some 80 women participated. Because, as they said in the meeting, women are the ones who have to keep house, many of them are also workers, and they are ready to fight beside the workers.
This December 24, they are calling on all the workers and all the people of Villa to go with them in the factory entrances to spend Christmas. Donations of food, beef, pork, beverages and sweet bread for everyone, from the city council and several unions, are already promised.
Pan y Rosas is joining this struggle, marching with them, going with them in the tent, on the ticket line. We are also joining the Women’s Commission to offer them our complete support, to contribute so that they will win, and be at their disposal, for whatever they need and decide.
Today the women of Villa Constitución are an example!
34 years ago, other women made heroic history in Villa Constitución, when from the Women’s Commission they organized to support the struggle, through a big strike fund, adding to the community, confronting repression.
Today the daughters of the Villazo are in the street, fighting once more!
Total support to the women from Paraná Metal!
Total support to the workers from Paraná Metal!
Women’s Group Pan y Rosas
Monday, December 29, 2008
Sunday, December 28, 2008
ARGENTINA--Workers' struggle at Paraná Metal
From: http://www.pts.org.ar/spip.php?article11474
Friday, December 19, 2008
Big workers’ and people’s march in Villa Constitución
More than 4,000 people mobilize in support of the workers at Paraná Metal
By PTS Santa Fe
At 9 a.m., they were already gathered in front of Paraná Metal. The mobilization began with a picket at the former Metcom. There was a lot of enthusiasm, and the workers from Paraná Metal were not alone. The workers from Tenaris had already endorsed the call. The women’s commission in struggle was there early, exerting all their strength.
The workers’ contingent was moving foward along the road. The first stop was at the entrances of Acindar. Lots of emotion. Applause. The workers from Acindar, on foot and motorcycles, joined the march. Local workshops also came out and joined.
“You have to jump, you gotta jump. The one who doesn’t jump is management” was heard, growing ever louder. “The people united, will never be defeated.” Two hours of walking, and at every step the column grew larger. Applause again, when the workers and young people who arrived from Rosario in a bus, lined up on the side of the road to join.
Teachers, workers from the hospital, from the EPE, from city government, everyone coming together in the mobilization. Delegations from AMSAFE, ATILRA of Rosario, CCC, Raúl Castells, the women's group Pan y Rosas, the Agrupación Marrón from Rosario, the students' center from Villa Constitución, the PTS, Polo obrero, and others accompanied. During the whole march, the young people from Paraná Metal did not stop chanting very energetically.
When the march reached the city, families were applauding from their balconies, housewives, neighbors, waiting on the sidewalk for the contingent to walk by. All the businesses had closed. The city of Villa Constitución was moved by the struggle of the workers from Paraná Metal.
Finally they got to the Plaza. "If this is not the people, where are they?" A group from Paraná Metal added another chant: "Occupation, a wave of people, workers' control to throw out the bosses!"
The rally was held in the historic Plaza of Villa Constitución (where the Villazo took place). There were speeches by leaders from CTA Rosario, AMSAFE, ATE, CTA Mar del Plata, leaders of the [metalworkers' union branches] UOM Campana, UOM Casilda, UOM Las Parejas, and also a metalworkers' representative from the CUT of San José Dos Campos of Brazil. Leaders of the [metalworkers' union] UOM Villa Constitución concluded the rally. It was very emotional when two women who belong to the Women's Commmission of Paraná Metal went up to the speakers' box. "You can feel it, you can sense it, women are present," and "Yes, we can, yes, we can! If a woman steps forward, no man retreats!" the women were chanting.
Support from Villa, from Rosario, and from all of Argentina, was extremely strong.
Support also arrived from the corps of delegates of the Buenos Aires subway.
One of the delegates from the internal commission announced that through Caló (national UOM) the government will soon give them 500 pesos for each worker before the year ends. They managed to restore the 600 peso subsidy for each worker that the government had already been giving the bosses for wages, but for after January 15. Now the workers continue to be without a single peso to take to their families.
Today they have a meeting at the Ministry of Labor in Rosario, and another on Monday in Buenos Aires with the Buenos Aires secretary of commerce, but until now, there is no news.
The women invited the audience to spend December 24 in the tent alongside of the workers. They already received a donation from the town council of beef and sweet bread for everyone, and donations of pork and food from other bodies. The Santa Cruz oil workers offered beverages for 3,000 people for those days. The Contraimagen Group, which was filming the whole march, publicly offered to screen films in the tent for the workers and their families.
The resolutions from the workers' plenary meeting that took place on Wednesday, December 17, in Rosario, that include a rejection of layoffs and suspensions, distributing the hours of work, workers' putting every plant that closes back to producing, non-payment of the foreign debt, and support for all the struggles, were read from the speakers' box.
It was an historic mobilization, that generated a lot of popular support for the workers' victory in their struggle, for insuring that the workers do not pay for the crisis. The Women's Commission called a broader meeting for 6 p.m. on Saturday, in the UOM auditorium.
From the speakers' box, they called for continuing to back the struggle and participating in the tent.
Today the workers of Paraná Metal are a great example for all workers of Argentina and the region, next to those of GM in Alvear and others. Actis, leader of UOM Villa, and of Paraná Metal, asserted in conclusion that “if all else fails, we workers will set the factory to producing.” This is a report of a great day of an historic struggle.
Total support to the struggle of the workers of Paraná Metal!
Friday, December 19, 2008
Big workers’ and people’s march in Villa Constitución
More than 4,000 people mobilize in support of the workers at Paraná Metal
By PTS Santa Fe
At 9 a.m., they were already gathered in front of Paraná Metal. The mobilization began with a picket at the former Metcom. There was a lot of enthusiasm, and the workers from Paraná Metal were not alone. The workers from Tenaris had already endorsed the call. The women’s commission in struggle was there early, exerting all their strength.
The workers’ contingent was moving foward along the road. The first stop was at the entrances of Acindar. Lots of emotion. Applause. The workers from Acindar, on foot and motorcycles, joined the march. Local workshops also came out and joined.
“You have to jump, you gotta jump. The one who doesn’t jump is management” was heard, growing ever louder. “The people united, will never be defeated.” Two hours of walking, and at every step the column grew larger. Applause again, when the workers and young people who arrived from Rosario in a bus, lined up on the side of the road to join.
Teachers, workers from the hospital, from the EPE, from city government, everyone coming together in the mobilization. Delegations from AMSAFE, ATILRA of Rosario, CCC, Raúl Castells, the women's group Pan y Rosas, the Agrupación Marrón from Rosario, the students' center from Villa Constitución, the PTS, Polo obrero, and others accompanied. During the whole march, the young people from Paraná Metal did not stop chanting very energetically.
When the march reached the city, families were applauding from their balconies, housewives, neighbors, waiting on the sidewalk for the contingent to walk by. All the businesses had closed. The city of Villa Constitución was moved by the struggle of the workers from Paraná Metal.
Finally they got to the Plaza. "If this is not the people, where are they?" A group from Paraná Metal added another chant: "Occupation, a wave of people, workers' control to throw out the bosses!"
The rally was held in the historic Plaza of Villa Constitución (where the Villazo took place). There were speeches by leaders from CTA Rosario, AMSAFE, ATE, CTA Mar del Plata, leaders of the [metalworkers' union branches] UOM Campana, UOM Casilda, UOM Las Parejas, and also a metalworkers' representative from the CUT of San José Dos Campos of Brazil. Leaders of the [metalworkers' union] UOM Villa Constitución concluded the rally. It was very emotional when two women who belong to the Women's Commmission of Paraná Metal went up to the speakers' box. "You can feel it, you can sense it, women are present," and "Yes, we can, yes, we can! If a woman steps forward, no man retreats!" the women were chanting.
Support from Villa, from Rosario, and from all of Argentina, was extremely strong.
Support also arrived from the corps of delegates of the Buenos Aires subway.
One of the delegates from the internal commission announced that through Caló (national UOM) the government will soon give them 500 pesos for each worker before the year ends. They managed to restore the 600 peso subsidy for each worker that the government had already been giving the bosses for wages, but for after January 15. Now the workers continue to be without a single peso to take to their families.
Today they have a meeting at the Ministry of Labor in Rosario, and another on Monday in Buenos Aires with the Buenos Aires secretary of commerce, but until now, there is no news.
The women invited the audience to spend December 24 in the tent alongside of the workers. They already received a donation from the town council of beef and sweet bread for everyone, and donations of pork and food from other bodies. The Santa Cruz oil workers offered beverages for 3,000 people for those days. The Contraimagen Group, which was filming the whole march, publicly offered to screen films in the tent for the workers and their families.
The resolutions from the workers' plenary meeting that took place on Wednesday, December 17, in Rosario, that include a rejection of layoffs and suspensions, distributing the hours of work, workers' putting every plant that closes back to producing, non-payment of the foreign debt, and support for all the struggles, were read from the speakers' box.
It was an historic mobilization, that generated a lot of popular support for the workers' victory in their struggle, for insuring that the workers do not pay for the crisis. The Women's Commission called a broader meeting for 6 p.m. on Saturday, in the UOM auditorium.
From the speakers' box, they called for continuing to back the struggle and participating in the tent.
Today the workers of Paraná Metal are a great example for all workers of Argentina and the region, next to those of GM in Alvear and others. Actis, leader of UOM Villa, and of Paraná Metal, asserted in conclusion that “if all else fails, we workers will set the factory to producing.” This is a report of a great day of an historic struggle.
Total support to the struggle of the workers of Paraná Metal!
PTS Argentina, blasts Israeli massacre of Palestinians in GAZA
Urgent—Press release
We repudiate the Israeli massacre against the Palestinian people
By PTS, Argentina
Sunday, December 28, 2008
(PTS, 27-12-08) Christian Castillo, national leader of the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS) indicated today that "with the massacre of 200 Palestinians in Gaza, Israel again shows that it is a terrorist state, which does not hesitate to bomb the civilian population indiscriminately. It is a state that took the lead in introducing the doctrine of 'preventive war,' the legalization of
torture and murder of its opponents without any judgment, something that afterwards the Bush administration did itself." He also condemned "the complicit declarations of the imperialist governments of the US and the European Union, that want to turn the victims into murderers. This is not surprising, since these are the same states that maintain the colonial occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, among other territories."
In conclusion, Castillo stated that "the Palestinian people are one of the most oppressed on the planet. One and a half million Palestinians, those whom Israel seeks to crush with hunger and terror, are crammed into the worst poverty, in the Gaza Strip, a territory of scarcely 360 square kilometers. We from the PTS are in complete solidarity with the Palestinians. There will be no peace in the region until the oppression of the Palestinians is ended once and for all, a matter that can only be achieved by expelling imperialism from the region, ending the terrorist and colonial State of Israel and setting up a workers' and socialist Palestine where Arabs and Jews may live in peace."
PTS
Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas
Argentina
We repudiate the Israeli massacre against the Palestinian people
By PTS, Argentina
Sunday, December 28, 2008
(PTS, 27-12-08) Christian Castillo, national leader of the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS) indicated today that "with the massacre of 200 Palestinians in Gaza, Israel again shows that it is a terrorist state, which does not hesitate to bomb the civilian population indiscriminately. It is a state that took the lead in introducing the doctrine of 'preventive war,' the legalization of
torture and murder of its opponents without any judgment, something that afterwards the Bush administration did itself." He also condemned "the complicit declarations of the imperialist governments of the US and the European Union, that want to turn the victims into murderers. This is not surprising, since these are the same states that maintain the colonial occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, among other territories."
In conclusion, Castillo stated that "the Palestinian people are one of the most oppressed on the planet. One and a half million Palestinians, those whom Israel seeks to crush with hunger and terror, are crammed into the worst poverty, in the Gaza Strip, a territory of scarcely 360 square kilometers. We from the PTS are in complete solidarity with the Palestinians. There will be no peace in the region until the oppression of the Palestinians is ended once and for all, a matter that can only be achieved by expelling imperialism from the region, ending the terrorist and colonial State of Israel and setting up a workers' and socialist Palestine where Arabs and Jews may live in peace."
PTS
Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas
Argentina
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Social revolt in GREECE: Country paralyzed by 24 hour general strike
From: www.ft-ci.org
A country paralyzed by a 24-hour general strike:
Social revolt in Greece
By Simone Ishibashi
Thursday, November 11, 2008
A trigger-happy act became the fuse for a social explosion in the streets of Greece, as we relate in these pages. The young people's explosion in Greece is taking place in a context of chronic unemployment and extremely precarious employment and was preceded by different struggles and mobilizations in recent years. In 2006 and 2007, Greek students led harsh conflicts with assemblies of around 70,000 students, massive mobilizations, and seizure of almost all the schools, and then, following their example, high-school students seized almost 1,000 schools. The neo-liberal policies of the Karamanlís administration were also confronted by the workers with a series of general strikes in the last few years. The current rebellion of young people and students in Greece is not an isolated case. In Berlusconi's Italy, a privatizing reform of education was answered by "the people of the schools" in the streets, together with other groups of workers in a big national day of struggle. In Gemrany, privatizations also aroused high school and university students, and teachers, who organized a one-day strike with demonstrations in around 40 cities; more than 100,000 students filled the streets. Similar actions were carried out in the Spanish state and Ireland, as we show in this issue. It is clear that the entire European bourgeoisie has been trying systematically to undermine what remains of the conquests, like public education, with the privatizing Bologna Plan, by striking at the youth, that has been one of the groups most affected by unemployment and the results of the economic crisis. But it is also clear that young people in Europe are ready to resist. The revolt by the "Generation of 700 Euros" (as they call young workers with precarious jobs in Greece) is a sign of that.
On Saturday, December 6, the streets of the main Greek cities, like Athens, Hania, Crete and Salonika, were seized by thousands of demonstrators, who were protesting against the murder of Alexis Grigoropoulos, 15 years old, by the police. The demonstration, in spite of having been harshly repressed by the cops, lasted for hours, stretching out until Sunday and leaving a toll of 40 wounded.
However, the fierce repression did not manage to intimidate the youth and popular groups that rose up against the brutal murder carried out by the police. After the confrontations, university professors, who were already preparing a mobilization against social security reform and the economic policy of the worn-out Costas Karamanlís administration, the right-wing New Democracy Party, announced that they will join the three days of protests, scheduled to occur beginning December 9, while the University of Thessalonika was occupied by hundreds of students, who responded to the attacks of the police with stones and Molotov cocktails. A march on the night of December 8, at which the main Greek unions should appear, was also called by the Greek Communist Party and PASOK, the socialist party.
The repercussions of the Greek social revolt were already going through the European Union. On the morning of December 8, the Greek consulate in Berlin was occupied by 15young Greek citizens who were carrying a sign that read "The state murders." The Greek demonstrations expressed popular rage against the government and the effects of the economic crisis, which have struck Greece harshly, worsening the already dreadful distribution of the country's income, and they could be the herald of big onslaughts in the class struggle, and a profound political crisis of the servile and reactionary Greek government. So the confrontations in Greece are part of the first responses by the movement of the masses to the effects of the capitalist crisis, and they could transform the ancient birthplace of Western civilization into a frontline barricade of the international class struggle, now that it has assumed a political character, to the extent that the government of Costas Karamanlís is being questioned.
Greece: Political and economic crisis
The current Greek political situation is marked by a profound impact from the international economic crisis. Despite the numbers presented by the government, that were certifying advances in the economic indicators beginning with Greece's entry into the European Union in 2001, from the beginning of this year, Greece, beside countries like the Spanish state, was one of the first to see its economy fall. The Greek economy, which is largely sustained by the service sector, with 74.5% of the national GDP, of which, tourism is responsible for a large part, has suffered with the recession of some of its European neighbors. However, it is the industrial sector, responsible for 20.7% of all economic activisty, that has been the most battered: total exports fell by 13.2% compared with last year, while industrial activity as a whole shrank by approximately 3.5%. The jobs created in the last year are still mostly precarious, not having reversed the proportion of 1 in every 5 Greeks living below the poverty line, earning less than 5,000 Euros/year. Furthermore, Greece was already in the sights of the European Union because it exceeded the deficit permitted to countries of the Euro Zone.
The Costas Karamanlís government has been one of the most determined to unload the crisis on the backs of the workers. As a way to heed the opinions of the main imperialisms of the European Union, the government is trying to privatize difference businesses, including the state-owned airlines, besides carrying out reforms that immensely attack the pension system, with a plan that increases retirement age and reduces the value of pensions. The New Democracy government is alos responsible for cutting investments dedicated to social programs, increasing taxes, and attacking higher education. So the popular reaction that exploded in recent demonstrations is also a response to the rescue costing billions, announced by the Greek government to save the finanical system and the banks, following the US and the European Union. Thus, contrary to the bourgeois discourse of greeting Greece's entry into the European Union as a means of economic growth, in view of the crisis, it is obvious that countries with less economic power, besides continuing to keep structurally the same disparities that impose immense sufferings and privations on the masses, entry still means for these countries attacks on historically won rights, in the name of "seeking competitiveness," and "modernization" imposed by the European imperialist powers. This confirms that the European Union, as we have already discussed in other articles, is only an attempt by the main European imperialisms to subjugate their own proletariat and those of other countries of the Continent.
Inside Greece, the effects of the economic crisis are added to a big political crisis that is beginning among highly-placed officials in the New Democracy government. As if the goverment's attacks were not enough, and the harsh situation to which a immense part of the population and the Greek workers are subjected, an endless number of ministers are being accused of corruption. Together with the explosion of the international crisis, in September of this year scandals came to the surface that involved the Merchant Marine Minister, Yorgos Vulgarakis, who was forced to resign after the discovery that hidden, lucrative deals of his family were based on abuses of power. Other institutions that were favored by the New Democracy government, like Orthodox Church itself, were also targets of corruption scandals, which weakens the allies of Costas Karamanlís. In an attempt not to appear even more weakened, the Greek President, after having lost a series of other collaborators, was forced to refuse the request for resignation of Prokopis Pavlopoulos, Minister of the Interior, who was ready to hand over the job because of the murder of the youth in Athens. However, this decision could increase popular rage, contributing to his government still more.
Recover and strengthen the tradition of struggle by workers and young people
Greece has been one of the most unstable countries of Europe, and it was already the stage for several confrontations of workers and popular groups with the government. The social revolt that has exploded in recent days is one more episode that shows the immense fighting spirit of the Greek youth and people. The workers' entry on the stage could raise the demonstrations to a higher level. In spite of the treacherous pacifist line adopted by the PASOK bureaucracy, than, when it was in government in 2001, tried to pass similar attacks on the pension system and was also almost overthrown by popular demonstrations, and of Communist Party (the KKE, according to its Greek initials), it is possible that the mobilizations could break out again, that oculd force the leaderships to go much further thna they wished, giving continuity and radicalizing the different mobilizations that occured since the beginning of this year.
These mobiizations were very large, like the 24-hour strike on October 21, that had the support of 90% of service sector workers and culminated in a march with the participation of 15,000 people in Athens, against the government's attacks, and with the slogan, "We cannot tolerate any more." The high-school and university students' movement actively joined in protest against the privatization of higher education and against cutting budget items for education, culminating in the occupation of 250 institutes and schools throughout the country. The strike ended with the occupation of the central building of Olympic Airways by workers, who were also harshly repressed by the police. The shutdowns continued on October 22, and this time included rural groups, that had almost 100% participation.
Today, many people are already comparing the social revolt detonated by the murder of the teenager with the demonstrations led by the students in 1985, when the police also murdered a young man who was participating in the tributes to the November, 1973actions. It is a tradition of the Greek youth, popular groups and workers to go out to the streets to remember the fall of the so-called "Colonels' dictatorship," a regime led by General Yorgos Papadópulos, that had subjugated the Greek people and workers with great brutality since the coup d'état driven by the colonels on April
21, 1967. The 1973 demonstrations, with the students as vanguard, quickly became massive, including broad popular and workers' groups, that made the occupation of the Athens Polytechnical School the epicenter of the mobilization. This movement helped enormously for the fall of the Colonels' dictatorship in 1974.
So it is necessary that the workers enter the stage with their historical methods of struggle, equiping the social revolt that was setting the streets of the main cities of the country on fire, with a program capable of imposing a workers' solution and finishing the road opened in 1973, preventing the economic crisis from being unloaded on the backs of the workers and the Greek people. The combative working class and the Greek youth need to surpass their leaderships, now in the hands of the KKE and PASOK, and unify their ranks, by struggling to impose a definitive solution to the misfortunes imposed by the Costas Karamanlís government and its bourgeoisie connected to the interests of the European Union. Let us follow attentively.
A country paralyzed by a 24-hour general strike:
Social revolt in Greece
By Simone Ishibashi
Thursday, November 11, 2008
A trigger-happy act became the fuse for a social explosion in the streets of Greece, as we relate in these pages. The young people's explosion in Greece is taking place in a context of chronic unemployment and extremely precarious employment and was preceded by different struggles and mobilizations in recent years. In 2006 and 2007, Greek students led harsh conflicts with assemblies of around 70,000 students, massive mobilizations, and seizure of almost all the schools, and then, following their example, high-school students seized almost 1,000 schools. The neo-liberal policies of the Karamanlís administration were also confronted by the workers with a series of general strikes in the last few years. The current rebellion of young people and students in Greece is not an isolated case. In Berlusconi's Italy, a privatizing reform of education was answered by "the people of the schools" in the streets, together with other groups of workers in a big national day of struggle. In Gemrany, privatizations also aroused high school and university students, and teachers, who organized a one-day strike with demonstrations in around 40 cities; more than 100,000 students filled the streets. Similar actions were carried out in the Spanish state and Ireland, as we show in this issue. It is clear that the entire European bourgeoisie has been trying systematically to undermine what remains of the conquests, like public education, with the privatizing Bologna Plan, by striking at the youth, that has been one of the groups most affected by unemployment and the results of the economic crisis. But it is also clear that young people in Europe are ready to resist. The revolt by the "Generation of 700 Euros" (as they call young workers with precarious jobs in Greece) is a sign of that.
On Saturday, December 6, the streets of the main Greek cities, like Athens, Hania, Crete and Salonika, were seized by thousands of demonstrators, who were protesting against the murder of Alexis Grigoropoulos, 15 years old, by the police. The demonstration, in spite of having been harshly repressed by the cops, lasted for hours, stretching out until Sunday and leaving a toll of 40 wounded.
However, the fierce repression did not manage to intimidate the youth and popular groups that rose up against the brutal murder carried out by the police. After the confrontations, university professors, who were already preparing a mobilization against social security reform and the economic policy of the worn-out Costas Karamanlís administration, the right-wing New Democracy Party, announced that they will join the three days of protests, scheduled to occur beginning December 9, while the University of Thessalonika was occupied by hundreds of students, who responded to the attacks of the police with stones and Molotov cocktails. A march on the night of December 8, at which the main Greek unions should appear, was also called by the Greek Communist Party and PASOK, the socialist party.
The repercussions of the Greek social revolt were already going through the European Union. On the morning of December 8, the Greek consulate in Berlin was occupied by 15young Greek citizens who were carrying a sign that read "The state murders." The Greek demonstrations expressed popular rage against the government and the effects of the economic crisis, which have struck Greece harshly, worsening the already dreadful distribution of the country's income, and they could be the herald of big onslaughts in the class struggle, and a profound political crisis of the servile and reactionary Greek government. So the confrontations in Greece are part of the first responses by the movement of the masses to the effects of the capitalist crisis, and they could transform the ancient birthplace of Western civilization into a frontline barricade of the international class struggle, now that it has assumed a political character, to the extent that the government of Costas Karamanlís is being questioned.
Greece: Political and economic crisis
The current Greek political situation is marked by a profound impact from the international economic crisis. Despite the numbers presented by the government, that were certifying advances in the economic indicators beginning with Greece's entry into the European Union in 2001, from the beginning of this year, Greece, beside countries like the Spanish state, was one of the first to see its economy fall. The Greek economy, which is largely sustained by the service sector, with 74.5% of the national GDP, of which, tourism is responsible for a large part, has suffered with the recession of some of its European neighbors. However, it is the industrial sector, responsible for 20.7% of all economic activisty, that has been the most battered: total exports fell by 13.2% compared with last year, while industrial activity as a whole shrank by approximately 3.5%. The jobs created in the last year are still mostly precarious, not having reversed the proportion of 1 in every 5 Greeks living below the poverty line, earning less than 5,000 Euros/year. Furthermore, Greece was already in the sights of the European Union because it exceeded the deficit permitted to countries of the Euro Zone.
The Costas Karamanlís government has been one of the most determined to unload the crisis on the backs of the workers. As a way to heed the opinions of the main imperialisms of the European Union, the government is trying to privatize difference businesses, including the state-owned airlines, besides carrying out reforms that immensely attack the pension system, with a plan that increases retirement age and reduces the value of pensions. The New Democracy government is alos responsible for cutting investments dedicated to social programs, increasing taxes, and attacking higher education. So the popular reaction that exploded in recent demonstrations is also a response to the rescue costing billions, announced by the Greek government to save the finanical system and the banks, following the US and the European Union. Thus, contrary to the bourgeois discourse of greeting Greece's entry into the European Union as a means of economic growth, in view of the crisis, it is obvious that countries with less economic power, besides continuing to keep structurally the same disparities that impose immense sufferings and privations on the masses, entry still means for these countries attacks on historically won rights, in the name of "seeking competitiveness," and "modernization" imposed by the European imperialist powers. This confirms that the European Union, as we have already discussed in other articles, is only an attempt by the main European imperialisms to subjugate their own proletariat and those of other countries of the Continent.
Inside Greece, the effects of the economic crisis are added to a big political crisis that is beginning among highly-placed officials in the New Democracy government. As if the goverment's attacks were not enough, and the harsh situation to which a immense part of the population and the Greek workers are subjected, an endless number of ministers are being accused of corruption. Together with the explosion of the international crisis, in September of this year scandals came to the surface that involved the Merchant Marine Minister, Yorgos Vulgarakis, who was forced to resign after the discovery that hidden, lucrative deals of his family were based on abuses of power. Other institutions that were favored by the New Democracy government, like Orthodox Church itself, were also targets of corruption scandals, which weakens the allies of Costas Karamanlís. In an attempt not to appear even more weakened, the Greek President, after having lost a series of other collaborators, was forced to refuse the request for resignation of Prokopis Pavlopoulos, Minister of the Interior, who was ready to hand over the job because of the murder of the youth in Athens. However, this decision could increase popular rage, contributing to his government still more.
Recover and strengthen the tradition of struggle by workers and young people
Greece has been one of the most unstable countries of Europe, and it was already the stage for several confrontations of workers and popular groups with the government. The social revolt that has exploded in recent days is one more episode that shows the immense fighting spirit of the Greek youth and people. The workers' entry on the stage could raise the demonstrations to a higher level. In spite of the treacherous pacifist line adopted by the PASOK bureaucracy, than, when it was in government in 2001, tried to pass similar attacks on the pension system and was also almost overthrown by popular demonstrations, and of Communist Party (the KKE, according to its Greek initials), it is possible that the mobilizations could break out again, that oculd force the leaderships to go much further thna they wished, giving continuity and radicalizing the different mobilizations that occured since the beginning of this year.
These mobiizations were very large, like the 24-hour strike on October 21, that had the support of 90% of service sector workers and culminated in a march with the participation of 15,000 people in Athens, against the government's attacks, and with the slogan, "We cannot tolerate any more." The high-school and university students' movement actively joined in protest against the privatization of higher education and against cutting budget items for education, culminating in the occupation of 250 institutes and schools throughout the country. The strike ended with the occupation of the central building of Olympic Airways by workers, who were also harshly repressed by the police. The shutdowns continued on October 22, and this time included rural groups, that had almost 100% participation.
Today, many people are already comparing the social revolt detonated by the murder of the teenager with the demonstrations led by the students in 1985, when the police also murdered a young man who was participating in the tributes to the November, 1973actions. It is a tradition of the Greek youth, popular groups and workers to go out to the streets to remember the fall of the so-called "Colonels' dictatorship," a regime led by General Yorgos Papadópulos, that had subjugated the Greek people and workers with great brutality since the coup d'état driven by the colonels on April
21, 1967. The 1973 demonstrations, with the students as vanguard, quickly became massive, including broad popular and workers' groups, that made the occupation of the Athens Polytechnical School the epicenter of the mobilization. This movement helped enormously for the fall of the Colonels' dictatorship in 1974.
So it is necessary that the workers enter the stage with their historical methods of struggle, equiping the social revolt that was setting the streets of the main cities of the country on fire, with a program capable of imposing a workers' solution and finishing the road opened in 1973, preventing the economic crisis from being unloaded on the backs of the workers and the Greek people. The combative working class and the Greek youth need to surpass their leaderships, now in the hands of the KKE and PASOK, and unify their ranks, by struggling to impose a definitive solution to the misfortunes imposed by the Costas Karamanlís government and its bourgeoisie connected to the interests of the European Union. Let us follow attentively.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
VENEZUELA--Punish those who murdered the 3 workers' leaders in Aragua
[From www.ft-ci.org]
In view of the murder of three workers
Big national demonstration in Venezuela
By the LTS of Venezuela
Thursday, December 11, 2008
On Thursday, December 4, the big national protest meeting against hired killers and against impunity, called by the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores of Aragua state and several leftist political organizations, was carried out. Different national and regional coordinating committees of the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores, rank and file union leaders and hundreds of workers from the various factories of Aragua and the rest of Venezuela, participated. The event took place in Maracay in the facilities of Saniplásticas (opposite the enterprise Sanitarios Maracay, at the end of Avenida Aragua). The meeting had as its central objective denouncing the murder of the three union leaders of the regional union federation in Aragua, comrades Richard Gallardo, Luís Hernández y Carlos Requena, and demanding speed and transparency from the national government and the appropriate entities in the investigations of those responsible for this horrible homicide. The meeting is part of the regional plan of struggle adopted by the union federation of the state of Aragua to condemn and confront the scourge of paid assassins in the region and in the whole country. The members of the workers’ commission negotiating with the regional government presented a report on the state of the agreements. The Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo (LTS) was present at this big meeting called by the comrades of UNT-Aragua, as part of the tireless struggle that this crime should not remain unpunished, since, as we had said, this triple murder constitutes a harsh blow against the working class and its organizations. If we let it pass and remain as an unpunished act, the bosses, who daily resort more and more to “Colombianization” as a method to decide workers’ struggles (paying hired killers and paramilitaries to eliminate trade unionists), will not hesitate to rise up against all those workers that are calling for their basic rights and demands. It is the blood of the workers that is at risk, in view of the impunity of capital and the secret cooperation of the government.
During the demonstration, there was a call for the big national march that will take place in Maracay on Thursday, December 11, at 2 p.m., leaving from Avenida Bolívar and Ayacucho, and ending up at the former regional government headquarters, located beside Plaza Bolívar.
In view of the murder of three workers
Big national demonstration in Venezuela
By the LTS of Venezuela
Thursday, December 11, 2008
On Thursday, December 4, the big national protest meeting against hired killers and against impunity, called by the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores of Aragua state and several leftist political organizations, was carried out. Different national and regional coordinating committees of the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores, rank and file union leaders and hundreds of workers from the various factories of Aragua and the rest of Venezuela, participated. The event took place in Maracay in the facilities of Saniplásticas (opposite the enterprise Sanitarios Maracay, at the end of Avenida Aragua). The meeting had as its central objective denouncing the murder of the three union leaders of the regional union federation in Aragua, comrades Richard Gallardo, Luís Hernández y Carlos Requena, and demanding speed and transparency from the national government and the appropriate entities in the investigations of those responsible for this horrible homicide. The meeting is part of the regional plan of struggle adopted by the union federation of the state of Aragua to condemn and confront the scourge of paid assassins in the region and in the whole country. The members of the workers’ commission negotiating with the regional government presented a report on the state of the agreements. The Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo (LTS) was present at this big meeting called by the comrades of UNT-Aragua, as part of the tireless struggle that this crime should not remain unpunished, since, as we had said, this triple murder constitutes a harsh blow against the working class and its organizations. If we let it pass and remain as an unpunished act, the bosses, who daily resort more and more to “Colombianization” as a method to decide workers’ struggles (paying hired killers and paramilitaries to eliminate trade unionists), will not hesitate to rise up against all those workers that are calling for their basic rights and demands. It is the blood of the workers that is at risk, in view of the impunity of capital and the secret cooperation of the government.
During the demonstration, there was a call for the big national march that will take place in Maracay on Thursday, December 11, at 2 p.m., leaving from Avenida Bolívar and Ayacucho, and ending up at the former regional government headquarters, located beside Plaza Bolívar.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
VENEZUELA--Reflections of the crisis in petro-"socialism"
Venezuela: Reflections of the world economic crisis in petro-"socialism"
By Max Trinidad Cerén
Sunday, November 30, 2008
One of the elements that shows that the government of Chávez is moving without foresight and is adrift in the context of the international economic crisis, is the fact that among strong international economic storms and a clear world recession, it approved a national budget of 167.4 billion bolívares fuertes, based on US$60/barrel, and after just a few days, it found itself forced to rush out to correct the numbers, given the sudden drop that has already hit the floor of US$45/barrel on average for crude so far this month. In this context, the situation of world economic crisis and the repercussions of the recession that are happening in the economies of the main countries of the world, and their impact on oil prices, will have an effect on the national [Venezuelan] economy, to become the determining element for the certain adjustment measures they will apply, that highly-placed members of the [Venezuelan] government are already expecting.
For the last week of November, according to figures from the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum, a barrel of Venezuelan oil was at $40.68 US, the lowest level recorded since the first quarter of 2007. In July, it had reached the maximum of $129.50 US, which shows it is not a matter of just any decrease. If this dynamic continues, the loss of income will be considerable, which could worsen as the recession of the world economy deepens. For some analysts, although an average price of $60 US/barrel will prevail during 2009, Venezuela will experience a reduction in its oil income of almost 40%, around $25 billion US, and that is sufficiently serious for a country where public expenditure is the motor that keeps the economy active, a country more closely tied than any other, to what happens in the unpredictable casino of oil prices. Taking into account the fact that oil represents 94% of Venezuela’s exports, and that only oil makes it possible to pay for imports, obviously shows the extremely volatility of the Venezuelan economy and its great dependence on international fluctuations.
During the whole election campaign, the [Venezuelan] government did everything possible to avoid talking about the subject of oil, because it wanted to create the feeling that things are going well, and that the Venezuelan economy is immune to what is happening with prices. But the specter of the world crisis is hanging over Venezuela; it is sufficient to recall that around 1998, the price of oil approached less than $10/barrel, also because of the effects of an international financial crisis – in that case, because of the 1997 crisis in Asia. Now with a barrel below $45, which looks like a breaking point in Chávez’ plan, marked by the bonanza in crude oil.
In spite of the government’s insistence at the beginning of the world crisis that Venezuela was not in the path of the hurricane, the faces have begun to change, and quite rightly, since, if the crisis deepens, big contradictions will come to light, and the crisis will unmask the rhetoric of Chávez’ “twenty-first century socialism,” that is no more than “socialism with businessmen.” And the problem is, Venezuela is a country that is closely connected to the international economy, like all the dependent countries, but it has the characteristic that it is a net exporter of oil and importer of everything needed for consumption and production. It is a country in debt to the international financial markets, with a public debt of about $50 billion US.
And by way of example, regarding only current conditions, the Venezuelan economy slowed down in the third quarter of 2008, with an index of 4.6%, reflecting a drop compared to the second quarter that had an index of 7.1%, and for the end of the year, a GDP rate of 2% was predicted, when the economy was growing. While petroleum activity kept growing from 3.2% to 6%, the non-petroleum sector fell from 7.8% to 4.5%; in that sector, construction activity went from 12.8% to 7.2%, manufacturing fell from 4.4% to 0.3%, transportation and storage, from 6.6% to -0.5%, etc. At the same time, inflation continued to be out of control, with a cumulative rate of 24.7% in the first ten months of this year, a much higher figure than the initial goal of 11%, and now it is estimated that in 2009 inflation will reach about 39%. If a more severe economic slowdown, combined with high inflation, develops, it will open up the unflattering prospect of stagflation in the country.
The oil bubble created incentives on which the government bet a lot, in view of the exuberant expansion of public expenditure and state economic activity. The impact of that global economic recession environment will come from an extreme slowdown of economic growth, from increased fiscal costs because of a drop in oil income, given the lower prices of oil production and of a likely fall in the Venezuelan oil supply.
In spite of the cushion of economic reserves, we will suffer the consequences already in 2009
It is true that the quantity of funds that Chávez' government would have cumulatively, for discretionary use, in organizations like the Central Bank, the Economic and Social Development Bank BANDES, and the Treasury Bank, have created a shock absorber to be taken into account; the point is, what will happen after the surplus resources run out? Because the behavior recorded by prices up to October is what allows the year's average to be around $97, guaranteeing a surplus of $62/barrel, since a reference price of $35 was anticipated for hte current year. Beyond the fact that in immediate terms the abrupt drop in Venezuelan crude is not affecting the fiscal accounts, since income continues to come from invoices signed three months ago and bought and sold at prices above $100/barrel, when it makes itself felt, the government will have to apply belt-tightening measures to make up for this abrupt drop. A report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) stressed that Venezuela needs prices between $85 and $100 to keep its accounts balanced in 2009, and for some analysts, like Maza Zabala, Venezuela, with the reserves it has, could enjoy a truce of one and a half years or two, which is really an excessively optimistic forecast.
But, outside of the effects on ordinary expenditure, the drop in prices is affecting the so-called "parallel budget." Given the increase in prices, the government manipulated the tax on the sudden profit in crude oil, which is applied when Brent exceeds $70, and the resources that originate in that way nourish the National Development Fund. Between June and September, that tax generated $5.8 billion, but in the face of the behavior of Brent this month, there is a reduced possibility that the industry and mixed enterprises will make those additional payments. As a result, an international scene with reduced growth or prolonged recession would impact the levels of income of Venezuela both for oil income and fiscal income that results from a reduction in tax collections from the petroleum and non-petroleum sectors, owing to less growth of export prices and royalties, as from our economy in the different sectors.
And beyond all the anti-Bush rhetoric that the government has maintained, economic dependence on the US, the main epicenter of the world economic crisis, is large and significant: the bulk of petroleum exports continues to be directed to the main North American power. For Venezuela, this is intensified, taking into account the fact the crisis we are now witnessing originated in the heart of the world capitalist system, the US, and has spread from there like a poisonous stain, seriously striking the European Union, Japan, Russia, and the countries of the capitalist periphery.
From the government, they had been talking about diversification of the oil market, taking China as a market, but that country is also feeling the crisis with the collapse of the myth that the Chinese economy could be “unfastened” from the crisis: the numbers reveal that China continues to be an economically dependent country that lacks the ability to act like a great power: it occupies position number 100 in terms of per capita income and represents only 6% of the global economy.
In the face of the deepening of the crisis, a workers’ solution
Although in the context of high oil income, the distribution of the national income left much to be desired, in the economic scene, the contradictions for the government will be sharper, taking growing demands into account, since the limits will be more serious for any policy of distribution Workers’ demands have been making themselves felt, where the struggles for readjustment of wages is spreading throughout the country and through the most diverse sectors of the working class, forming a very widespread picture of struggles such as has not been seen for many years, the result of big political polarization and Chávez’ immense leadership over the entire mass movement.
As James Petras states, about the government, “Venezuela will blame the fall of profits coming from oil and world recessions on the coup; the flight of capitals is increasing in spite of controls, and private capital is reducing investments or withholding credit in spite of considerable incentives. The government is unable to continue its large-scale financing of public social and economic projects, and, at the same time, subsidize private exporters, the food and agriculture, and, above all, importing luxury articles.” But in a more general sense, the proposals from the government and the local and continental chavista movement, do not go beyond being utopian. A meeting of economists was promoted by the Miranda International Center and the government; the economists published their “Responses to the world economic crisis from the South,” which proposed as a solution, the strengthening of ALBA and the Banco del Sur, new, regulated economic institutions, and a Latin American monetary agreement, to face up to the crisis, turn out to be completely utopian, These projects, which could not even be seriously set up during the previous period of economic growth, clearly remain without any foundation.
Faced with this situation and the crisis that could begin, the working class and the people must fight for a program that strikes at the material bases of the capitalists, that Chávez’ “socialism with businessmen” has limited itself to concealing, instead of taking serious measures. Faced with threats of layoffs, we must demand that the accounting books be opened and the expropriation without compensation of any firm that closes or has layoffs, and its being put into operation under workers’ control. Not a single bolívar to save the banks and capitalist enterprises. To prevent the flight of capitals and guarantee cheap credit for working-class families, small-business owners and the impoverished middle classes, it is necessary to fight for the state monopoly of foreign trade and for expropriating and nationalizing all the banks into a single state bank controlled by workers and depositors’ committees. It is a matter of setting up the power of the working class and of showing the only realistic road so that they do not unload the crisis on our shoulders: the struggle for a government belonging to the workers and impoverished people.
By Max Trinidad Cerén
Sunday, November 30, 2008
One of the elements that shows that the government of Chávez is moving without foresight and is adrift in the context of the international economic crisis, is the fact that among strong international economic storms and a clear world recession, it approved a national budget of 167.4 billion bolívares fuertes, based on US$60/barrel, and after just a few days, it found itself forced to rush out to correct the numbers, given the sudden drop that has already hit the floor of US$45/barrel on average for crude so far this month. In this context, the situation of world economic crisis and the repercussions of the recession that are happening in the economies of the main countries of the world, and their impact on oil prices, will have an effect on the national [Venezuelan] economy, to become the determining element for the certain adjustment measures they will apply, that highly-placed members of the [Venezuelan] government are already expecting.
For the last week of November, according to figures from the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum, a barrel of Venezuelan oil was at $40.68 US, the lowest level recorded since the first quarter of 2007. In July, it had reached the maximum of $129.50 US, which shows it is not a matter of just any decrease. If this dynamic continues, the loss of income will be considerable, which could worsen as the recession of the world economy deepens. For some analysts, although an average price of $60 US/barrel will prevail during 2009, Venezuela will experience a reduction in its oil income of almost 40%, around $25 billion US, and that is sufficiently serious for a country where public expenditure is the motor that keeps the economy active, a country more closely tied than any other, to what happens in the unpredictable casino of oil prices. Taking into account the fact that oil represents 94% of Venezuela’s exports, and that only oil makes it possible to pay for imports, obviously shows the extremely volatility of the Venezuelan economy and its great dependence on international fluctuations.
During the whole election campaign, the [Venezuelan] government did everything possible to avoid talking about the subject of oil, because it wanted to create the feeling that things are going well, and that the Venezuelan economy is immune to what is happening with prices. But the specter of the world crisis is hanging over Venezuela; it is sufficient to recall that around 1998, the price of oil approached less than $10/barrel, also because of the effects of an international financial crisis – in that case, because of the 1997 crisis in Asia. Now with a barrel below $45, which looks like a breaking point in Chávez’ plan, marked by the bonanza in crude oil.
In spite of the government’s insistence at the beginning of the world crisis that Venezuela was not in the path of the hurricane, the faces have begun to change, and quite rightly, since, if the crisis deepens, big contradictions will come to light, and the crisis will unmask the rhetoric of Chávez’ “twenty-first century socialism,” that is no more than “socialism with businessmen.” And the problem is, Venezuela is a country that is closely connected to the international economy, like all the dependent countries, but it has the characteristic that it is a net exporter of oil and importer of everything needed for consumption and production. It is a country in debt to the international financial markets, with a public debt of about $50 billion US.
And by way of example, regarding only current conditions, the Venezuelan economy slowed down in the third quarter of 2008, with an index of 4.6%, reflecting a drop compared to the second quarter that had an index of 7.1%, and for the end of the year, a GDP rate of 2% was predicted, when the economy was growing. While petroleum activity kept growing from 3.2% to 6%, the non-petroleum sector fell from 7.8% to 4.5%; in that sector, construction activity went from 12.8% to 7.2%, manufacturing fell from 4.4% to 0.3%, transportation and storage, from 6.6% to -0.5%, etc. At the same time, inflation continued to be out of control, with a cumulative rate of 24.7% in the first ten months of this year, a much higher figure than the initial goal of 11%, and now it is estimated that in 2009 inflation will reach about 39%. If a more severe economic slowdown, combined with high inflation, develops, it will open up the unflattering prospect of stagflation in the country.
The oil bubble created incentives on which the government bet a lot, in view of the exuberant expansion of public expenditure and state economic activity. The impact of that global economic recession environment will come from an extreme slowdown of economic growth, from increased fiscal costs because of a drop in oil income, given the lower prices of oil production and of a likely fall in the Venezuelan oil supply.
In spite of the cushion of economic reserves, we will suffer the consequences already in 2009
It is true that the quantity of funds that Chávez' government would have cumulatively, for discretionary use, in organizations like the Central Bank, the Economic and Social Development Bank BANDES, and the Treasury Bank, have created a shock absorber to be taken into account; the point is, what will happen after the surplus resources run out? Because the behavior recorded by prices up to October is what allows the year's average to be around $97, guaranteeing a surplus of $62/barrel, since a reference price of $35 was anticipated for hte current year. Beyond the fact that in immediate terms the abrupt drop in Venezuelan crude is not affecting the fiscal accounts, since income continues to come from invoices signed three months ago and bought and sold at prices above $100/barrel, when it makes itself felt, the government will have to apply belt-tightening measures to make up for this abrupt drop. A report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) stressed that Venezuela needs prices between $85 and $100 to keep its accounts balanced in 2009, and for some analysts, like Maza Zabala, Venezuela, with the reserves it has, could enjoy a truce of one and a half years or two, which is really an excessively optimistic forecast.
But, outside of the effects on ordinary expenditure, the drop in prices is affecting the so-called "parallel budget." Given the increase in prices, the government manipulated the tax on the sudden profit in crude oil, which is applied when Brent exceeds $70, and the resources that originate in that way nourish the National Development Fund. Between June and September, that tax generated $5.8 billion, but in the face of the behavior of Brent this month, there is a reduced possibility that the industry and mixed enterprises will make those additional payments. As a result, an international scene with reduced growth or prolonged recession would impact the levels of income of Venezuela both for oil income and fiscal income that results from a reduction in tax collections from the petroleum and non-petroleum sectors, owing to less growth of export prices and royalties, as from our economy in the different sectors.
And beyond all the anti-Bush rhetoric that the government has maintained, economic dependence on the US, the main epicenter of the world economic crisis, is large and significant: the bulk of petroleum exports continues to be directed to the main North American power. For Venezuela, this is intensified, taking into account the fact the crisis we are now witnessing originated in the heart of the world capitalist system, the US, and has spread from there like a poisonous stain, seriously striking the European Union, Japan, Russia, and the countries of the capitalist periphery.
From the government, they had been talking about diversification of the oil market, taking China as a market, but that country is also feeling the crisis with the collapse of the myth that the Chinese economy could be “unfastened” from the crisis: the numbers reveal that China continues to be an economically dependent country that lacks the ability to act like a great power: it occupies position number 100 in terms of per capita income and represents only 6% of the global economy.
In the face of the deepening of the crisis, a workers’ solution
Although in the context of high oil income, the distribution of the national income left much to be desired, in the economic scene, the contradictions for the government will be sharper, taking growing demands into account, since the limits will be more serious for any policy of distribution Workers’ demands have been making themselves felt, where the struggles for readjustment of wages is spreading throughout the country and through the most diverse sectors of the working class, forming a very widespread picture of struggles such as has not been seen for many years, the result of big political polarization and Chávez’ immense leadership over the entire mass movement.
As James Petras states, about the government, “Venezuela will blame the fall of profits coming from oil and world recessions on the coup; the flight of capitals is increasing in spite of controls, and private capital is reducing investments or withholding credit in spite of considerable incentives. The government is unable to continue its large-scale financing of public social and economic projects, and, at the same time, subsidize private exporters, the food and agriculture, and, above all, importing luxury articles.” But in a more general sense, the proposals from the government and the local and continental chavista movement, do not go beyond being utopian. A meeting of economists was promoted by the Miranda International Center and the government; the economists published their “Responses to the world economic crisis from the South,” which proposed as a solution, the strengthening of ALBA and the Banco del Sur, new, regulated economic institutions, and a Latin American monetary agreement, to face up to the crisis, turn out to be completely utopian, These projects, which could not even be seriously set up during the previous period of economic growth, clearly remain without any foundation.
Faced with this situation and the crisis that could begin, the working class and the people must fight for a program that strikes at the material bases of the capitalists, that Chávez’ “socialism with businessmen” has limited itself to concealing, instead of taking serious measures. Faced with threats of layoffs, we must demand that the accounting books be opened and the expropriation without compensation of any firm that closes or has layoffs, and its being put into operation under workers’ control. Not a single bolívar to save the banks and capitalist enterprises. To prevent the flight of capitals and guarantee cheap credit for working-class families, small-business owners and the impoverished middle classes, it is necessary to fight for the state monopoly of foreign trade and for expropriating and nationalizing all the banks into a single state bank controlled by workers and depositors’ committees. It is a matter of setting up the power of the working class and of showing the only realistic road so that they do not unload the crisis on our shoulders: the struggle for a government belonging to the workers and impoverished people.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
ARGENTINA--Big demonstration in front of the Venezuelan Embassy
[From the Partido de Trabajadores Socialistas, Argentina]
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
In repudiation of the massacre of workers in Aragua
Big demonstration in front of the Venezuelan Embassy
(PTS, 01/12/08) Today a big rally and demonstration was held in front of the Embassy of Venezuela in Buenos Aires to repudiate the brutal murder of the comrade workers' leaders Richard Gallardo, Luis Hernández and Carlos Requena and to demand an investigation and punishment of the murder. Around a thousand comrades from the different tendencies of the left that had called the action accompanied a delegation of leaders that delivered a statement before the authorities of the Embassy. Juan Carlos Giordano (Izquierda Socialista), Vilma Ripoll (MST), Néstor Pitrola (PO), Christian Castillo (PTS), Juan Carlos Beica (Convergencia Socialista) and Héctor Heberling (MAS) had an interview with an official, who could not answer why up to that moment -- three days after the cowardly murder -- President Hugo Chávez had still not repudiated this massacre of workers. Then a comrade from Izquierda Socialista read a report of the different workers' and popular mobilizations that took place after the crime against these workers' leaders and part of the plan of struggle launched by the leader Orlando Chirino and the comrades of the UNT to demand the investigation and punishment of the massacre. Finally, the national leader of Izquierda Socialista, Juan Carlos Giordano, spoke, giving a moving biographical sketch of the life of dedication to the workers’ cause of these comrades, explaining that a harsh blow against the class-conscious left had taken place, but that “from every Richard, from every Luis, from every Carlos, from each one of them, a thousand class-conscious, anti-imperialist and socialist workers will go out, just like they were.” “They will not be able to finish this struggle for class independence; they were struggling for a truly socialist society, without exploited or exploiters, a society without businessmen, for a society that is not the present Venezuela: that is why they killed them.” Comrade Giordano also recalled how, 24 hours before he was murdered, comrade Richard Gallardo had raised the need to prepare workers’ self-defense, “a question that he did not actually see, but that is set out now more than ever, in the Venezuelan working class.” In his intervention, Giordano rejected the version, promoted by the right-wing Venezuelan opposition, that the comrades were murdered for having made public an alleged fraud in the last Venezuelan elections, when two of them were independent workers' candidates for the Unidad Socialista de Izquierda (USI): "The facts are more than clear; the comrades were actively backing the struggle and the seizure by the workers of the Colombian multinational 'Alpina,' and they had been violently repressed by the Aragua state police the very day of their assassination, after they demanded a repudiation by the brand-new Governor Elect from the PSUV." In ending the demonstration, Christian Castillo stated that "we promoted this united demonstration as a first step of an intense internationalist campaign that we have now begun with the comrades of the Fracción Trotskista (Cuarta Internacional) from Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Europe, together with tendencies like the UIT-CI, the LIT-CI, the comrades of the PO, of the MST, and all the tendencies that are present here today to repudiate and demand the investigation and punishment for the massacre of the class-conscious leaders of Aragua." "The fascist assassins acted in accord with the repression against the workers of 'Alpina,' repression that should not surprise us in the so-called "socialism of the twenty-first century," of Venezuela. We have already seen repression against the workers of Sanitarios Maracay and the workers of Sidor; such a strange 'socialism,' that permits exploiting and murderous multinationals like 'Alpina' or that of Pepsi Cola, where comrade Luis Hernández was a leader, multinationals that hire assassins with complete impunity, to eliminate those who fight for their rights, and their businesses are defended by the repressive forces of the [Venezuelan] state."
The demonstration ended with the emotional cry: "RICHARD GALLARDO, LUIS HERNÁNDEZ Y CARLOS REQUENA: ¡PRESENTES! ¡HASTA EL SOCIALISMO SIEMPRE!
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
In repudiation of the massacre of workers in Aragua
Big demonstration in front of the Venezuelan Embassy
(PTS, 01/12/08) Today a big rally and demonstration was held in front of the Embassy of Venezuela in Buenos Aires to repudiate the brutal murder of the comrade workers' leaders Richard Gallardo, Luis Hernández and Carlos Requena and to demand an investigation and punishment of the murder. Around a thousand comrades from the different tendencies of the left that had called the action accompanied a delegation of leaders that delivered a statement before the authorities of the Embassy. Juan Carlos Giordano (Izquierda Socialista), Vilma Ripoll (MST), Néstor Pitrola (PO), Christian Castillo (PTS), Juan Carlos Beica (Convergencia Socialista) and Héctor Heberling (MAS) had an interview with an official, who could not answer why up to that moment -- three days after the cowardly murder -- President Hugo Chávez had still not repudiated this massacre of workers. Then a comrade from Izquierda Socialista read a report of the different workers' and popular mobilizations that took place after the crime against these workers' leaders and part of the plan of struggle launched by the leader Orlando Chirino and the comrades of the UNT to demand the investigation and punishment of the massacre. Finally, the national leader of Izquierda Socialista, Juan Carlos Giordano, spoke, giving a moving biographical sketch of the life of dedication to the workers’ cause of these comrades, explaining that a harsh blow against the class-conscious left had taken place, but that “from every Richard, from every Luis, from every Carlos, from each one of them, a thousand class-conscious, anti-imperialist and socialist workers will go out, just like they were.” “They will not be able to finish this struggle for class independence; they were struggling for a truly socialist society, without exploited or exploiters, a society without businessmen, for a society that is not the present Venezuela: that is why they killed them.” Comrade Giordano also recalled how, 24 hours before he was murdered, comrade Richard Gallardo had raised the need to prepare workers’ self-defense, “a question that he did not actually see, but that is set out now more than ever, in the Venezuelan working class.” In his intervention, Giordano rejected the version, promoted by the right-wing Venezuelan opposition, that the comrades were murdered for having made public an alleged fraud in the last Venezuelan elections, when two of them were independent workers' candidates for the Unidad Socialista de Izquierda (USI): "The facts are more than clear; the comrades were actively backing the struggle and the seizure by the workers of the Colombian multinational 'Alpina,' and they had been violently repressed by the Aragua state police the very day of their assassination, after they demanded a repudiation by the brand-new Governor Elect from the PSUV." In ending the demonstration, Christian Castillo stated that "we promoted this united demonstration as a first step of an intense internationalist campaign that we have now begun with the comrades of the Fracción Trotskista (Cuarta Internacional) from Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Europe, together with tendencies like the UIT-CI, the LIT-CI, the comrades of the PO, of the MST, and all the tendencies that are present here today to repudiate and demand the investigation and punishment for the massacre of the class-conscious leaders of Aragua." "The fascist assassins acted in accord with the repression against the workers of 'Alpina,' repression that should not surprise us in the so-called "socialism of the twenty-first century," of Venezuela. We have already seen repression against the workers of Sanitarios Maracay and the workers of Sidor; such a strange 'socialism,' that permits exploiting and murderous multinationals like 'Alpina' or that of Pepsi Cola, where comrade Luis Hernández was a leader, multinationals that hire assassins with complete impunity, to eliminate those who fight for their rights, and their businesses are defended by the repressive forces of the [Venezuelan] state."
The demonstration ended with the emotional cry: "RICHARD GALLARDO, LUIS HERNÁNDEZ Y CARLOS REQUENA: ¡PRESENTES! ¡HASTA EL SOCIALISMO SIEMPRE!
Sunday, November 30, 2008
VZLA--Repudiate the brutal murder of workers' leaders
Urgent: Venezuela
REPUDIATE THE BRUTAL MURDER DE THE WORKERS’ LEADERS RICHARD GALLARDO, LUIS HERNANDEZ AND CARLOS REQUENA!
By LTS of Venezuela
Friday, November 28, 2008
Repudiate the brutal murder of the workers’ leaders Richard Gallardo, Luís Hernández and Carlos Requena!
For a big national and international campaign to demand trial and exemplary punishment for the material and intellectual authors of this crime!
Yesterday, Thursday, November 27, comrades Richard Gallardo, national coordinator of the UNT and chairman of the Aragua section, Luís Hernández, union leader at Pepsi Cola, and Carlos Requena, work safety delegate from Alpina, militants of the Unidad Socialista de Izquierda (USI), were murdered in Cagua (Aragua state).
These comrades were leading the effort of solidarity with the Alpina workers, at a business owned by Colombian capital, that the workers seized in struggle against a breach of the contract and in the face of a threat to close the firm. Just that day, the workers had to resist a fierce police repression that included cops entering the plant and an eviction, with a toll of four workers wounded. As a result of the solidarity offered by workers and union leaders of the UNT, the workers recovered the plant again. That afternoon, the comrades had publicly demanded a statement by the recently elected PSUV governor, Rafael Isea; they also warned that if the factory was closed, the workers would opt for starting production under their own control, following the example of the comrades from Sanitarios Maracay. That night, comrades Gallardo, Hernández and Requena were shot in the La Encrucijada district, in Cagua.
Already on previous occasions, leading comrades of the UNT-Aragua, one of the most combative regional sections of the UNT, had received several threats. This brutal murder is not isolated from the situation of sharp labor conflicts in Aragua, not accidentally the state where the exemplary struggle by the Sanitarios Maracay workers for nationalization under workers’ control gained a lot of strength, including carrying out the first regional workers’ strike in almost a decade, in May last year.
Already last year, we could see how in the conflict at FUNDIMECA, the Valencia factory for making fans, the bosses used paid assassins to try to smash the hard struggle by the women workers for their rights, with the result that one female comrade got shot in the leg. All this happened with the complicity of the judges and state police.
From the Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo (LTS), together with our workers’ and student leaders, we declare our solidarity with the grief of the relatives and fellow militants of the comrades, a sorrow that is also ours, since we have shared a trench of joint struggle on more than one occasion. We join the call to the political organizations of the workers’ and socialist left, to political and intellectual personalities, to the union, student and human rights organizations, to declare themselves forcefully against this crime and carry out a large and active national and international campaign to demand exemplary punishment for the material and intellectual authors of this crime against the working-class vanguard of our country. We demand that the national and regional government immediately open an investigation in the hands of a commission made up of workers and human rights organizations, to discover the truth about this crime.
This is one more action that shows not only that there is no revolution nor socialism in the country, but that the institutions of this bourgeois state, as could not be otherwise, are completely on the side of the bosses’ interests against the struggles of workers and the impoverished people, when hundreds of murders of peasants and workers at the hands of paid assassins have gone unpunished. Between repression by the Guardia Nacional and the police on one hand, the “justice” system on the other, and murderers hired by the bosses, without the need to agree, they form a pair of pincers against the most hardened struggles the working class is beginning to wage. Our slogan must be to trust in our own class forces, without putting any confidence in projects of class conciliation!
Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo
Caracas, November 28, 2008
LTS
LIGA DE TRABAJADORES POR EL SOCIALISMO
www.lts.org. ve
lts@lts.org.ve
Member of the FRACCIÓN TROTSKISTA - CUARTA INTERNACIONAL
REPUDIATE THE BRUTAL MURDER DE THE WORKERS’ LEADERS RICHARD GALLARDO, LUIS HERNANDEZ AND CARLOS REQUENA!
By LTS of Venezuela
Friday, November 28, 2008
Repudiate the brutal murder of the workers’ leaders Richard Gallardo, Luís Hernández and Carlos Requena!
For a big national and international campaign to demand trial and exemplary punishment for the material and intellectual authors of this crime!
Yesterday, Thursday, November 27, comrades Richard Gallardo, national coordinator of the UNT and chairman of the Aragua section, Luís Hernández, union leader at Pepsi Cola, and Carlos Requena, work safety delegate from Alpina, militants of the Unidad Socialista de Izquierda (USI), were murdered in Cagua (Aragua state).
These comrades were leading the effort of solidarity with the Alpina workers, at a business owned by Colombian capital, that the workers seized in struggle against a breach of the contract and in the face of a threat to close the firm. Just that day, the workers had to resist a fierce police repression that included cops entering the plant and an eviction, with a toll of four workers wounded. As a result of the solidarity offered by workers and union leaders of the UNT, the workers recovered the plant again. That afternoon, the comrades had publicly demanded a statement by the recently elected PSUV governor, Rafael Isea; they also warned that if the factory was closed, the workers would opt for starting production under their own control, following the example of the comrades from Sanitarios Maracay. That night, comrades Gallardo, Hernández and Requena were shot in the La Encrucijada district, in Cagua.
Already on previous occasions, leading comrades of the UNT-Aragua, one of the most combative regional sections of the UNT, had received several threats. This brutal murder is not isolated from the situation of sharp labor conflicts in Aragua, not accidentally the state where the exemplary struggle by the Sanitarios Maracay workers for nationalization under workers’ control gained a lot of strength, including carrying out the first regional workers’ strike in almost a decade, in May last year.
Already last year, we could see how in the conflict at FUNDIMECA, the Valencia factory for making fans, the bosses used paid assassins to try to smash the hard struggle by the women workers for their rights, with the result that one female comrade got shot in the leg. All this happened with the complicity of the judges and state police.
From the Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo (LTS), together with our workers’ and student leaders, we declare our solidarity with the grief of the relatives and fellow militants of the comrades, a sorrow that is also ours, since we have shared a trench of joint struggle on more than one occasion. We join the call to the political organizations of the workers’ and socialist left, to political and intellectual personalities, to the union, student and human rights organizations, to declare themselves forcefully against this crime and carry out a large and active national and international campaign to demand exemplary punishment for the material and intellectual authors of this crime against the working-class vanguard of our country. We demand that the national and regional government immediately open an investigation in the hands of a commission made up of workers and human rights organizations, to discover the truth about this crime.
This is one more action that shows not only that there is no revolution nor socialism in the country, but that the institutions of this bourgeois state, as could not be otherwise, are completely on the side of the bosses’ interests against the struggles of workers and the impoverished people, when hundreds of murders of peasants and workers at the hands of paid assassins have gone unpunished. Between repression by the Guardia Nacional and the police on one hand, the “justice” system on the other, and murderers hired by the bosses, without the need to agree, they form a pair of pincers against the most hardened struggles the working class is beginning to wage. Our slogan must be to trust in our own class forces, without putting any confidence in projects of class conciliation!
Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo
Caracas, November 28, 2008
LTS
LIGA DE TRABAJADORES POR EL SOCIALISMO
www.lts.org. ve
lts@lts.org.ve
Member of the FRACCIÓN TROTSKISTA - CUARTA INTERNACIONAL
Friday, November 28, 2008
IRAN--Free Farzad Kamangar now!
Free Farzad Kamangar now!
Following an appeal from LabourStart and Education International yesterday (26 November), many trade unionists throughout the world sent protest emails to the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran protesting against Farzad Kamangar's imminent execution. Those writing to Ayatollah Khamenei included Brendan Barber, the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (in Britain).
According to Education International, the international teachers' federation, he was taken from his cell in Tehran's Evin prison on 26 November in preparation for execution. The guards told him he was about to be executed and made fun of him, calling him a martyr.
Fortunately Farzad Kamangar has not been executed. His lawyer has spoken to him and he is, considering the circumstances, quite well. The rumours and preparations for his execution are despicable stunts that highlight the real danger that this Kurdish teacher still faces. However, even though his arrest, the five minutes' trial and long imprisonment have been based on "absolutely zero evidence" there is nothing to stop the death sentence being carried out at a whim.
His arrest on trumped up charges, subsequent trial and death sentence have not only mobilised exiled labour activists but have also provoked protests in Iranian Kurdistan itself - including a picket by around 300 teachers.
We urge all trade unionists and labour activists to support the LabourStart campaign by filling in the online protest form.
Iranian Workers' Solidarity Network
27 November 2008
For more information on Farzad Kamangar see the special section at
http://www.iwsn.org/campaigns/teachers.htm
Following an appeal from LabourStart and Education International yesterday (26 November), many trade unionists throughout the world sent protest emails to the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran protesting against Farzad Kamangar's imminent execution. Those writing to Ayatollah Khamenei included Brendan Barber, the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (in Britain).
According to Education International, the international teachers' federation, he was taken from his cell in Tehran's Evin prison on 26 November in preparation for execution. The guards told him he was about to be executed and made fun of him, calling him a martyr.
Fortunately Farzad Kamangar has not been executed. His lawyer has spoken to him and he is, considering the circumstances, quite well. The rumours and preparations for his execution are despicable stunts that highlight the real danger that this Kurdish teacher still faces. However, even though his arrest, the five minutes' trial and long imprisonment have been based on "absolutely zero evidence" there is nothing to stop the death sentence being carried out at a whim.
His arrest on trumped up charges, subsequent trial and death sentence have not only mobilised exiled labour activists but have also provoked protests in Iranian Kurdistan itself - including a picket by around 300 teachers.
We urge all trade unionists and labour activists to support the LabourStart campaign by filling in the online protest form.
Iranian Workers' Solidarity Network
27 November 2008
For more information on Farzad Kamangar see the special section at
http://www.iwsn.org/campaigns/teachers.htm
Saturday, November 22, 2008
SPAIN--Student movement on the rise
From www.ft-ci.org
Spanish state: A student movement on the rise
By Carlos Munis and Susana Penna
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
The academic year in Europe had a hot beginning. Although the plans by the bourgeoisie for privatizing public education had already been in preparation since the 1998 Bologna Declaration, now the crisis of capitalism at an international level is forcing the acceleration and hardening of these measures.
The November 13 strike: One more step against the Bologna Plan and the capitalist crisis
In the Spanish state, the government of Rodríguez Zapatero, in keeping with the rest of the European bourgeoisies, is making a considerable gift of 150 billion euros to the banking interests, with the resulting emptying of the government coffers, that is precipitating, among other things, the reduction of the budget for the universities. University financing is decentralized and belongs to the autonomous communities. [1] Thus, for example, the Madrid community made a 30% cut, or the Valencia community, that cut [the university budget] by 25%, and in both, it will be impossible to guarantee payment of the wages of workers and university teachers, if things do not change. This budget cut is similar to the indebtedness of the autonomous communities to the central government.
The first step in the Spanish state was the October 22 strike against privatization of education. The mobilizations had been growing, and the last one, on November 13, was one of the most massive. 20,000 people came out in Madrid, a somewhat larger number in Barcelona, in a demonstration joined by teachers in secondary education, fighting against a privatizing law pushed by the Govern Catalá, 5,000 in Salamanca, 2,000 in Valencia, and 1,000 in Zaragoza. The mobilizations were not the only demonstrations of the spirit of struggle among the students; departments, like Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, were also seized, with the possible extension to other cities. These processes could mean the first steps this school year in organizing a vanguard group.
We need a combative, massive, democratic and grass-roots student movement
The struggle has only just begun: it is necessary to turn the assemblies into mass bodies. The student movement must be grass-roots and democratic, with delegates subject to recall. It must take as an example struggles like the one in France against the CPE. [2] We must recover these experiences to strengthen the offensive against the current crisis and all its privatizing plans for public education, which has already been much degraded.
For a worker-student pact, to fight against the capitalist crisis
Capitalists and their governments want to make not just us, but all the workers, and especially immigrants, legal or undocumented, pay for this crisis. Worker-student unity is more needed than ever.
Coordinating and unifying our demands, next to those of the workers, will allow us to be stronger, by taking up again the lessons of May 1968, or that of the Spanish state in 1986-1988, where the workers and students were the leaders. We should support the current struggles of the workers, like that of the Nissan workers in Barcelona, and back them actively, as we are able.
Down with the Bologna Plan!
Not a single Euro for the bankers!
The capitalists must be made to pay for the crisis!
Oppose layoffs and precarious employment!
For a decent job once studies are finished!
For an education that serves the working class!
* * *
[1] "Spain is divided into 17 autonomous communities," Wikipedia.
[2] Contract of first employment.
Spanish state: A student movement on the rise
By Carlos Munis and Susana Penna
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
The academic year in Europe had a hot beginning. Although the plans by the bourgeoisie for privatizing public education had already been in preparation since the 1998 Bologna Declaration, now the crisis of capitalism at an international level is forcing the acceleration and hardening of these measures.
The November 13 strike: One more step against the Bologna Plan and the capitalist crisis
In the Spanish state, the government of Rodríguez Zapatero, in keeping with the rest of the European bourgeoisies, is making a considerable gift of 150 billion euros to the banking interests, with the resulting emptying of the government coffers, that is precipitating, among other things, the reduction of the budget for the universities. University financing is decentralized and belongs to the autonomous communities. [1] Thus, for example, the Madrid community made a 30% cut, or the Valencia community, that cut [the university budget] by 25%, and in both, it will be impossible to guarantee payment of the wages of workers and university teachers, if things do not change. This budget cut is similar to the indebtedness of the autonomous communities to the central government.
The first step in the Spanish state was the October 22 strike against privatization of education. The mobilizations had been growing, and the last one, on November 13, was one of the most massive. 20,000 people came out in Madrid, a somewhat larger number in Barcelona, in a demonstration joined by teachers in secondary education, fighting against a privatizing law pushed by the Govern Catalá, 5,000 in Salamanca, 2,000 in Valencia, and 1,000 in Zaragoza. The mobilizations were not the only demonstrations of the spirit of struggle among the students; departments, like Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, were also seized, with the possible extension to other cities. These processes could mean the first steps this school year in organizing a vanguard group.
We need a combative, massive, democratic and grass-roots student movement
The struggle has only just begun: it is necessary to turn the assemblies into mass bodies. The student movement must be grass-roots and democratic, with delegates subject to recall. It must take as an example struggles like the one in France against the CPE. [2] We must recover these experiences to strengthen the offensive against the current crisis and all its privatizing plans for public education, which has already been much degraded.
For a worker-student pact, to fight against the capitalist crisis
Capitalists and their governments want to make not just us, but all the workers, and especially immigrants, legal or undocumented, pay for this crisis. Worker-student unity is more needed than ever.
Coordinating and unifying our demands, next to those of the workers, will allow us to be stronger, by taking up again the lessons of May 1968, or that of the Spanish state in 1986-1988, where the workers and students were the leaders. We should support the current struggles of the workers, like that of the Nissan workers in Barcelona, and back them actively, as we are able.
Down with the Bologna Plan!
Not a single Euro for the bankers!
The capitalists must be made to pay for the crisis!
Oppose layoffs and precarious employment!
For a decent job once studies are finished!
For an education that serves the working class!
* * *
[1] "Spain is divided into 17 autonomous communities," Wikipedia.
[2] Contract of first employment.
ITALY: General strike, December 12!
From http://www.ft-ci.org/, November 20, 2008
General strike, December 12!
By Ciro Tappeste, from Rome
This weekend, the center of the nightly scene of Roman youth moved to the University City of La Sapienza. Until a late hour of the early morning, groups of students from all over Italy could be seen on the steps of the occupied departments, in lively discussions of the prospects of the student movement; others, hungry, in search of some improvised dining room where some helping of pasta is left, and the tired ones, after almost twelve hours of an assembly, preparing their sleeping bags for rest in one of the lecture halls. The 2,000 student activists who met in Rome this weekend made clear what their program was: In opposition to the plans of Minister Gelmini, they are raising the prospect of reforming the university from below, "auto-reform," and against the policy of the government and Confindustria, the Italian bosses, they are determined to continue mobilizing and still support the December 12 general strike. The "tsunami," as the student movement calls itself, "onda anomala" in Italian, is, in reality, to continue the metaphor of climatic and natural phenomena, only the tip of a deeper iceberg that is called "class struggle."
The student "tsunami," staggered strikes, wildcat strikes: an X ray of the social mobilization in Italy
In fact, the last 15 days were particularly turbulent. Although a large part of the Gelmini counter-reform has been definitively adopted, the high school and university students did not let down their guard, quite the contrary. Without any doubt, the biggest mobilization was the national demonstration of 200,000 people on Friday, November 14, which coincided with the general strike in university research proclaimed by the CGIL and the UIL, joined by students mobilized from all over Italy, after which the first national student coordinating committee met.
On the most directly social front, the CGIL had to reconsider their positions in the last few weeks. Meanwhile, the national leaderships of the CISL and the UIL, more disposed to dialogue, were trying to maintain a certain balance between the sense of "responsibility," that is, negotiating with the government and the bosses over the attacks that have been swooping down on the subordinate classes, and the noticeable anger among the unions' rank and file. The CGIL leadership and its different federations are being pressured by the existing dissatisfaction among the workers because of the economic situation and the avalanche of announcing layoffs, because of right-wing provocations by the government and, in the final instance, because of the student mobilization that is serving as a social and political sounding board symbolized by the famous "we will not pay for your crisis," sung at all the university marches.
The CGIL leadership among government employees, had to keep the staggered strike during the first half of November, while the CISL and UIL drew back and preferred to negotiate with Berlusconi. In the commercial sector, one of the most precarious in Italy, the CGIL called the November 15 mobilization. On Tuesday, November 11, the main Italian cities had been paralyzed by a force general transportation strike, the third this year. On that same day, the workers of Alitalia, threatened with 2000 layoffs, stopped working at the Rome airport ... in a "wildcat" strike, that is, without legal authorization and against even the most combative unions that until now had opposed the plan to dismantle the company agreed to by the bosses, the government and the union confederation bureaucracies.
Meanwhile, at a local level, above all in the north of the country, calls to strike against factory closings, as in Turin on November 20 and in Brescia on November 21, were circulating, and the National Assembly of the FIOM metalworkers' delegates, decided to call the December 12 strike. This date ended up becoming a general strike called by the CGIL, as Roman students in struggle had requested at the end of October, a strike that rank and file unions now joined.
Towards the December 12 general strike, to be organized from below and coordinated, the better to prepare the confrontation with the "Cavalier" and the bosses
As some militant students and workers explained in the discussions this weekend in the University City, after several weeks of mobilizations, one can begin to draw some conclusions.
All these struggles show how the union bureaucracy, especially the CGIL, that "turned to the left" in the last few weeks, is in a state of tension, between continuing to negotiate and the bosses, and, at the same time, being part of the struggles and even leading them, so as not to lose control. That explains the apparently paradoxical character of the current policy of Epifani (leader of the CGIL). Alhtough in Alitalia the CGIL signed the agreement privatizing the company, scabbing on the workers' struggles, and although in the transportation sector the three main unions called for a strike, the better to resume negotiations with the government, Epifani found himself forced, at a global level, to change the call for a December 12 metalworkers' strike into a call for the general strike for the first time since 2004.
Acting as a social and political sounding board, the student vanguard in struggle, in a certain sense, has made a qualitative leap in the last few weeks, as shown by the main points of the appeal by the universities in Rome, adopted on October 31, after the massive strike by teachers and students. In that appeal, reference is made to the need to coordinate all the struggles underway, and that December 12 should bethe occasion for all the union leaderships to call a strike jointly, beyond their differences. The appeal also mentions the need to set up, for the first time in years, a national student coordinating committee, that ended up by meeting on November 14 and 15 in Rome. Although student pressure managed to impose the united front between the CGIL and rank and file unions and organize a national coordinating committee that would give the mobilization a political profile of greater scope, the road we have before us continues to be very complex, to guarantee that we workers and students really do not pay for the crisis.
As shown by the ambiguous orientation of the union bureaucracy, that buries the struggles on the one hand, and calls for mobilization on the other, the question of building the strike from below among workers and students, immigrants, workers in precarious situations, and the jobless, is more urgent than ever so that the general strike will be the most incisive possible. On the other hand, the national student coordinating committee showed that students organized from below achieved more weight than if the conflicts are fragmented. A struggle to set up a national worker and student coordinating committee of the vanguards in struggle would be the best way to build a tendency capable of opposing the vacillating line of the bureaucracy in an organized fashion and at the same time the best guarantee that the current wave of mobilization goes on, by creating the most favorable possible conditions for continuing to confront a shamelessly right-wing and reactionary government and bosses that have announced a million layoffs for the coming months.
Rome, November 19
General strike, December 12!
By Ciro Tappeste, from Rome
This weekend, the center of the nightly scene of Roman youth moved to the University City of La Sapienza. Until a late hour of the early morning, groups of students from all over Italy could be seen on the steps of the occupied departments, in lively discussions of the prospects of the student movement; others, hungry, in search of some improvised dining room where some helping of pasta is left, and the tired ones, after almost twelve hours of an assembly, preparing their sleeping bags for rest in one of the lecture halls. The 2,000 student activists who met in Rome this weekend made clear what their program was: In opposition to the plans of Minister Gelmini, they are raising the prospect of reforming the university from below, "auto-reform," and against the policy of the government and Confindustria, the Italian bosses, they are determined to continue mobilizing and still support the December 12 general strike. The "tsunami," as the student movement calls itself, "onda anomala" in Italian, is, in reality, to continue the metaphor of climatic and natural phenomena, only the tip of a deeper iceberg that is called "class struggle."
The student "tsunami," staggered strikes, wildcat strikes: an X ray of the social mobilization in Italy
In fact, the last 15 days were particularly turbulent. Although a large part of the Gelmini counter-reform has been definitively adopted, the high school and university students did not let down their guard, quite the contrary. Without any doubt, the biggest mobilization was the national demonstration of 200,000 people on Friday, November 14, which coincided with the general strike in university research proclaimed by the CGIL and the UIL, joined by students mobilized from all over Italy, after which the first national student coordinating committee met.
On the most directly social front, the CGIL had to reconsider their positions in the last few weeks. Meanwhile, the national leaderships of the CISL and the UIL, more disposed to dialogue, were trying to maintain a certain balance between the sense of "responsibility," that is, negotiating with the government and the bosses over the attacks that have been swooping down on the subordinate classes, and the noticeable anger among the unions' rank and file. The CGIL leadership and its different federations are being pressured by the existing dissatisfaction among the workers because of the economic situation and the avalanche of announcing layoffs, because of right-wing provocations by the government and, in the final instance, because of the student mobilization that is serving as a social and political sounding board symbolized by the famous "we will not pay for your crisis," sung at all the university marches.
The CGIL leadership among government employees, had to keep the staggered strike during the first half of November, while the CISL and UIL drew back and preferred to negotiate with Berlusconi. In the commercial sector, one of the most precarious in Italy, the CGIL called the November 15 mobilization. On Tuesday, November 11, the main Italian cities had been paralyzed by a force general transportation strike, the third this year. On that same day, the workers of Alitalia, threatened with 2000 layoffs, stopped working at the Rome airport ... in a "wildcat" strike, that is, without legal authorization and against even the most combative unions that until now had opposed the plan to dismantle the company agreed to by the bosses, the government and the union confederation bureaucracies.
Meanwhile, at a local level, above all in the north of the country, calls to strike against factory closings, as in Turin on November 20 and in Brescia on November 21, were circulating, and the National Assembly of the FIOM metalworkers' delegates, decided to call the December 12 strike. This date ended up becoming a general strike called by the CGIL, as Roman students in struggle had requested at the end of October, a strike that rank and file unions now joined.
Towards the December 12 general strike, to be organized from below and coordinated, the better to prepare the confrontation with the "Cavalier" and the bosses
As some militant students and workers explained in the discussions this weekend in the University City, after several weeks of mobilizations, one can begin to draw some conclusions.
All these struggles show how the union bureaucracy, especially the CGIL, that "turned to the left" in the last few weeks, is in a state of tension, between continuing to negotiate and the bosses, and, at the same time, being part of the struggles and even leading them, so as not to lose control. That explains the apparently paradoxical character of the current policy of Epifani (leader of the CGIL). Alhtough in Alitalia the CGIL signed the agreement privatizing the company, scabbing on the workers' struggles, and although in the transportation sector the three main unions called for a strike, the better to resume negotiations with the government, Epifani found himself forced, at a global level, to change the call for a December 12 metalworkers' strike into a call for the general strike for the first time since 2004.
Acting as a social and political sounding board, the student vanguard in struggle, in a certain sense, has made a qualitative leap in the last few weeks, as shown by the main points of the appeal by the universities in Rome, adopted on October 31, after the massive strike by teachers and students. In that appeal, reference is made to the need to coordinate all the struggles underway, and that December 12 should bethe occasion for all the union leaderships to call a strike jointly, beyond their differences. The appeal also mentions the need to set up, for the first time in years, a national student coordinating committee, that ended up by meeting on November 14 and 15 in Rome. Although student pressure managed to impose the united front between the CGIL and rank and file unions and organize a national coordinating committee that would give the mobilization a political profile of greater scope, the road we have before us continues to be very complex, to guarantee that we workers and students really do not pay for the crisis.
As shown by the ambiguous orientation of the union bureaucracy, that buries the struggles on the one hand, and calls for mobilization on the other, the question of building the strike from below among workers and students, immigrants, workers in precarious situations, and the jobless, is more urgent than ever so that the general strike will be the most incisive possible. On the other hand, the national student coordinating committee showed that students organized from below achieved more weight than if the conflicts are fragmented. A struggle to set up a national worker and student coordinating committee of the vanguards in struggle would be the best way to build a tendency capable of opposing the vacillating line of the bureaucracy in an organized fashion and at the same time the best guarantee that the current wave of mobilization goes on, by creating the most favorable possible conditions for continuing to confront a shamelessly right-wing and reactionary government and bosses that have announced a million layoffs for the coming months.
Rome, November 19
Friday, November 21, 2008
GERMANY: Workers and students mobilize
From www.ft-ci.org
GERMANY: Workers and students mobilize
By Antje Berlinger and Marcelo Torres
Thursday, November 20, 2008
The German working class is showing signs of wanting to follow in the steps of their class brothers in Italy and Greece. In Germany, a significant increase in struggles over demands that largely exceed the policy of wage moderation that the union bureaucracies have tried to impose, can be observed. Thus, last week, workers belonging to the metalworkers' union IG Metall partially shut down production in the heart of the German economy: automakers and electricity. Up to 550,000 workers of the plants of Opel, Mercedes Benz, Ford, Audi, BMW, Bosch, Nokia, Siemens and MAN forced the union leaderships to call warning strikes, work stoppages and demonstrations. They were demanding 8% wage raises, a demand that the IG Metall bureaucracy quickly betrayed, given its fear of calling a strike of indefinite duration, by arriving at an agreement, behind the backs of the workers, for a 4.2% raise, way below the 8% demanded originally.
While the President of the employers' association, Dieter Hundt, was welcoming the agreement as representing a "sign of common sense in a difficult economic situation," groups of rank and file workers were demanding and are still demanding "repudiation of that meager result and immediately beginning with a strike referendum," since "they cannot unload the crisis on our shoulders." According to estimates, in the coming year, 350,000 workers will lose their jobs, half of which would be in the automotive sector. Now, temporary workers have already been thrown into the street, and neither staff reductions of workers with permanent contracts nor wage cuts can be ruled out.
And the problem is that the "German marketplace" depends in large part on countries consuming its products, countries that are now stricken, as trade partners: the US, the United Kingdom, and the Spanish state. According to some estimates, exports, the preeminent German economic motor, will suffer a big sudden halt that will lead to only a 0.4% growth in exports (after this year's 4.2%) or even complete stagnation.
"Managers, out of the universities!"
Attacks by the bourgeoisie are also intensifying in the educational sector, where, besides the directives of the Bologna plan, a wave of privatizations is being carried out, from the kindergartens up to the universities, which intensifies the class character of the educational system. For instance, at present, only 16% of university students are sons or daughters of workers, and only 3.3%, children of immigrants. Last Wednesday, facing this situation, high school students, accompanied by university students and some professors, organized a 24-hour strike with demonstrations in approximately 40 German cities. More than 100,000 students filled the streets, demanding an end to inadequate funding of education, and a quality, unrestricted, and popular education, gratis. Students in Hannover surpassed the limits of bourgeois legality by blockading the regional parliament, and in Berlin they seized the Humboldt University by assault, waving red banners from its balconies. They forcefully entered a large room where businessmen were negotiating patent rights for universities, and they forced the businessmen to hold their signs while they helped themselves to the culinary delicacies from the banquet prepared for the occasion, to the cry of "a -anti -anticapitalist" and "managers, out of the universities."
These most recent acts are one more proof that young people in Germany are starting to wake up from their lethargy, beginning to see the need to find responses to the dominant ideologies and demand active participation in [determining] the conditions they live under. Precisely in this social climate where people are beginning to feel that in the context of the ideological failure of neoliberalism and the lack of responses from the bourgeoisie to face up to the economic crisis and from the traditional parties, the youth univerisites of the party Die Linke are organizing circles for reading and discussing Capital by Karl Marx. After years of the exile of Marxism from the universities, 2,000 young people meet every week in more than 40 German universities to read and debate that work, next to leftist intellectuals. After years of de-politicization and silence, of the alleged end of history, groups of young people are putting criticism of capitalism on the agenda.
GERMANY: Workers and students mobilize
By Antje Berlinger and Marcelo Torres
Thursday, November 20, 2008
The German working class is showing signs of wanting to follow in the steps of their class brothers in Italy and Greece. In Germany, a significant increase in struggles over demands that largely exceed the policy of wage moderation that the union bureaucracies have tried to impose, can be observed. Thus, last week, workers belonging to the metalworkers' union IG Metall partially shut down production in the heart of the German economy: automakers and electricity. Up to 550,000 workers of the plants of Opel, Mercedes Benz, Ford, Audi, BMW, Bosch, Nokia, Siemens and MAN forced the union leaderships to call warning strikes, work stoppages and demonstrations. They were demanding 8% wage raises, a demand that the IG Metall bureaucracy quickly betrayed, given its fear of calling a strike of indefinite duration, by arriving at an agreement, behind the backs of the workers, for a 4.2% raise, way below the 8% demanded originally.
While the President of the employers' association, Dieter Hundt, was welcoming the agreement as representing a "sign of common sense in a difficult economic situation," groups of rank and file workers were demanding and are still demanding "repudiation of that meager result and immediately beginning with a strike referendum," since "they cannot unload the crisis on our shoulders." According to estimates, in the coming year, 350,000 workers will lose their jobs, half of which would be in the automotive sector. Now, temporary workers have already been thrown into the street, and neither staff reductions of workers with permanent contracts nor wage cuts can be ruled out.
And the problem is that the "German marketplace" depends in large part on countries consuming its products, countries that are now stricken, as trade partners: the US, the United Kingdom, and the Spanish state. According to some estimates, exports, the preeminent German economic motor, will suffer a big sudden halt that will lead to only a 0.4% growth in exports (after this year's 4.2%) or even complete stagnation.
"Managers, out of the universities!"
Attacks by the bourgeoisie are also intensifying in the educational sector, where, besides the directives of the Bologna plan, a wave of privatizations is being carried out, from the kindergartens up to the universities, which intensifies the class character of the educational system. For instance, at present, only 16% of university students are sons or daughters of workers, and only 3.3%, children of immigrants. Last Wednesday, facing this situation, high school students, accompanied by university students and some professors, organized a 24-hour strike with demonstrations in approximately 40 German cities. More than 100,000 students filled the streets, demanding an end to inadequate funding of education, and a quality, unrestricted, and popular education, gratis. Students in Hannover surpassed the limits of bourgeois legality by blockading the regional parliament, and in Berlin they seized the Humboldt University by assault, waving red banners from its balconies. They forcefully entered a large room where businessmen were negotiating patent rights for universities, and they forced the businessmen to hold their signs while they helped themselves to the culinary delicacies from the banquet prepared for the occasion, to the cry of "a -anti -anticapitalist" and "managers, out of the universities."
These most recent acts are one more proof that young people in Germany are starting to wake up from their lethargy, beginning to see the need to find responses to the dominant ideologies and demand active participation in [determining] the conditions they live under. Precisely in this social climate where people are beginning to feel that in the context of the ideological failure of neoliberalism and the lack of responses from the bourgeoisie to face up to the economic crisis and from the traditional parties, the youth univerisites of the party Die Linke are organizing circles for reading and discussing Capital by Karl Marx. After years of the exile of Marxism from the universities, 2,000 young people meet every week in more than 40 German universities to read and debate that work, next to leftist intellectuals. After years of de-politicization and silence, of the alleged end of history, groups of young people are putting criticism of capitalism on the agenda.
Monday, November 3, 2008
General Strike in ITALY
From http://www.ft-ci.org/
A big call by rank and file unions
General Strike in ITALY
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
By comrades of the Communist Collective of Via Efeso
Berlusconi’s government is getting ready to unload the crisis, at its beginning, brutally onto the workers and the popular classes. Like Prodi, his center-left predecessor, he is seeking to isolate wage earners more and more, to pad the effects of a hidden crisis that had become obvious some time ago. In addition to racist measures against immigrants, an educational reform that continues the privatizing and pro-boss measures imposed under Prodi and a brutal campaign against state workers, with cutbacks and increasingly precarious employment, Confindustria, the big Italian employers’ association, is trying to impose a reform of the national work agreements. However, autumn in Italy has begun to get hot. Groups in the working class and among young people, that now count 15 million of their fellow Italians below the poverty line, are beginning to act. In September, the heroic resistance of the Alitalia workers showed that something could be changing in the workers’ state of mind. In turn, the “second generation Italians” from the suburbs (children and grandchildren of immigrants, born in Italy) showed up massively, with clashes and antiracist demonstrations. Protests among teachers, secondary-school and university students are growing, with marches by parents and teachers, and occupations of schools and universities in big Italian cities. The latest news is that Berlusconi is threatening to use cops to put an end to student protests and the seizures of universities and schools. This new social climate forced groups of the union bureaucracy to relocate. Another symptom of the intensity of the current wave of struggles: Veltroni’s Democratic Party, having wavered about keeping its October 25 national demonstration, in the name of “a sense of national responsibility” because of the economic crisis, nevertheless is now calling for a mobilization, and, while we were closing this note, it requested the withdrawal of the Gelmini reform, in order not to be cut off from the mobilizations. On the other hand, this new climate filled the demonstrations, that had been planned some time ago, with a different content, like the October 11 demonstration, called by Rifondazione Comunista (PRC) and the Italian Communists, that served as a means of expression for tens of thousands of young people and workers fed up with the government’s policy, and the massive October 17 general strike, called by rank and file unions, that we report on below.
The national demonstration that went across Rome showed that the general strike called by rank and file unions (RdB-CUB, Cobas and SdL [1]) had a big success. Support for the strike was higher than anticipated. In spite of the rain that fell all morning on the capital, an impressive demonstration (500,000 people according to the organizers, 350,000 according to La Repubblica) marched for more than four hours between Repubblica and the Piazza San Giovanni.
Other anti-government mobilizations were organized in the length and breadth of the country. In Milan, a demonstration called by the CUB and the SlaiCobas [2] joined with two other demonstrations, one, by the teachers, and the other, by the students, and then they marched towards the Rectorate Building. After having thrown eggs and firecrackers, the students knocked down the barriers and, in front of the main entrance, they left a banner on which was written, "We are blocking the decree [of the reform of the educational system], occupation! The school is opposed to Gelmini [the Minister of Education]! The revolt is in the street and has hardly begun!" Strikes and demonstrations also paralyzed traffic in Naples and Palermo, while students in Florence, Pisa and Siena mobilized, occupying the universities.
... On October 17, a clear message was sent to Berlusconi. The strike set forth that his policy of wage cuts, attacking civil servants, and attacks on education, displeases many people, not least, the most dynamic groups of workers and students. The strike made it clear that the government will not be able to get its policy approved automatically, at least, not without having to "pay some price." What is more, the more Berlusconi has to pay for the attacks he is unleashing, if the government is weakened, the better the conditions will be for the working class of the peninsula to struggle and reorganize its ranks.
Students, teachers, state employees, transportation workers, workers with uncertain employment: all united
Who were the ones who came out to the street and for what reasons? The most visible sector was the one the Italian press calls "the people of the schools," teachers, hit three times: by the widespread offensive against the working class (reform of the national labor agreements, reductions in wages and in retirements), by cuts in public services, and by the attack on education (the Gelmini reform anticipated a reduction in the number of workers, privatization, in the final instance, of the universities, through their transformation into "foundations," the implementation of a more authoritarian and even repressive educational model, etc.).
They were also public sector workers.... Berlusconi is trying to deepen an orientation carried out during the last few years, by both center-left governments and those of the center-right, that consists of continuing with the cuts in public adminstration, both from the point of view of wages and jobs.... In the different marches, the considerable number of transportation workers was observed. Traffic in several cities was disrupted with the strike, as attested, for example, by the 33% rate of participation in the strike in Rome.
There were likewise workers with uncertain employment, especially from the public sector....
In short, the mobilization went beyond all those sectors influenced by rank and file trade unionism. There lies perhaps the greatest innovation and potential of the mobilization and of the current phase. Among the demonstrators, there were many unorganized workers or others who have the membership card, especially of the main union organization in Italy, the CGIL.
What perspectives after the October 17 strike?
The fact is that the aims defended by the organizers of the October 17 strike (no to the cuts in public services, no to precarious work, for wage raises and the sliding scale, against bank and stock market speculation, for a social wage) have a reformist-redistributionist matrix (leftist Keynesianism). It is also a fact that those who participate in the strike and the real movement impose a content on it. From this point of view, considering the reduction of the spaces for redistribution, the workers that struck and went out to the street could become more "opposed to the system" and "incompatible" with respect to the demands proposed by the leaders of the rank and file unions.
Before the October 17 strike, the bureaucratic leaderships of the unions in the Confederation had announced (without giving any date or specifying the form of the actions of force) a series of mobilizations in the educational sector and the civil service. At the same time, however, they declared themselves prepared to continue a dialogue with the government, as shown by the public statements of Bonnani, leader of the CSIL, and of Angeletti, main leader of the UIL.
The call for measures of force by the bureaucracy of the Confederation had as its aim, weakening the strike by the rank and file unions. It is also a symptom of a change in the state of mind in some mobilized groups. Taking into account, for example, the assemblies of state workers in which we participated: all the workers attacked by the government, few of them unionized, who have not yet broken with the bourgeois political leaderships of the center-left, nor with the bureaucratic leaderships of the unions, are today demanding a real, effective and united struggle, although timidly and without having the ability to impose it.
Considering the stage we are going through, the October 17 strike cannot remain as a mere work stoppage, whose main objective consists in organizationally strengthening the space that the rank and file unions have at their disposal. If the leaders of the rank and file unions pose the problem of building a real and effective counteroffensive against the government, if they know how to take up again the banner of the different struggles that are crossing the peninsula now, then the October 17 strike could become the first stage of a movement that would serve to build a broader, more permanent and combative front of struggle.
With the October 17 strike, the workers and students that joined the measure of force more massively than anticipated, marked a milestone. Will the union and political forces that consider themselves militant and class-conscious respond to their demands? In the national post-strike communiqué, the Cobas leadership sets forth that "the exciting demonstration in Rome sends a united message of increased awareness to continue stronger than ever in defending social rights and workers' rights for everyone: forward!" Continuing in this direction would mean carrying out a consistent and united struggle (based on workers' assemblies, with openness to current struggles, up to and including when they are led by the bureaucracy of the Confederation, etc.) to broaden the current front of struggle and transform it into a more general movement against the government and the bosses.
[Notes]
[1] According to the abbreviations in Italian, Representatives of the Base-United Confederation of the Base (RdB-CUB), Confederation of the Committees of the Base (Cobas), Inter-category Union of Workers (SdL), the three main rank and file union organizations in Italy. Although small, they are characterized by more radical positions than those of the historical union confederations, CGIL, CISL, and UIL.
[2] The Intercategory Union of Self-organized Workers-Committees of the Base (SlaiCobas, according to its Italian abbreviations), of lesser size, compared to the other rank and file unions, generally defends more militant and class-conscious positions.
A big call by rank and file unions
General Strike in ITALY
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
By comrades of the Communist Collective of Via Efeso
Berlusconi’s government is getting ready to unload the crisis, at its beginning, brutally onto the workers and the popular classes. Like Prodi, his center-left predecessor, he is seeking to isolate wage earners more and more, to pad the effects of a hidden crisis that had become obvious some time ago. In addition to racist measures against immigrants, an educational reform that continues the privatizing and pro-boss measures imposed under Prodi and a brutal campaign against state workers, with cutbacks and increasingly precarious employment, Confindustria, the big Italian employers’ association, is trying to impose a reform of the national work agreements. However, autumn in Italy has begun to get hot. Groups in the working class and among young people, that now count 15 million of their fellow Italians below the poverty line, are beginning to act. In September, the heroic resistance of the Alitalia workers showed that something could be changing in the workers’ state of mind. In turn, the “second generation Italians” from the suburbs (children and grandchildren of immigrants, born in Italy) showed up massively, with clashes and antiracist demonstrations. Protests among teachers, secondary-school and university students are growing, with marches by parents and teachers, and occupations of schools and universities in big Italian cities. The latest news is that Berlusconi is threatening to use cops to put an end to student protests and the seizures of universities and schools. This new social climate forced groups of the union bureaucracy to relocate. Another symptom of the intensity of the current wave of struggles: Veltroni’s Democratic Party, having wavered about keeping its October 25 national demonstration, in the name of “a sense of national responsibility” because of the economic crisis, nevertheless is now calling for a mobilization, and, while we were closing this note, it requested the withdrawal of the Gelmini reform, in order not to be cut off from the mobilizations. On the other hand, this new climate filled the demonstrations, that had been planned some time ago, with a different content, like the October 11 demonstration, called by Rifondazione Comunista (PRC) and the Italian Communists, that served as a means of expression for tens of thousands of young people and workers fed up with the government’s policy, and the massive October 17 general strike, called by rank and file unions, that we report on below.
The national demonstration that went across Rome showed that the general strike called by rank and file unions (RdB-CUB, Cobas and SdL [1]) had a big success. Support for the strike was higher than anticipated. In spite of the rain that fell all morning on the capital, an impressive demonstration (500,000 people according to the organizers, 350,000 according to La Repubblica) marched for more than four hours between Repubblica and the Piazza San Giovanni.
Other anti-government mobilizations were organized in the length and breadth of the country. In Milan, a demonstration called by the CUB and the SlaiCobas [2] joined with two other demonstrations, one, by the teachers, and the other, by the students, and then they marched towards the Rectorate Building. After having thrown eggs and firecrackers, the students knocked down the barriers and, in front of the main entrance, they left a banner on which was written, "We are blocking the decree [of the reform of the educational system], occupation! The school is opposed to Gelmini [the Minister of Education]! The revolt is in the street and has hardly begun!" Strikes and demonstrations also paralyzed traffic in Naples and Palermo, while students in Florence, Pisa and Siena mobilized, occupying the universities.
... On October 17, a clear message was sent to Berlusconi. The strike set forth that his policy of wage cuts, attacking civil servants, and attacks on education, displeases many people, not least, the most dynamic groups of workers and students. The strike made it clear that the government will not be able to get its policy approved automatically, at least, not without having to "pay some price." What is more, the more Berlusconi has to pay for the attacks he is unleashing, if the government is weakened, the better the conditions will be for the working class of the peninsula to struggle and reorganize its ranks.
Students, teachers, state employees, transportation workers, workers with uncertain employment: all united
Who were the ones who came out to the street and for what reasons? The most visible sector was the one the Italian press calls "the people of the schools," teachers, hit three times: by the widespread offensive against the working class (reform of the national labor agreements, reductions in wages and in retirements), by cuts in public services, and by the attack on education (the Gelmini reform anticipated a reduction in the number of workers, privatization, in the final instance, of the universities, through their transformation into "foundations," the implementation of a more authoritarian and even repressive educational model, etc.).
They were also public sector workers.... Berlusconi is trying to deepen an orientation carried out during the last few years, by both center-left governments and those of the center-right, that consists of continuing with the cuts in public adminstration, both from the point of view of wages and jobs.... In the different marches, the considerable number of transportation workers was observed. Traffic in several cities was disrupted with the strike, as attested, for example, by the 33% rate of participation in the strike in Rome.
There were likewise workers with uncertain employment, especially from the public sector....
In short, the mobilization went beyond all those sectors influenced by rank and file trade unionism. There lies perhaps the greatest innovation and potential of the mobilization and of the current phase. Among the demonstrators, there were many unorganized workers or others who have the membership card, especially of the main union organization in Italy, the CGIL.
What perspectives after the October 17 strike?
The fact is that the aims defended by the organizers of the October 17 strike (no to the cuts in public services, no to precarious work, for wage raises and the sliding scale, against bank and stock market speculation, for a social wage) have a reformist-redistributionist matrix (leftist Keynesianism). It is also a fact that those who participate in the strike and the real movement impose a content on it. From this point of view, considering the reduction of the spaces for redistribution, the workers that struck and went out to the street could become more "opposed to the system" and "incompatible" with respect to the demands proposed by the leaders of the rank and file unions.
Before the October 17 strike, the bureaucratic leaderships of the unions in the Confederation had announced (without giving any date or specifying the form of the actions of force) a series of mobilizations in the educational sector and the civil service. At the same time, however, they declared themselves prepared to continue a dialogue with the government, as shown by the public statements of Bonnani, leader of the CSIL, and of Angeletti, main leader of the UIL.
The call for measures of force by the bureaucracy of the Confederation had as its aim, weakening the strike by the rank and file unions. It is also a symptom of a change in the state of mind in some mobilized groups. Taking into account, for example, the assemblies of state workers in which we participated: all the workers attacked by the government, few of them unionized, who have not yet broken with the bourgeois political leaderships of the center-left, nor with the bureaucratic leaderships of the unions, are today demanding a real, effective and united struggle, although timidly and without having the ability to impose it.
Considering the stage we are going through, the October 17 strike cannot remain as a mere work stoppage, whose main objective consists in organizationally strengthening the space that the rank and file unions have at their disposal. If the leaders of the rank and file unions pose the problem of building a real and effective counteroffensive against the government, if they know how to take up again the banner of the different struggles that are crossing the peninsula now, then the October 17 strike could become the first stage of a movement that would serve to build a broader, more permanent and combative front of struggle.
With the October 17 strike, the workers and students that joined the measure of force more massively than anticipated, marked a milestone. Will the union and political forces that consider themselves militant and class-conscious respond to their demands? In the national post-strike communiqué, the Cobas leadership sets forth that "the exciting demonstration in Rome sends a united message of increased awareness to continue stronger than ever in defending social rights and workers' rights for everyone: forward!" Continuing in this direction would mean carrying out a consistent and united struggle (based on workers' assemblies, with openness to current struggles, up to and including when they are led by the bureaucracy of the Confederation, etc.) to broaden the current front of struggle and transform it into a more general movement against the government and the bosses.
[Notes]
[1] According to the abbreviations in Italian, Representatives of the Base-United Confederation of the Base (RdB-CUB), Confederation of the Committees of the Base (Cobas), Inter-category Union of Workers (SdL), the three main rank and file union organizations in Italy. Although small, they are characterized by more radical positions than those of the historical union confederations, CGIL, CISL, and UIL.
[2] The Intercategory Union of Self-organized Workers-Committees of the Base (SlaiCobas, according to its Italian abbreviations), of lesser size, compared to the other rank and file unions, generally defends more militant and class-conscious positions.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
General Strike in GREECE
Europe: General strike in Greece
By Celeste Murillo
Thursday, October 23, 2008
In Greece, on Tuesday, October 21, a 24-hour general strike in which millions of workers from the public and private sector participated, took place against the bailout announced for the banks, costing millions, against privatizing the state-owned Olympic Airlines, and to demand wage raises.
In Greece, on Tuesday, October 21, a 24-hour general strike in which millions of workers from the public and private sector participated, took place against the bailout announced for the banks, costing millions, against privatizing the state-owned Olympic Airlines, and to demand wage raises.
Most of the economic and transportation activities of the country were paralyzed because of the action by the workers, who responded unanimously to the call from the General Federation of Workers and the Civil Servants Union, that, between them, represent 2,500,000 workers, half of the country’s workforce.
The strike affected both public transportation in the cities and air traffic, which caused the cancellation of 200 domestic and international flights in a single day. There was no activity in the ports, and the state railway company suspended almost all services; the electric and suburban trains and the trolleybuses did not run either. Public offices, post offices, schools, universities and hospitals were closed; hospitals were on duty for emergency cases only. According to the unions, compliance with the strike was massive: 90% of workers participated in the action.
In Athens, 15,000 people marched to the government palace to oppose conservative Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis’ privatization plans. The police blocked the way of the demonstrators, and clashes occurred. Thousands of young people and workers participated in the march with signs that showed the Greek people were fed up with watching the government bail out the banks while a large part of the population is suffering the consequences of the economic crisis.
The strike demanded a wage raise at the same time that it asked the government to increase social spending to help working-class families that are already suffering the results of the economic crisis. Another one of the slogans was rejection of privatizing the state-owned Olympic Airlines and rejection of the already unpopular plans to reform the retirement system. The protests continued on Wednesday, October 22, and the unions and other organizations announced that they are going to intensify the actions if the government fails to back down.
This week, the Greek parliament was supposed to discuss the 2009 budget and look for ways to reduce the deficit, that already brought Greece to the attention of EU, because it exceeded the deficit allowed the countries of the Eurozone. For this, the government is planning a series of privatizations, including that of the state-owned airline, cutting the budget for social programs and reforming retirements and pensions.
Faced with protests and the unpopularity of the government, Costas Karamanlis has promised wage compensations and measures to alleviate the rise in prices. So far, the main expenditure announced by the government was the promise of the Finance Minister, George Alogoskoufis, to pay out 28 billion euros to support the banks of Greece. Meanwhile, one out of every five Greeks is already living beneath the poverty line, according to official data. The first consequences of the crisis and its impact on the daily life of millions of workers could impoverish millions more.
The recent general strike and the struggles that have taken place in the country during the last two years (including the March 2006 general strike and the big student mobilizations in March 2007) show that the workers and the Greek people are not prepared to pay for the crisis of the capitalists.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
MEXICO: Victory to Morelos teachers struggle!
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Solidarity Bulletin from the LTS-CC
Long live the Morelos teachers' struggle!
In recent days, the teachers, together with groups of workers, campesinos, the indigenous population and the people, were repressed on the highways and in the communities of Morelos state, by the cowardly action of the repressive forces, with helicopters, armored vehicles, clubs, and tear gas. Faced with this, the teachers and inhabitants of towns and communities bravely faced the police-military operation and showed that they are ready to fight to the end against the anti-education plans and against the Alianza por la Calidad de la Educación [ACE].
Dozens of arrested people and several people who disappeared, as well as more police and military raids against communities, is the result of the savage represison that seeks to protect the plans of the state and federal governments. In spite of this, the spirited sit-in by the teachers continues in the main square of Cuernavaca, and together with the indigenous people, campesinos, students and workers, they declare they will not retreat a single step.
It is time to show and increase solidarity and support for the teachers and the people of Morelos.
The sections of the CNTE throughout the country must now call a national solidarity strike. The teachers in the whole country must wage a united struggle, repudiating the ACE and for the removal of Elba Esther from office. Halt the repression! Down with the Governor!
We must not abandon our comrades from Morelos. The UNT and the SME must also call for immediate mobilization actions and a national strike in support of this heroic struggle. It is time for these unions, that present themselves as opponents of the government, to join this great movement; if we postpone the task of unifying the struggle, it could be too late. We must now strengthen the only struggle that is intimidating the government. If Section 19's struggle is victorious, and they defeat the ACE in the state, it will more difficult for the government in its attempt to twist the arm of the other sections of the CNTE. In addition, that will strengthen the struggle against privatization of the energy industry, as well as defense of the contracts, and against the impoverishment of the working class, that will be intensified by the economic crisis. We will have a better chance of defeating the labor reform and reforms of the collective work contracts and of social security.
The broadest solidarity of all the workers', social, human rights and political organizations is urgently needed, first of all, to demand the immediate and unconditional release of everyone who was arrested and the return, safe and sound, of everyone who disappeared.
Down with the ACE! Dismissal of the union boss Gordillo!
Down with the state of siege in Xoxocotla!
NATIONAL STRIKE of solidarity by the CNTE, the UNT and the SME!
FOR THE VICTORY OF THE MORELOS TEACHERS' STRUGGLE!
Solidarity Bulletin from the LTS-CC
Long live the Morelos teachers' struggle!
In recent days, the teachers, together with groups of workers, campesinos, the indigenous population and the people, were repressed on the highways and in the communities of Morelos state, by the cowardly action of the repressive forces, with helicopters, armored vehicles, clubs, and tear gas. Faced with this, the teachers and inhabitants of towns and communities bravely faced the police-military operation and showed that they are ready to fight to the end against the anti-education plans and against the Alianza por la Calidad de la Educación [ACE].
Dozens of arrested people and several people who disappeared, as well as more police and military raids against communities, is the result of the savage represison that seeks to protect the plans of the state and federal governments. In spite of this, the spirited sit-in by the teachers continues in the main square of Cuernavaca, and together with the indigenous people, campesinos, students and workers, they declare they will not retreat a single step.
It is time to show and increase solidarity and support for the teachers and the people of Morelos.
The sections of the CNTE throughout the country must now call a national solidarity strike. The teachers in the whole country must wage a united struggle, repudiating the ACE and for the removal of Elba Esther from office. Halt the repression! Down with the Governor!
We must not abandon our comrades from Morelos. The UNT and the SME must also call for immediate mobilization actions and a national strike in support of this heroic struggle. It is time for these unions, that present themselves as opponents of the government, to join this great movement; if we postpone the task of unifying the struggle, it could be too late. We must now strengthen the only struggle that is intimidating the government. If Section 19's struggle is victorious, and they defeat the ACE in the state, it will more difficult for the government in its attempt to twist the arm of the other sections of the CNTE. In addition, that will strengthen the struggle against privatization of the energy industry, as well as defense of the contracts, and against the impoverishment of the working class, that will be intensified by the economic crisis. We will have a better chance of defeating the labor reform and reforms of the collective work contracts and of social security.
The broadest solidarity of all the workers', social, human rights and political organizations is urgently needed, first of all, to demand the immediate and unconditional release of everyone who was arrested and the return, safe and sound, of everyone who disappeared.
Down with the ACE! Dismissal of the union boss Gordillo!
Down with the state of siege in Xoxocotla!
NATIONAL STRIKE of solidarity by the CNTE, the UNT and the SME!
FOR THE VICTORY OF THE MORELOS TEACHERS' STRUGGLE!
Sunday, October 5, 2008
[MEXICO] DECLARATION: RELEASE THE STUDENTS ARRESTED DURING THE OCTOBER 2 MARCH
Once again, the October 2 March was violently repressed, once again provocations were staged by infiltrating thugs, judicial police and cops dressed as civilians, in exactly the same way as during the years when the PRI governed. Once again, the real "coordination" that the government of the Federal District and the federal government have achieved is against youth and students. These governments are the ones who murdered the young people in the News Divine discotheque and the very ones who repressed the rejected students, the street vendors, the teachers, the campesinos, the workers, and the groups in struggle. Once again, a media campaign to legitimize repression against students, to criminalize them, and to place the blame on them, when an obviously planned repressive operation took place.
Participants in the march have charged that the arrested students were detained by persons dressed in civilian clothes who put them in unmarked cars. Some students were arrested when they were part of a barrier to prevent cops from entering the Zócalo. This has also been documented by daily papers like "El Universal" on its website through videos and photos, where it is mentioned that the confrontations began once the arbitrary arrests had commenced. And thus, while provocateurs that were seen later inside Agency 50 of the Ministerio Público, with absolute impunity, at that time, they were inciting the confrontation with the police; riot police and alleged cops entered the contingents of the march and carried out the arrests with beatings, violating every guarantee of democracy. Now there are students, many of them minors who have injuries, bruises on their eyelids, and various lesions on their ribcages, arms and legs. Six students have already been moved to the Norte prison and a female comrade, to the Santa Martha Acatitla prison.
We declare ourselves in favor of the immediate and unconditional release of the students arrested during the October 2 march; we hold the government of the Federal District, the police of the Federal District, and the corps of riot police, completely responsible for this repression, and we demand an investigation to determine those responsible for this provocation, as well as punishment for the material and intellectual authors of this repression. For this purpose, it is necessary to form an independent commission of investigation, headed by human rights organizations.
We call on the students, workers and academics of the UNAM, the IPN [Instituto Politécnico Nacional] and the UAM, to repudiate this repression emphatically and to demand that the campaign against them be stopped. We also call on democratic lawyers and human rights organizations to declare their support for the defense, in the face of dozens of irregularities in the penal process. We call on social and political organizations, the unions and workers', campesinos' and indigenous organizations, to condemn this repression and to discuss a real plan of struggle against repression and for the release of political prisoners.
Finally, we call for carrying out informational assemblies and organizing action plans in the schools, to free our comrades and continue advancing in students' coordination and coordination with other groups.
Halt the repression!
Immediate release of the arrested students!
Thugs out of the schools!
Dissolve the repressive forces!
For student coordination and organization!
From the Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo-ContraCorriente and the university group En Clave Revolucionaria, we call for broadly disseminating this deunciation and for continuing to fight for a big National Coordinating Committee against Repression.
Participants in the march have charged that the arrested students were detained by persons dressed in civilian clothes who put them in unmarked cars. Some students were arrested when they were part of a barrier to prevent cops from entering the Zócalo. This has also been documented by daily papers like "El Universal" on its website through videos and photos, where it is mentioned that the confrontations began once the arbitrary arrests had commenced. And thus, while provocateurs that were seen later inside Agency 50 of the Ministerio Público, with absolute impunity, at that time, they were inciting the confrontation with the police; riot police and alleged cops entered the contingents of the march and carried out the arrests with beatings, violating every guarantee of democracy. Now there are students, many of them minors who have injuries, bruises on their eyelids, and various lesions on their ribcages, arms and legs. Six students have already been moved to the Norte prison and a female comrade, to the Santa Martha Acatitla prison.
We declare ourselves in favor of the immediate and unconditional release of the students arrested during the October 2 march; we hold the government of the Federal District, the police of the Federal District, and the corps of riot police, completely responsible for this repression, and we demand an investigation to determine those responsible for this provocation, as well as punishment for the material and intellectual authors of this repression. For this purpose, it is necessary to form an independent commission of investigation, headed by human rights organizations.
We call on the students, workers and academics of the UNAM, the IPN [Instituto Politécnico Nacional] and the UAM, to repudiate this repression emphatically and to demand that the campaign against them be stopped. We also call on democratic lawyers and human rights organizations to declare their support for the defense, in the face of dozens of irregularities in the penal process. We call on social and political organizations, the unions and workers', campesinos' and indigenous organizations, to condemn this repression and to discuss a real plan of struggle against repression and for the release of political prisoners.
Finally, we call for carrying out informational assemblies and organizing action plans in the schools, to free our comrades and continue advancing in students' coordination and coordination with other groups.
Halt the repression!
Immediate release of the arrested students!
Thugs out of the schools!
Dissolve the repressive forces!
For student coordination and organization!
From the Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo-ContraCorriente and the university group En Clave Revolucionaria, we call for broadly disseminating this deunciation and for continuing to fight for a big National Coordinating Committee against Repression.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Cde Christian Castillo on the US/world financial crash
Tuesday, September 30, 2008 [Buenos Aires]
Press Release
Christian Castillo: "The internacional financial system is in free fall"
(PTS, 9/29/08) Christian Castillo, national leader of the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS) indicated today that “the rejection by the US House of Representatives of the plan for bailing out the speculators, that produced an historic fall in the markets of the whole world, is a new sign that we face a crisis of a magnitude comparable only to that of 1930. Up to now, the government bailouts costing millions have been completely useless. The international financial system continues in free fall and refutes not only those who believe in the market's self-regulation, but also all those who assert that this crisis can be contained with a little more regulation and state intervention."
Castillo also stated that "the rejection was caused by a combination of factors, that go from the rejection by a large part of the population that pressured the legislators, to the mistrust of the financial market itself, given certain limits that were put on the original bailout plan. The rejection shows that a big political crisis has begun, that jeopardizes both Bush and McCain and Obama, who went out to say the the bill had to be approved in the next few days."
The PTS leader also explained that "in this context of an acute crisis of world capitalism, the attitude of the Argentinean government, of paying the debt to the Club of Paris and opening a new exchange for bondholders, is a combination of appeasement and provincialism, since the argument that these measures are necessary to assure financing is odd, when the whole financial system is collapsing. The development of the crisis makes the demand for nationalization under control of the banking workers and the monopoly of foreign trade more timely than ever. The government, in turn, prefers to pay an illicit and illegitimate debt to bankrupt speculators, instead of allocating these funds for healthcare, education, housing and guaranteeing an 82% sliding scale retirement."
PTS - Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas
Press Release
Christian Castillo: "The internacional financial system is in free fall"
(PTS, 9/29/08) Christian Castillo, national leader of the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS) indicated today that “the rejection by the US House of Representatives of the plan for bailing out the speculators, that produced an historic fall in the markets of the whole world, is a new sign that we face a crisis of a magnitude comparable only to that of 1930. Up to now, the government bailouts costing millions have been completely useless. The international financial system continues in free fall and refutes not only those who believe in the market's self-regulation, but also all those who assert that this crisis can be contained with a little more regulation and state intervention."
Castillo also stated that "the rejection was caused by a combination of factors, that go from the rejection by a large part of the population that pressured the legislators, to the mistrust of the financial market itself, given certain limits that were put on the original bailout plan. The rejection shows that a big political crisis has begun, that jeopardizes both Bush and McCain and Obama, who went out to say the the bill had to be approved in the next few days."
The PTS leader also explained that "in this context of an acute crisis of world capitalism, the attitude of the Argentinean government, of paying the debt to the Club of Paris and opening a new exchange for bondholders, is a combination of appeasement and provincialism, since the argument that these measures are necessary to assure financing is odd, when the whole financial system is collapsing. The development of the crisis makes the demand for nationalization under control of the banking workers and the monopoly of foreign trade more timely than ever. The government, in turn, prefers to pay an illicit and illegitimate debt to bankrupt speculators, instead of allocating these funds for healthcare, education, housing and guaranteeing an 82% sliding scale retirement."
PTS - Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Wall Street struggles to survive: The US on the verge of the crash
[From http://www.ft-ci.org/]
Wall Street struggles to survive: The US on the verge of the crash
By Juan Chingo Thursday, September 18, 2007
Maybe the rescue will be successful, it cannot be ruled out. The US authorities and the central banks of the whole world are doing the impossible, although they are dragged down by events. But never since the crisis of 1929 has the US economy been so close to the crash. As the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve [the Fed], Alan Greenspan said, these are phenomena that happen “once-in-a-half-century, probably once-in-a-century.”
The crisis has already destroyed the neo-liberal dogma that the market fixes everything. But also, against what some neo-Keynesian economists maintain, this crisis is not a result of “neo-liberalism”; in reality, the collapsing financial hypertrophy is a byproduct of the only possible capitalist solution to the crisis of over-accumulation of capital, which has been taking place since the end of the postwar boom.
The falls of the US financial heavyweights, like Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest US investment bank, which survived the Civil War, the two World Wars and the Great Depression, Merrill Lynch, which has been in existence for 94 years, and the colossal rescue of the gigantic insurance company AIG, can only lead to a greater discrediting of the US ruling class’ “free market” ideology, as well as its political and economic system, presented until recently as the capitalist panacea for the whole world.
The Fed, behind the events
The authorities of the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury, the only remaining “pilots” amidst the devastating financial hurricane, are being pulled along by the phenomenal shock wave.
Last week, forced by the role of the giants Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac in the real estate market, and especially because their fall would have sunk foreign investors like China, Russia or Japan, that are financing the enormous US deficit, they carried out the so-called “mother of all rescues.” This weekend, wishing to restore the appearance of market rules, while, on their knees, they were begging the “semi-healthy” small banks that exist in the US to save the “bad banks,” whether by buying them or continuing to do business with them, they let Lehman Brothers fall, which in turn hastened the sale of Merrill Lynch to the Bank of America, in an act of desperation, before Merrill Lynch could itself fail. The unprecedented development, unthinkable until recently, of the possibility of a US government default, that, although to a slight extent, began to be evaluated by the credit markets, was also hovering over the head of Henry Paulson, US Treasury Secretary, to adopt this course. But the Federal Reserve, two days after “drawing the line” on massive state rescues, at the final hour on Tuesday, with Treasury backing, went out to offer an $85 billion loan to avoid the bankruptcy of the main insurance company on earth, AIG, by, in fact, nationalizing the insurance market, although, contrary to expectations, without calming the markets. In turn, by other ways, they go on opening the faucet of liquidity even further, with increasingly desperate measures, like lowering the creditworthiness of the below par assets accepted at the liquidity windows of the Federal Reserve, up to including variable-rate assets, and even permitting companies to use deposits by their customers to finance their investment banking. That is, using deposits by those with savings accounts to avoid bankruptcy from their speculative activities. Incredible!
However, in spite of these "containment measures," the crisis is not stopping, and it promises to drag down new banks. The problem is that the Lehman bankruptcy could start a run on what is left of investment banking, like Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley or other investment banks or brokers that are part of the big commercial banks like, for instance, JP Morgan and Citigroup. The problems are repeated in other firms like Washington Mutual (WaMu), whose shares plummeted, as investors lost confidence in the ability of the main US savings bank to raise new capital or find a buyer who will let it continue business. In turn, another one of the financial firms that the market is focussing its concerns on is Wachovia, one of the largest commercial banks, that has suffered $16 billion in losses, as a result of the credit crisis caused by "garbage" mortgages. This is not counting the thousands of local or regional banks that could fail. As is obvious, there is no part of the US financial system that could be rescued in the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, that has at the same time, set off the biggest process of concentration and centralization of banking capital since the 1930's. To put it clearly, we are facing the survival of the strongest, whether through the bankruptcy of firms with a smaller capital base, or the takeover and creation of mega-firms like the Bank of America, that has already absorbed the mortgage company Countrywide Financial and has now taken the investment bank Merrill Lynch, that has a tentacle in all the sectors of the US financial system. Although it still remains to be seen if this was a good deal or if, on the contrary, the "garbage" title deeds ("toxic," in the financial language of these days) that they got from the firms with problems they purchased could torment their new owners, by eroding their capital ratios (or base), something that, if it happened, would open an even more ominous prospect for the entire financial system since, the more banking mega-giants that are formed as a result of the crisis, the greater could be their fall.
In turn, the setback of the main mortgage bank of the United Kingdom, HBOS, in talks with its British rival Lloyds TSB, shows that the financial crisis is not limited to the US. The fears that HBOS will not be able to refinance 100 billion pounds in the coming months, nor find funds to do it in the present market conditions, have put this company in a coma.
The culprit is not "deficient" regulation, but the insatiable thirst for profits
The current setback of investment banking and its opaque character, have provoked the rise of a series of analysts that, confronted with the hypertrophy and the greater sophistication of the financial system, blame the regulatory agencies for behaving with liberal logic and not measuring up to the need to impose strong control on these banking practices. This explanation ignores the real causes and is, in turn, a self-interested vision from apologists for the system, currently in retreat, that naturalizes capitalism and considers that its excesses are the only problem. However, the explanation is different.
The development of investment banking and the securitization and titlization that accompanied it, like a shadow follows a body, in other words, the transformation of all credit into a negotiable security, that increased exponentially for the last thirty years, from the beginning of the neo-liberal offensive, were actions by capital (more precisely, capital as ownership) of subjecting and limiting the autonomy of the productive part of capital (more precisely to functioning capital) to increase the profits from invested capital. The universal titlization that was generated, to the detriment of the intermediary role of the old banking, towards a more direct financing, followed the logic of not being tied to management of real assets, in order constantly to seek the best yield. Increasing exposure to risk, even with a small capital base, or the fact that a large part of the expansion of financial products and services in the last five years originated in transactions between financial firms (incredible development of fictitious capital) should not blind us to the fact that the main reason for such changes in the financial system was to increase pressure on the management of enterprises, by approving of or penalizing their performance through buying and selling stock. The subprime mortgage crisis (or, better expressed, the sub-primary character of the US financial system) has punished this form of growth that the US ruling class had as a way of making up for the fall in profitability that devastated it in 1970, when the beneficial effects of the postwar-era boom were exhausted. This form of growth has revealed the fragile and unstable character of the current financial system, based on diversification and arbitrage of investors between different places as a way of getting superprofits, which, in turn, puts at risk the viability of the entire finanical system, as the current financial crisis, the biggest since the crash of 1929, shows.
Deregulation of the operations of the big corporations, approved by both Republican and Democratic administrations, removed all the legal limits to obtaining profits and promoted the accumulation of increasingly obscene levels of wealth in the hands of a financial oligarchy, to which both parties answer. Big sectors of the US industrial base were destroyed as part of this process, by relocating production in areas with cheap labor, that would allow getting superprofits, and provoking enormous social inequality, to the benefit of the more well-to-do groups in society, one of the structural bases of the historic decline of US capitalism.
And has it hit rock bottom?
It is still very premature to know whether a crash will be avoided. Wall Street has not seen the bankruptcy of an investment bank since the fall of Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1990, and today the interconnections of the sector through the derivatives market have grown beyond all limits. The debt of US financial groups to their counterparts has doubled since the beginning of the 1990's, reaching 112% of the US gross domestic product (GDP). Lehman's bankruptcy means the firm's inability to face up to its current payments, a standstill in its ordinary activity, and its beginning a process of liquidating assets, with unpredictable consequences. We are talking about $600 billion up to June, with considerable exposure to mortgage titlizations of doubtful intrinsic value, the market for which has contracted to the point of being almost nonexistent. The adjustment to market prices ("mark to market"), that could be derived from the process of forced disinvestment from the US investment bank, could be devastating for the rest of its counterparts, unless the authorities continue opening an accounting window to avoid entering a spiral of losses that threaten to sweep away the entire financial system. In the case of AIG, the US insurance company that had broad exposure to the segment of the Credit Default Swaps (CDS), including those of Lehman, the authorities were unwilling to take another risk. The CDS are a type of derivative where it is agreed to pay a certain amount of cash (with a certain frequency) to the seller, in exchange for having protection against default on a bond or loan from an enterprise or country. The sums that AIG owed, in the face of the insolvency of the current credit system, turned AIG into a sure bet for bankruptcy. Overall, the commitments in derivatives are far in excess of the assets of the big banks. Morgan Stanley has an exposure ten times greater than Lehman to the derivatives market, although Lehman's risk, compared to its weakened capital base, seems to have been worse. In turn, 97% of the derivatives in the hands of the commercial banks are held by the five biggest: JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Wachovia and HSBC. Will these be the next victims? Who knows, but the waters are still too unsettled to let down one's guard.
Where is the US and world economy going?
As we say in the beginning, never since the crisis of 1929 has the US economy been so close to the crash, that is, a situation with innumerable bank failures (with a loss of deposits of millions of savers), firms going bankrupt, massive unemployment (that in the 1930's reached 28% in the US), etc. But, although there is not yet a crash to begin this generalized process, it is already possible to imagine an extremely severe recession in the main imperialist countries, with high unemployment. It is possible that we are entering a combination of the feared credit crunch (a drying up of credit) or lack of credit, and a synchronized emergency landing of the world economy. The dizzying collapse of Lehman Brothers and the absorption of Merrill Lynch have removed an enormous quantity of liquidity from the economy, to the extent that securities built up during decades of speculation are evaporating. As Paul Krugman explains in his column in The New York Times with the suggestive title, "Financial Russian Roulette,"... the system has been experiencing postmodern bank runs. These don't look like the old-fashioned version: With few exceptions, we're not talking about mobs of distraught depositors pounding on closed bank doors. Instead, we're talking about frantic phone calls and mouse clicks, as financial players pull credit lines and try to unwind counterparty risk. But the economic effects - a freezing up of credit, a downward spiral in asset values - are the same as those of the great bank runs of the 1930s.... That creates the real possibility that 2008 could be 1931 revisited." (The New York Times, September 15, 2008).
US industrial production contracted by 1% in August (12% in the auto industry), a matter that happened totally unnoticed amidst enormous financial stagnation. But the strong interrelation between finances and the economy will soon make itself felt and could lead to the worst US recession in decades. First, the debt relief crisis pointed out above will reduce the availability of credit in the economy. Second, the fall in the price of housing and of stocks will reduce the so-called "wealth effect" and the resulting consumption. Third, the problems in the credit and stock markets will have a worldwide effect, because of which it will be less and less likely that world economic activity will go on supporting the US via increasing US exports, which, together with the temporary effects of the tax cut, has until now avoided a big fall in the US GDP.
On the other hand, the world economy is deaccelerating. The euro zone and Japan are already in recession. England is rapidly headed there. And the so-called "emerging economies" are beginning to show signs of weakness, if not panic. On Monday (September 15), worried by the effects that the bleak prospect that is closing over the world economy could have on its own economy, as well as the sharp decline in the price of housing in the summer, China reduced interest rates. In Russia, on Wednesday, the regulatory authorities decided to suspend operations in the two main stock markets of the country, to hold back the stock market collapse that was reaching its third consecutive day (on Tuesday, September 16, the two main indices, the RTS and the Micex, tumbled by 11.5% and 17.45%, respectively). Among the stocks hit were those of two of the largest banks in Russia, the Sberbank and the VTB, that today (September 17) depreciated around 20%. This collapse of the Russian markets is tied, on the one hand, to that of Wall Street, that has affected all the emergent markets, the strong geopolitical tension with the US that jumped with the war between Russia and Georgia, and finally, but not less important, to the rapid fall in the price of oil, that has caused worries in an economy supported mainly by its exports of raw materials. Likewise, we must wait to see how the crisis affects the international bonds market of the Russian enterprises, the true source of their financing.
Like in 1930?
So, will a crisis like that of 1930 be repeated? In his September 16 blog, Julio Sevares, from the Argentinean daily Clarín, basing himself on some definite elements, denies it: "In the 1930's the world economy ... was fragmented, there was control of exchange and protectionism.... There was no common international currency, because the pound was weak and most of the time, non-convertible, and the dollar was not widespread, and the USA, the big international creditor, was unwilling to function as a moneylender of last resort; after the crisis, the Federal Reserve responded with monetary restriction, different from what is happening now. It is frequently mentioned that the Roosevelt administration responded with the expansive policy of the New Deal, but it is forgotten that in 1931, the US increased tariffs, worsening the world depression (the Smoot-Hawley Act), and that in 1933, it carried out a brutal devaluation of 30%. And in 1932, Great Britain responded to the USA's protectionism with the Treaty of Ottawa, with preferential tariffs for the Commonwealth. France was engaged in accumulating gold, contributing to illiquidity [an insufficiency of cash], and Germany was in debt and in crisis after the departure of capital, that went to speculate in New York during the upturn. The responses of protectionism and devaluation impeded the recovery, which only arrived with rearmament. The level of commercial and family indebtedness was infinitely less than at present; for that reason, the mechanism of transmission of crisis now is more financial than commercial. Unlike what happened in the thirties, there are state systems with "anti-cyclical" instruments and international institutions of consultation and regulation." But while it is true that the situation is not the same as that of 1930, the "anti-cyclical" mechanisms can affect the tempos and the forms of the crisis, but a scenario of a widespread crash cannot be ruled out. To rule that out, right when capitalism is openly showing its explosive contradictions, would mean having confidence in capitalism and denying that it can open catastrophic situations, not only in the semi-colonial countries, like the Argentinean crash and default of 2001, but even in the main imperialist countries.
Furthermore, if we bear in mind the increasing geopolitical tensions at an international level, the accelerated hegemonic decline of the US and the growing weakness of the dollar, that, strangely, had been rising in its exchange rate since the end of June when US stocks were collapsing, owing to the strong manipulation of US currency by the US Treasury, with the active support of the Chinese central bank and, very probably, of Japan and Europe, an increasingly untenable operation that could accelerate the collapse of the monetary system based on the dollar, all these elements make one expect that the world economy has entered a period of profound commercial wars and inter-imperialist tensions, full of threats.
Millions could lose their jobs: Get ready for the catastrophe
The recession is just in its first stages. Strong contractions of the GDP are to be expected in the coming quarters. According to the last report from the International Labor Organization (ILO), the financial disaster could lead to an increase of five million in the number of unemployed people in the world in 2008.
For the US working class, the current financial collapse means a rapid growth of unemployment, of poverty, of the number of homeless people, and of suffering in society. The government, Wall Street and the presidential candidates of both parties are getting ready to unload the consequences of their own greed and incompentence onto the shoulders of the working class. The crisis is already devastating certain groups of wage earners, especially those who work on Wall Street or in the City in London, who got part of the crumbs from the incredible credit and speculative bubble. In the US, the epicenter of the current crisis, in the face of the catastrophe that capitalism represents for the workers, it is now necessary to raise a program to make the capitalists pay for the crisis, a program that would begin with the suspension of all foreclosures, distribution of the hours of work among all available workers, putting into operation a public works plan to restructure basic industries and repair the obsolete infrastructure of the country, creating millions of jobs financed by taxes on the big fortunes, and basically carrying out a true nationalization of the banking and financial system, but not in the service of the rich, Wall Street, and in the hands of the financial oligarchy; rather, under bank workers' control and serving all workers. This program involves breaking with the Democratic and Republican parties and the adoption of an independent course by the working class.
This program, that is beginning to be ever more necessary for the US, to the extent that the crisis develops in the coming months and years, will be raised for action, for ever broader groups of the working class and the exploited of many countries in the world, since the crisis seems to be spreading like a poisonous cloud throughout the globe.
But basically the current crisis sets forth the need for the workers of the whole world to confront the collaborationist union bureaucracies of each country, that will be accomplices in the plans to unload the crisis onto their backs, and get organized politically not just on a national level, but by rebuilding proletarian internationalism and forging a new revolutionary workers' international. Although today these ideas are very remote from the present consciousness of the workers as a result of years of social fragmentation, of the damages that endure in consciousness and organization because of the neoliberal offensive and the Stalinist experience, the severity and sufferings from the crisis could make many workers, especially their vanguard, again grasp in their hands the tools and the program of revolutionary Marxism, the only one that can lead them to defeat that caste of parasites and exploiters: the bourgeoisie and its governments, that threaten the whole planet with further and bigger catastrophes.
=====
Who will pay for the capitalist crisis?
"The First World that used to paint us as the Mecca is falling like a bubble," maintained the President [of Argentina, Cristina Kirchner] a few seconds after espousing the economic "model" of the Kirchners and predicting that Argentina is "steady in the middle of a heavy sea." Fantasizing about an economically solid Argentina avoiding the tumultuous crisis that world capitalism is experiencing, is really living in a bubble. The international conditions that favored Argentina's growth cycle are disappearing. The current international capitalist crisis is the biggest since 1929; in spite of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the governments of the imperialist countries to contain the disaster, big banks continue to declare bankruptcy. The firms that are quoted on Wall Street are adding losses of their value of more than $4 billion dollars, the equivalent of 100 times the reserves of the Central Bank of Argentina. The US, Europe, Japan and the main economies are declining. The only horizon that capitalism has to offer is the combination of recession and inflation: more unemployment, more poverty and hunger for millions throughout the world. And this is what, in recent decades, they have been commissioned to present as the only viable system. The new international situation poses confronting the plans with which they will try to unload their losses on the backs of the workers, by overcoming the collaborationist union leaderships and preparing the mobilization of a powerful social and political force capable of imposing a program to make the capitalists pay for the crisis. Faced with the international nature of "the catastrophe that threatens us," it is urgent to rebuild the workers' internationalism and a new revolutionary international that intends to put an end to this system of exploitation and oppression.
Wall Street struggles to survive: The US on the verge of the crash
By Juan Chingo Thursday, September 18, 2007
Maybe the rescue will be successful, it cannot be ruled out. The US authorities and the central banks of the whole world are doing the impossible, although they are dragged down by events. But never since the crisis of 1929 has the US economy been so close to the crash. As the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve [the Fed], Alan Greenspan said, these are phenomena that happen “once-in-a-half-century, probably once-in-a-century.”
The crisis has already destroyed the neo-liberal dogma that the market fixes everything. But also, against what some neo-Keynesian economists maintain, this crisis is not a result of “neo-liberalism”; in reality, the collapsing financial hypertrophy is a byproduct of the only possible capitalist solution to the crisis of over-accumulation of capital, which has been taking place since the end of the postwar boom.
The falls of the US financial heavyweights, like Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest US investment bank, which survived the Civil War, the two World Wars and the Great Depression, Merrill Lynch, which has been in existence for 94 years, and the colossal rescue of the gigantic insurance company AIG, can only lead to a greater discrediting of the US ruling class’ “free market” ideology, as well as its political and economic system, presented until recently as the capitalist panacea for the whole world.
The Fed, behind the events
The authorities of the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury, the only remaining “pilots” amidst the devastating financial hurricane, are being pulled along by the phenomenal shock wave.
Last week, forced by the role of the giants Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac in the real estate market, and especially because their fall would have sunk foreign investors like China, Russia or Japan, that are financing the enormous US deficit, they carried out the so-called “mother of all rescues.” This weekend, wishing to restore the appearance of market rules, while, on their knees, they were begging the “semi-healthy” small banks that exist in the US to save the “bad banks,” whether by buying them or continuing to do business with them, they let Lehman Brothers fall, which in turn hastened the sale of Merrill Lynch to the Bank of America, in an act of desperation, before Merrill Lynch could itself fail. The unprecedented development, unthinkable until recently, of the possibility of a US government default, that, although to a slight extent, began to be evaluated by the credit markets, was also hovering over the head of Henry Paulson, US Treasury Secretary, to adopt this course. But the Federal Reserve, two days after “drawing the line” on massive state rescues, at the final hour on Tuesday, with Treasury backing, went out to offer an $85 billion loan to avoid the bankruptcy of the main insurance company on earth, AIG, by, in fact, nationalizing the insurance market, although, contrary to expectations, without calming the markets. In turn, by other ways, they go on opening the faucet of liquidity even further, with increasingly desperate measures, like lowering the creditworthiness of the below par assets accepted at the liquidity windows of the Federal Reserve, up to including variable-rate assets, and even permitting companies to use deposits by their customers to finance their investment banking. That is, using deposits by those with savings accounts to avoid bankruptcy from their speculative activities. Incredible!
However, in spite of these "containment measures," the crisis is not stopping, and it promises to drag down new banks. The problem is that the Lehman bankruptcy could start a run on what is left of investment banking, like Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley or other investment banks or brokers that are part of the big commercial banks like, for instance, JP Morgan and Citigroup. The problems are repeated in other firms like Washington Mutual (WaMu), whose shares plummeted, as investors lost confidence in the ability of the main US savings bank to raise new capital or find a buyer who will let it continue business. In turn, another one of the financial firms that the market is focussing its concerns on is Wachovia, one of the largest commercial banks, that has suffered $16 billion in losses, as a result of the credit crisis caused by "garbage" mortgages. This is not counting the thousands of local or regional banks that could fail. As is obvious, there is no part of the US financial system that could be rescued in the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, that has at the same time, set off the biggest process of concentration and centralization of banking capital since the 1930's. To put it clearly, we are facing the survival of the strongest, whether through the bankruptcy of firms with a smaller capital base, or the takeover and creation of mega-firms like the Bank of America, that has already absorbed the mortgage company Countrywide Financial and has now taken the investment bank Merrill Lynch, that has a tentacle in all the sectors of the US financial system. Although it still remains to be seen if this was a good deal or if, on the contrary, the "garbage" title deeds ("toxic," in the financial language of these days) that they got from the firms with problems they purchased could torment their new owners, by eroding their capital ratios (or base), something that, if it happened, would open an even more ominous prospect for the entire financial system since, the more banking mega-giants that are formed as a result of the crisis, the greater could be their fall.
In turn, the setback of the main mortgage bank of the United Kingdom, HBOS, in talks with its British rival Lloyds TSB, shows that the financial crisis is not limited to the US. The fears that HBOS will not be able to refinance 100 billion pounds in the coming months, nor find funds to do it in the present market conditions, have put this company in a coma.
The culprit is not "deficient" regulation, but the insatiable thirst for profits
The current setback of investment banking and its opaque character, have provoked the rise of a series of analysts that, confronted with the hypertrophy and the greater sophistication of the financial system, blame the regulatory agencies for behaving with liberal logic and not measuring up to the need to impose strong control on these banking practices. This explanation ignores the real causes and is, in turn, a self-interested vision from apologists for the system, currently in retreat, that naturalizes capitalism and considers that its excesses are the only problem. However, the explanation is different.
The development of investment banking and the securitization and titlization that accompanied it, like a shadow follows a body, in other words, the transformation of all credit into a negotiable security, that increased exponentially for the last thirty years, from the beginning of the neo-liberal offensive, were actions by capital (more precisely, capital as ownership) of subjecting and limiting the autonomy of the productive part of capital (more precisely to functioning capital) to increase the profits from invested capital. The universal titlization that was generated, to the detriment of the intermediary role of the old banking, towards a more direct financing, followed the logic of not being tied to management of real assets, in order constantly to seek the best yield. Increasing exposure to risk, even with a small capital base, or the fact that a large part of the expansion of financial products and services in the last five years originated in transactions between financial firms (incredible development of fictitious capital) should not blind us to the fact that the main reason for such changes in the financial system was to increase pressure on the management of enterprises, by approving of or penalizing their performance through buying and selling stock. The subprime mortgage crisis (or, better expressed, the sub-primary character of the US financial system) has punished this form of growth that the US ruling class had as a way of making up for the fall in profitability that devastated it in 1970, when the beneficial effects of the postwar-era boom were exhausted. This form of growth has revealed the fragile and unstable character of the current financial system, based on diversification and arbitrage of investors between different places as a way of getting superprofits, which, in turn, puts at risk the viability of the entire finanical system, as the current financial crisis, the biggest since the crash of 1929, shows.
Deregulation of the operations of the big corporations, approved by both Republican and Democratic administrations, removed all the legal limits to obtaining profits and promoted the accumulation of increasingly obscene levels of wealth in the hands of a financial oligarchy, to which both parties answer. Big sectors of the US industrial base were destroyed as part of this process, by relocating production in areas with cheap labor, that would allow getting superprofits, and provoking enormous social inequality, to the benefit of the more well-to-do groups in society, one of the structural bases of the historic decline of US capitalism.
And has it hit rock bottom?
It is still very premature to know whether a crash will be avoided. Wall Street has not seen the bankruptcy of an investment bank since the fall of Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1990, and today the interconnections of the sector through the derivatives market have grown beyond all limits. The debt of US financial groups to their counterparts has doubled since the beginning of the 1990's, reaching 112% of the US gross domestic product (GDP). Lehman's bankruptcy means the firm's inability to face up to its current payments, a standstill in its ordinary activity, and its beginning a process of liquidating assets, with unpredictable consequences. We are talking about $600 billion up to June, with considerable exposure to mortgage titlizations of doubtful intrinsic value, the market for which has contracted to the point of being almost nonexistent. The adjustment to market prices ("mark to market"), that could be derived from the process of forced disinvestment from the US investment bank, could be devastating for the rest of its counterparts, unless the authorities continue opening an accounting window to avoid entering a spiral of losses that threaten to sweep away the entire financial system. In the case of AIG, the US insurance company that had broad exposure to the segment of the Credit Default Swaps (CDS), including those of Lehman, the authorities were unwilling to take another risk. The CDS are a type of derivative where it is agreed to pay a certain amount of cash (with a certain frequency) to the seller, in exchange for having protection against default on a bond or loan from an enterprise or country. The sums that AIG owed, in the face of the insolvency of the current credit system, turned AIG into a sure bet for bankruptcy. Overall, the commitments in derivatives are far in excess of the assets of the big banks. Morgan Stanley has an exposure ten times greater than Lehman to the derivatives market, although Lehman's risk, compared to its weakened capital base, seems to have been worse. In turn, 97% of the derivatives in the hands of the commercial banks are held by the five biggest: JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Wachovia and HSBC. Will these be the next victims? Who knows, but the waters are still too unsettled to let down one's guard.
Where is the US and world economy going?
As we say in the beginning, never since the crisis of 1929 has the US economy been so close to the crash, that is, a situation with innumerable bank failures (with a loss of deposits of millions of savers), firms going bankrupt, massive unemployment (that in the 1930's reached 28% in the US), etc. But, although there is not yet a crash to begin this generalized process, it is already possible to imagine an extremely severe recession in the main imperialist countries, with high unemployment. It is possible that we are entering a combination of the feared credit crunch (a drying up of credit) or lack of credit, and a synchronized emergency landing of the world economy. The dizzying collapse of Lehman Brothers and the absorption of Merrill Lynch have removed an enormous quantity of liquidity from the economy, to the extent that securities built up during decades of speculation are evaporating. As Paul Krugman explains in his column in The New York Times with the suggestive title, "Financial Russian Roulette,"... the system has been experiencing postmodern bank runs. These don't look like the old-fashioned version: With few exceptions, we're not talking about mobs of distraught depositors pounding on closed bank doors. Instead, we're talking about frantic phone calls and mouse clicks, as financial players pull credit lines and try to unwind counterparty risk. But the economic effects - a freezing up of credit, a downward spiral in asset values - are the same as those of the great bank runs of the 1930s.... That creates the real possibility that 2008 could be 1931 revisited." (The New York Times, September 15, 2008).
US industrial production contracted by 1% in August (12% in the auto industry), a matter that happened totally unnoticed amidst enormous financial stagnation. But the strong interrelation between finances and the economy will soon make itself felt and could lead to the worst US recession in decades. First, the debt relief crisis pointed out above will reduce the availability of credit in the economy. Second, the fall in the price of housing and of stocks will reduce the so-called "wealth effect" and the resulting consumption. Third, the problems in the credit and stock markets will have a worldwide effect, because of which it will be less and less likely that world economic activity will go on supporting the US via increasing US exports, which, together with the temporary effects of the tax cut, has until now avoided a big fall in the US GDP.
On the other hand, the world economy is deaccelerating. The euro zone and Japan are already in recession. England is rapidly headed there. And the so-called "emerging economies" are beginning to show signs of weakness, if not panic. On Monday (September 15), worried by the effects that the bleak prospect that is closing over the world economy could have on its own economy, as well as the sharp decline in the price of housing in the summer, China reduced interest rates. In Russia, on Wednesday, the regulatory authorities decided to suspend operations in the two main stock markets of the country, to hold back the stock market collapse that was reaching its third consecutive day (on Tuesday, September 16, the two main indices, the RTS and the Micex, tumbled by 11.5% and 17.45%, respectively). Among the stocks hit were those of two of the largest banks in Russia, the Sberbank and the VTB, that today (September 17) depreciated around 20%. This collapse of the Russian markets is tied, on the one hand, to that of Wall Street, that has affected all the emergent markets, the strong geopolitical tension with the US that jumped with the war between Russia and Georgia, and finally, but not less important, to the rapid fall in the price of oil, that has caused worries in an economy supported mainly by its exports of raw materials. Likewise, we must wait to see how the crisis affects the international bonds market of the Russian enterprises, the true source of their financing.
Like in 1930?
So, will a crisis like that of 1930 be repeated? In his September 16 blog, Julio Sevares, from the Argentinean daily Clarín, basing himself on some definite elements, denies it: "In the 1930's the world economy ... was fragmented, there was control of exchange and protectionism.... There was no common international currency, because the pound was weak and most of the time, non-convertible, and the dollar was not widespread, and the USA, the big international creditor, was unwilling to function as a moneylender of last resort; after the crisis, the Federal Reserve responded with monetary restriction, different from what is happening now. It is frequently mentioned that the Roosevelt administration responded with the expansive policy of the New Deal, but it is forgotten that in 1931, the US increased tariffs, worsening the world depression (the Smoot-Hawley Act), and that in 1933, it carried out a brutal devaluation of 30%. And in 1932, Great Britain responded to the USA's protectionism with the Treaty of Ottawa, with preferential tariffs for the Commonwealth. France was engaged in accumulating gold, contributing to illiquidity [an insufficiency of cash], and Germany was in debt and in crisis after the departure of capital, that went to speculate in New York during the upturn. The responses of protectionism and devaluation impeded the recovery, which only arrived with rearmament. The level of commercial and family indebtedness was infinitely less than at present; for that reason, the mechanism of transmission of crisis now is more financial than commercial. Unlike what happened in the thirties, there are state systems with "anti-cyclical" instruments and international institutions of consultation and regulation." But while it is true that the situation is not the same as that of 1930, the "anti-cyclical" mechanisms can affect the tempos and the forms of the crisis, but a scenario of a widespread crash cannot be ruled out. To rule that out, right when capitalism is openly showing its explosive contradictions, would mean having confidence in capitalism and denying that it can open catastrophic situations, not only in the semi-colonial countries, like the Argentinean crash and default of 2001, but even in the main imperialist countries.
Furthermore, if we bear in mind the increasing geopolitical tensions at an international level, the accelerated hegemonic decline of the US and the growing weakness of the dollar, that, strangely, had been rising in its exchange rate since the end of June when US stocks were collapsing, owing to the strong manipulation of US currency by the US Treasury, with the active support of the Chinese central bank and, very probably, of Japan and Europe, an increasingly untenable operation that could accelerate the collapse of the monetary system based on the dollar, all these elements make one expect that the world economy has entered a period of profound commercial wars and inter-imperialist tensions, full of threats.
Millions could lose their jobs: Get ready for the catastrophe
The recession is just in its first stages. Strong contractions of the GDP are to be expected in the coming quarters. According to the last report from the International Labor Organization (ILO), the financial disaster could lead to an increase of five million in the number of unemployed people in the world in 2008.
For the US working class, the current financial collapse means a rapid growth of unemployment, of poverty, of the number of homeless people, and of suffering in society. The government, Wall Street and the presidential candidates of both parties are getting ready to unload the consequences of their own greed and incompentence onto the shoulders of the working class. The crisis is already devastating certain groups of wage earners, especially those who work on Wall Street or in the City in London, who got part of the crumbs from the incredible credit and speculative bubble. In the US, the epicenter of the current crisis, in the face of the catastrophe that capitalism represents for the workers, it is now necessary to raise a program to make the capitalists pay for the crisis, a program that would begin with the suspension of all foreclosures, distribution of the hours of work among all available workers, putting into operation a public works plan to restructure basic industries and repair the obsolete infrastructure of the country, creating millions of jobs financed by taxes on the big fortunes, and basically carrying out a true nationalization of the banking and financial system, but not in the service of the rich, Wall Street, and in the hands of the financial oligarchy; rather, under bank workers' control and serving all workers. This program involves breaking with the Democratic and Republican parties and the adoption of an independent course by the working class.
This program, that is beginning to be ever more necessary for the US, to the extent that the crisis develops in the coming months and years, will be raised for action, for ever broader groups of the working class and the exploited of many countries in the world, since the crisis seems to be spreading like a poisonous cloud throughout the globe.
But basically the current crisis sets forth the need for the workers of the whole world to confront the collaborationist union bureaucracies of each country, that will be accomplices in the plans to unload the crisis onto their backs, and get organized politically not just on a national level, but by rebuilding proletarian internationalism and forging a new revolutionary workers' international. Although today these ideas are very remote from the present consciousness of the workers as a result of years of social fragmentation, of the damages that endure in consciousness and organization because of the neoliberal offensive and the Stalinist experience, the severity and sufferings from the crisis could make many workers, especially their vanguard, again grasp in their hands the tools and the program of revolutionary Marxism, the only one that can lead them to defeat that caste of parasites and exploiters: the bourgeoisie and its governments, that threaten the whole planet with further and bigger catastrophes.
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Who will pay for the capitalist crisis?
"The First World that used to paint us as the Mecca is falling like a bubble," maintained the President [of Argentina, Cristina Kirchner] a few seconds after espousing the economic "model" of the Kirchners and predicting that Argentina is "steady in the middle of a heavy sea." Fantasizing about an economically solid Argentina avoiding the tumultuous crisis that world capitalism is experiencing, is really living in a bubble. The international conditions that favored Argentina's growth cycle are disappearing. The current international capitalist crisis is the biggest since 1929; in spite of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the governments of the imperialist countries to contain the disaster, big banks continue to declare bankruptcy. The firms that are quoted on Wall Street are adding losses of their value of more than $4 billion dollars, the equivalent of 100 times the reserves of the Central Bank of Argentina. The US, Europe, Japan and the main economies are declining. The only horizon that capitalism has to offer is the combination of recession and inflation: more unemployment, more poverty and hunger for millions throughout the world. And this is what, in recent decades, they have been commissioned to present as the only viable system. The new international situation poses confronting the plans with which they will try to unload their losses on the backs of the workers, by overcoming the collaborationist union leaderships and preparing the mobilization of a powerful social and political force capable of imposing a program to make the capitalists pay for the crisis. Faced with the international nature of "the catastrophe that threatens us," it is urgent to rebuild the workers' internationalism and a new revolutionary international that intends to put an end to this system of exploitation and oppression.
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