LENIN'S TOMB

Monday, February 13, 2012

In Athens, Tahrir posted by Richard Seymour

It is estimated that one in six Athenians were protesting today, with the trade union march constituting the largest component of it. The police, notwithstanding their earlier warnings to the government, fulfilled their purpose well, pro-actively disrupting and blockading the union march by engineering conflicts along the main feeder routes. But even with superior organisation, weaponry and a politically organised will to engage in physical combat, they could only do so much. Greeks on Twitter almost uniformly report that people were thronging, out in their thousands, all over the city, not just in Syntagma Square and nearby routes.

The emblems of news coverage - burning buildings, tear gas, molotov cocktails exploding around the feet of riot police - are but the epiphenomena. Today represented another fatal breach in the state's civil society buttress. Once, the bedrock of the state was the petty bourgeoisie in alliance with shipping and banking capital. This was no small thing when the petty bourgeoisie constituted a vast social class. But since the fall of the junta, at least, waged labourers have been the majority, and have been among the more radical working classes in Europe. Now, both the Greek proletariat and petty bourgeoisie have overwhelmingly rejected the programme of austerity, and of the Frankfurt group pushing for its most extreme variant. The state has no popular base, and the apparatus is increasingly tested as it attempts to contain the anti-austerity struggles. The Greek ruling class is wholly dependent on, and subservient to, the EU leadership, the ECB and to a lesser extent the IMF. They rely on the blackmail that the EU's leaders and bankers and bond traders, with their immense material resources, can mobilise - this blackmail, in that supremely mendacious act of mystification, they call by the name of 'the market'.

Today also represents another phase in the disintegration of the bourgeois parties as 15% of MPs refused to vote in favour of the second memorandum outlining the latest wave of austerity measures. The 'national accord' government failed to hold the support of 65 out of 255 of its MPs. Expulsions are under way, to accompany the raft of resignations and defections. The BBC journalist Paul Mason reports a sense of ludicrous resignation among the Greek ruling class. They know very well that sado-monetarism will not save them - default is inevitable - but feel compelled to play the Euro game. Their desperate hope, one can only surmise, is that a prolonged and agonised death offers them a chance of redemption, where the instant death of withdrawal from the Eurozone and the radical reconstitution of national politics that this would entail, offers them no hope at all. If an election were held tomorrow, and one must be held quite soon, the parties currently straddling the parliamentary apparatus would be shown in their true, depleted form. PASOK's risible vote would make Nick Clegg piss himself.

But this is the least of it. What is driving these fractures, this sudden rushing of forces under new banners and away from their traditional banners, is the radicalisation of the workers' struggle. Two general strikes in one week, mass civil unrest, routine protests and riots... and underlying this ferment a series of ongoing industrial actions and occupations, forms of militancy which germinally - only germinally - pose the question of workers' power, of direct democracy. It is what happens on this account, this side of the balance, that will determine how permanent, how salvageable, the Greek bourgeoisie's crisis is.

Labels: austerity, capitalist crisis, eu, greece, neoliberalism, pasok

Friday, February 10, 2012

Scenes from the class struggle in Greece posted by Richard Seymour

This loan shark says, make them pay, beat them until they pay everything, but don't beat them so hard that they can't keep paying. That loan shark says, if you don't make an example of this one, the others won't respect you. Beat them to death. And it is between these two poles that the bankers, ratings agencies, and EU leaders oscillate.

Earlier this week, Greek workers walked out on an impromptu general strike. This was a moment of acute pressure applied to the 'technocratic' regime led by Lucas Papademos, as it struggled to agree austerity measures to satisfy Eurozone leaders, thus qualifying for bailouts that would satisfy the bankers and bond markets. For a moment, it looked as if the government wouldn't reach agreement. Eventually, the deputy minister for labour resigned in protest, and a package was agreed, in which the minimum wage was cut by 22% and a further 150,000 public sector jobs were cut. Achieving this was a fraught affair, but it hardly concluded the matter. Strikes and protests continued. The bond markets didn't relent for a second in their punishing assault on Greek government debt, and lenders instantly conveyed their doubts. More ministers resigned, this time from the extreme right LAOS. The PASOK deputy foreign minister also departed, along with the minister for labour. Papademos has been forced to announce a cabinet re-shuffle. But so far, he and his subordinates have stuck with the EU's austerity demands loyally and doggedly, regardless of the immediate consequences. And you would have thought that the EU's finance ministers would welcome this. You would be wrong.

The Eurozone leaders reacted to the deal, to this complete capitulation signed on behalf of Greece by its unelected government, by dismissing the agreement and demanding more. The actual amount of additional cuts they demanded is fairly piddling compared to the agreed total and, you would think, hardly worth scuppering an agreement for. But the contempt conveyed by this gesture is jaw-dropping. It goes without saying that they don't care if a fifth of Greek workers, and just under half of young Greek workers, are unemployed. Knowing that the government is widely seen as a slave of external powers, European bankers, EU leaders, the ECB, and the IMF, they demanded further prostration from the Greek government and ruling class. Knowing that the struggle against cuts in Greece is now suffused in the popular imagination with the national resistance to Mussolini's invading forces beginning in 1940, they opted to underline the sense of national humiliation. Knowing that the left-of-PASOK parties could win any election called in the near future, they demanded the bourgeois parties add petrol to their own immolation. Knowing that there is a volatile, violent mood, that the tempo of working class struggle is escalating, that strikes will continue over the weekend when the package is put to a vote, that more defections are on their way, and that the government may not survive for long, they smacked it down for following orders. Knowing, aside from anything else, that the police federation is angrily claiming that it is not willing to keep a lid on popular anger, and that the head of the civil servants union is predicting a "social uprising", they've raised their two fingers and said 'bring it on'.

Of course, as I said, this wasn't necessarily a good idea on their terms. The demand for more cuts has been like the proverbial straw, provoking aghast outrage from people who had otherwise signed up to the austerity agenda. The government is falling to pieces. The Torygraph thinks the EU is trying to drive Greece out of the Eurozone. No. The government will probably have enough supporters to force the deal through parliament, with the participation of the two major parties. What the EU leaders stated very clearly when they rebuffed Papademos was that they expected Greece to comply, that in the future its treasury and ministerial budgets would be overseen by the EU, that the sell-off of assets would be accelerated, and that there would be renewed drive to enforce tax collection from people who cannot afford to pay in order to facilitate the ongoing transfer of wealth to the bankers. What's happening, I suspect, is that the EU is keeping the screws turning until the very last minute, until they know that the Greek government will give just about anything to avoid a 'disorderly default'. Yes, they've just made things harder for the government, and the class, that they expect to impose this on Greece. But you have to understand it from their perspective. Greece, so they keep telling anyone who will listen, caused this crisis. It could bring down the Eurozone. They are very unhappy with the Greeks. And so, unsurprisingly, they want the Greek ruling class to suffer a bit for its continued membership of the EU. Meanwhile, Greece's neoliberal 'technocrats' insist on staying the course - yes, things are hard, says the arch-privatizer and former finance minister Stefanos Manos, but we need to do this, and in fact we need to do even more. People just don't get it, but they must be made to. This has been the dispensation in Greece, to greater or lesser degrees, since it belatedly embarked on its neoliberal turn in the 1990s.

Even so, the EU's rulers have probably over-played their hand by acting in such a provocative way. The disintegration of the government, the warning noises from the police, the further shift to the left, and the signs of industrial escalation, are indicative that they may have gone too far. Amid the second general strike in a single week, both called on very short notice and with considerable success, the chances of this government surviving to implement any package it can agree are shrinking fast.

Labels: austerity, capitalist crisis, class struggle, eu, europe, greece, left, militancy, neoliberalism, pasok, socialism, working class

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Tories, Europe and political animals who cannot be domesticated. posted by Richard Seymour

I've been away, so neglected to post this article up:

There were merry guffaws when former British prime minister John Major incautiously referred to three cabinet members as 'bastards'.
This was in 1993, when European economic and monetary union was nearing the completion of its first stage. Right-wing Conservative MPs were then in rebellion over the Maastricht Treaty, which ratified the European Union. The weakness and division of the parliamentary party was obvious. With a majority of only 18 MPs, 22 backbenchers voted against the government.
Party whips were unable to contain the revolt with their usual mix of threats and rewards, because the rebels were confident that Major's leadership would not last long and that it would fall to them to save the Conservative Party. In that, they had the blessing of former leader Margaret Thatcher. Though the right reclaimed the leadership after 1997, they could not win an election. It fell to David Cameron, standing as a socially liberal 'One Nation' Conservative, to take the Tories out of the hard right ghetto.
Fast-forward to 2011, and Cameron's prospects look bleak. The backbench rebellion that took place in October was not over an outstanding Treaty issue. Its source was a parliamentary motion for a referendum over membership of the European Union, pushed by a number of right-wing MPs. These MPs must have known there was no prospect, even if a motion was carried, of Britain being withdrawn from the EU. The Tories' business allies would be the first to scream blue murder if this were on the cards. They can only have intended to hurt their leadership.

Labels: atlanticism, capitalism, eu, europe, petit bourgeoisie, reactionaries, ruling class, tories

Wednesday, November 02, 2011

Would European capital sacrifice Greece to protect profits? posted by Richard Seymour

Answer: what do you think they've been doing? On Monday, the Greek Prime Minister announced that his government would hold a referendum on the latest Euro austerity package. And look at the reaction to this ostensible democratic naivete. Stock markets slide everywhere. The BBC expresses its disbelief: "For whatever reasons, George Papandreou was standing up for democracy." German and French politicians throw tantrums, demanding accountability. Papandreou has been summoned to Cannes to explain himself and get chewed out. PASOK MPs have defected, and the Blairites are calling for Papandreou to resign. The cabinet has backed the PM, but a no confidence motion is being raised in parliament, and the government could easily collapse by the end of the week. Yesterday, Greece's military top brass was sacked and replaced by the PASOK defence minister. The ides of march forestalled? I'll come back to that.

The decision to hold a referendum is a tremendous risk for the government. As Costas Lapavitsas puts it: "Assuming it is not withdrawn amid all the political turmoil afflicting the ruling party, the vote is planned for January, and the issue will presumably be the latest bailout. But the real question will be: "Euro or drachma?"" As Papandreou has put it, the referendum would be on "our European course and participation in the euro". PASOK are talking as if they can win a referendum. Maybe they really believe this, because as yet most Greeks don't see the need to leave the Euro. Polls show that 70% favour staying in. But if the choice is between the Euro and a reasonable standard of living, it's very possible that people will choose their living standards. And even if a referendum happens now, it won't be over the present deal, which isn't going to be on the table. In the most polyannaish situation imaginable, Merkel et al would concede that things have reached a critical impasse, offer a much better deal, and allow Papandreou to put this to the electorate. But that looks very unlikely at the moment. Almost all the 'haircuts' applied to Greece's debts so far have been to the disadvantage of Greek banks, not French and German banks. Substantial further reductions would harm politically dominant class interests which makes it highly unlikely to happen.

One can imagine the fears that pro-Euro politicians would work with: banks collapsing, international capital flight, currency instability, rapid inflation or deflation, house prices slumping, years of painful re-financing, and Greek isolation within Europe. And that's not just scaremongering. Default would pose a set of challenges that can by no means be wished away. But it would allow Greece to stop the massive annual interest payments to bondholders, which Greece's productive base simply can't sustain, and prevent the need for further austerity. A people's default is conceivable. A people's austerity is not. Yet, if the scare tactics were going to work, one would have expected the middle classes to cave already, and that has not happened. The PASOK government has created a situation now where there's a realistic possibility of Greece simply pulling the plug on the Euro.

The consequences for the Euro as a viable currency would be dire. Lapavitsas is probably right that the managers of the ECB and the EU never intended to push Greece to the point that it may end up withdrawing from the euro. Yes, they're turning Greece into a basket case. Yes, they are literally asset-stripping the entire economy, presumably because they don't expect it to be a viable export market any time soon. Yes, it's a death spiral. But, they apparently imagined, that's no reason for anyone to go off in a huff. But French and German banks are probably unwilling to sacrifice a single cent of the debt interest they believe they have coming to them. After all, there isn't much money to be found elsewhere. As Michael Burke points out, the recovery in profit rates facilitated by the attack on labour over the last few years has been accompanied by a slump in corporate investment. There's little for the banks to invest their money in but speculation and debt. The EU leaders have said clearly that the main elements of the current deal are not up for renegotiation.

So, we're back to the ides of march. The replacement of the top generals, despite bland official assurances that it's all regular, suggests that PASOK smelled a coup in the works. There have also been hints that Papandreou may be unwise in going to Cannes, as a lot can happen while he's out of the country. The opposition are feigning outrage, hinting that PASOK themselves are the agents of a coup, but that seems unlikely. Now, the EU may not prefer a military coup, if it was possible to orchestrate the political collapse of the government through a no confidence vote, and facilitate a new right-wing New Democracy-led government. But the structures of the European Union have always been profoundly anti-democratic, and the politics of austerity, pushed most aggressively by the EU, are pushing the institutions of capitalist democracy to their limit.

Consider what Greece is up against. Guglielmo Carchedi, in a superior class analysis of the European Union, argues that the project of economic and monetary union is driven by European capitalist oligarchies, led by German oligarchies, with the aim of creating a new superpower. This would, of course, be an imperialist power, re-asserting European influence after decolonisation. It would allow Europe under united Franco-German leadership, to compete with the US by overcoming the limited scale of national markets and production. As importantly, it is a reaction by capital against the post-war influence of communist and socialist parties in Europe, and an attempt to create a political framework that would systematically reduce the power of labour. The project of European unification has, on these grounds, been successful.

But, a consequence of Carchedi's analysis is that, far from reflecting a community of interests, the EU is necessarily characterised both by class antagonisms (the working class has always made its presence felt, even while it has been excluded from the construction of the EU) and by national or inter-imperialist conflicts (Franco-German competition, and the predatory relationship between core and peripheral economies). The antagonisms at the heart of the EU could blow the whole project apart. The neutral (but intensely ideological) language of the mass media and the political classes treats the suppression and management of those antagonisms (in the interests of the dominant capitalist oligarchies) as a merely technical problem, albeit one complicated by various pressures. This is why they don't understand when politicians invoke 'democracy'. What has democracy got to do with it, they think, when Everyone Knows What Needs To Be Done? We're all in it together, after all. (This ideology was expressed concisely in a tweet I saw this morning, complaining that Greece was 'letting the team down': the hashtag said, '#globalvillage'.) In this view, the exclusion and suppression of working class insurgencies is a duty of 'responsible' politicians serving the general interest.

Greece's PASOK government has tried its best to fulfil its brief as a responsible government. But the severity of the crisis is overwhelming its ability to cope, and its referendum gamble has offended its masters in Europe. There is a continent of surplus value at stake. There is an imperialist super power at stake. There is decades of institutional construction and refinement at stake. There is a whole austerity formula at stake. For that reason, I suspect there'd be corks popping in Cannes if the government fell by one means or another.

Labels: austerity, capitalism, capitalist crisis, coup, dictatorship, eu, eurozone, greece, recession, socialism, working class

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Greece on the brink posted by Richard Seymour

Greek austerity plans "threaten growth", they say. They go on to add that "The economy is forecast to shrink by 5.5 per cent this year, and a further 2.5 per cent in 2012, bringing the total contraction since 2008 to 14 per cent." There is no growth to threaten. That is why Greece is on the brink. That is why the state is dysfunctional, with ministers and international financial inspectors locked out of government offices by striking civil servants. That is why the government fears "complete lawlessness" as the state's capacities disintegrate in several ways. That is why new forms of militancy have emerged, with struggle committees arising to express the popular goals. That is why the whole infrastructure is shut down in major and small ways every day by strikes and protests. That is why the "mother of all strikes" is shutting Athens down.

Of course, the resistance is very exciting, but the level of resistance and upheaval is proportionate to the level of social distress. A constellation of capitalist powers, from the banks to the IMF, EU, European Central Bank, and the government itself, are putting the Greek working class through an incredible trauma. On every possible index, from wages to poverty, unemployment, working conditions and health, they are being put through the grinder. Living standards have taken an unprecedented plunge. And every time the austerity measures produce a renewed contraction, and make it impossible for the debts to be repaid, the banks come back for more, demanding further austerity and more bailouts for financial corporations. They don't care how much suffering it causes. This is mainly because it is an imperative for the major European banks to retain solvency and keep the Euro afloat as a global currency. This is also an imperative for large sectors of European capital, in whose interests the EU has been constructed. If the problem is insoluble on capitalist terms, and if there isn't going to be a renewed wave of capitalist growth, then I think the 1% would sooner take as much as possible and wait in their fortressed enclaves for the deluge to hit the 99%.

It's not just Greece. The reason we have seen a global movement erupt is because capitalism is an international system, and it's doing the same thing to all of us, everywhere. What was done to the Third World in terms of structural adjustment is now being done to the working classes in advanced capitalist societies. What is being done to Greece is being rolled out across Europe. This means that what happens in Greece, as a weak link in the capitalist chain, is of incredible importance to what happens to us. There is no immediate happy ending in sight. Whether the Greek government forces through austerity, or is compelled to withdraw from the Eurozone and default on its debts, things are going to be very difficult. As long as Greece is subordinated to the logic of capitalism, it is faced with a choice of evils.

This is one of the reasons that, while there is a very powerful mass movement, it is not yet united around a clear alternative. The idea of default and withdrawal from the Euro is advanced by many on the Left, who point out that the EU system is exploitative of peripheral countries, and that the most predatory lending and austerity measures are being forced on Greece by European institutions far more than by the IMF. Germany in particular hopes to become, as Costas Lapavitsas puts it in his recent Socialist Register article, "undisputed master of European capitalism" as a result of the crisis. But social democracy across the continent is placing its hopes in a 'good euro'. These formations exert a gravitational pull on other left parties as well as the union bureaucracy. Radicals to the left of social democracy, such as French economist Michael Husson (quoted here), argue that default and withdrawal by itself would not shift the balance of forces in favour of workers, pointing to the example of British capitalism which is outside the Eurozone. While there's an element of truth in this, it ignores the core/periphery relationship, wherein Greek subordination within the EU is a major factor in its austerity drive and in intensifying the exploitation of Greek workers in general. And since it is increasingly unlikely that default will be avoided, it is crucial that there is a leftist pressure to ensure it happens on terms that are relatively beneficial to the working class. Above all, though, there needs to be a response to austerity at the continental level. Lapavitsas argues that "working people in both core and periphery have no stake in the success of the EMU", and that radical left strategy across Europe should be based on this understanding. This would involve different concrete proposals in each country, as the precise forms of exploitation differ in each case. In Germany, the focus should be on raising domestic demand, breaking wage restraint and moving away from an export-led economy. In the peripheral countries, it should be on finding radical ways of dealing with the debt/deficit burden. But the social forces assembled behind this should also operate at a pan-European level: a Europe-wide general strike, coupled with a political campaign for a social Europe involving the left parties - the Portguese Left Bloc, Die Linke, NPA, etc. - is surely the minimum plausible response.

Things are moving very fast, and in such circumstances of organic crisis, as Gramsci reminds us, the troops of many different parties can suddenly pass under the banner of one party that better represents their interests. The left parties have been gaining spectacularly, even if they remain divided, and even if the bureaucratic, parliamentarist and Stalinist elements have arguably held the struggle back in various ways. Yes, the ruling class has its trained cadres, and changes its personnel and programmes much faster than opponents. It is highly adaptible. Just look at the way "corporate leaders say they understand protests". Look at the way New Democracy are trying to capitalise on the government's woes; if social democracy has lost its ability to achieve austerity through bargaining, the ruling class will just turn to the Tories to use the whip instead. But in such times, the ruling class can also lose the capacity for initiative. It can make catastrophic mis-calculations, attack at the wrong moment, lose the loyalty of sections of its repressive apparatus.

The situation is extraordinarily precarious. It's important to remember that even amid the confidence and optimism of militant struggle, social misery of the kind Greece is going through also produces enormous despair. And ruling classes have always been able to benefit from the disruption caused by strikes. A serious setback for the struggle would be toxic, strengthening those who want to blame the strikes for the misery, and even worse those who want to scapegoat and terrorise immigrants, Muslims and the oppressed. At the moment, even the lower middle class are effectively on strike. Tax collectors aren't collecting taxes; and small businesses aren't paying VAT. If it isn't the 99%, it's at least the 80%. (Though, as is reported today, 99% of Greek small businesses and shops are closed for the strike.) Their success now depends entirely on how those forces are placed, politically and strategically.

Labels: austerity, capitalism, class struggle, eu, europe, european left, eurozone, exploitation, greece, neoliberalism, working class

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

The Class Struggle in Greece posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: austerity, capitalism, capitalist crisis, class struggle, eu, greece, left, militancy, ruling class, socialism, strikes

Tuesday, September 06, 2011

Cameron's immigration calamity posted by Richard Seymour

In The Guardian on the immigration figures and Cameron's troubles with the Right:

So why did Cameron make a futile promise that he knew would cost him politically? Partly, he is torn between his business allies, who favour a relaxed approach to immigration, and the lower-middle-class Tory bedrock, who would ideally like to inhabit the sort of all-white chronotope of modern Britain purveyed by Midsomer Murders. Cameron has attempted to manage this by triangulating. Thus, his cap on non-EU migration partially made up for his reneging on the "cast iron" guarantee to hold a referendum on the EU treaty. Similarly, he has made concessions to alarmism about immigration threatening "our way of life". Yet, under pressure from big business, he has relented, even promising last year to relax the cap on non-EU migration. Thus, while tending to give business what it wants, Cameron engages in strategic rhetorical tilts to one or other element in an unstable Tory coalition, in an attempt to prevent the whole from collapsing into fragments as it did over Europe in the 1990s.

Labels: 'british values', capitalism, conservatism, eu, immigration, racism, the meaning of david cameron, tories, working class

Monday, August 29, 2011

Racist vengeance in Libya posted by Richard Seymour

"This is a bad time to be a black man in Libya," reports Alex Thomson in this worrying segment:

There is frightening evidence of racist killings taking place across Libya as elements in the opposition-cum-regime now act on the unfounded rumours that "African" mercenaries acted as Qadhafi's fifth column. As Kim Septunga reports:

Around 30 men lay decomposing in the heat. Many of them had their hands tied behind their back, either with plastic handcuffs or ropes. One had a scarf stuffed into his mouth. Almost all of the victims were black men. Their bodies had been dumped near the scene of two of the fierce battles between rebel and regime forces in Tripoli.

"Come and see. These are blacks, Africans, hired by Gaddafi, mercenaries," shouted Ahmed Bin Sabri, lifting the tent flap to show the body of one dead patient, his grey T-shirt stained dark red with blood, the saline pipe running into his arm black with flies. Why had an injured man receiving treatment been executed? Mr Sabri, more a camp follower than a fighter, shrugged. It was seemingly incomprehensible to him that anything wrong had been done.

There have been lynchings, mass arrests and beatings previously. A painted slogan of the rebels in Misrata read, "the brigade for purging slaves, black skin". But this, taking place as it does in the aftermath of triumph, is a qualitatively distinct phase, and it is a disgrace to the original emancipatory upsurge. I argued previously that the more conservative, bourgeois elements in the opposition had every reason to promote racist scapegoating. Since they had no interest in revolutionising Libyan society, it made perfect sense for them to say that the problem is just Qadhafi and some imported mercenaries, that all of Libya was united against the dictator and would throw him off were it not for the fifth columnists. By mobilising the elements of racism that had thrived under Qadhafi, it displaces social antagonisms that are internal to Libya, reflecting class and other divisions, onto a nationalist plane. No one need think of expropriating the wealth of the capitalist dissident if they're busy usurping the life of the black worker. I also argued that this was one area in which the rebels could even do worse than Qadhafi. If racism was never the dominant motive in the rebellion, it was nonetheless a motive of those dominant in the rebellion. The prisons of Benghazi and elsewhere would not have filled with black and immigrant workers without the approval of the rebel leadership. The coming days will tell whether this barbarism is to last. I suspect the pressure from the new regime's international sponsors will be to come down hard on it, as racist lynch mobs tend to make a fool of anyone calling them - I don't know - "human rights dissidents". But the new regime does have a promise to keep with the EU, viz. upholding the blockade on immigration from Africa to Europe, which will tend to institutionalise racist practises.

Labels: dictatorship, eu, immigration, imperialism, libya, middle east, NATO, qadhafi, racism, revolution

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Greece protests posted by Richard Seymour

A 48 hour general strike has begun in Greece. Protests in the capital are being attacked by police. You can watch live footage of the protests here:

LIVE STREAMING: Γενική Απεργία ενάντια στο... by News247

Labels: austerity, capitalism, capitalist crisis, class struggle, eu, greece, neoliberalism, pasok, protest, trade unions

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Athens: working class resistance breaks Pasok government posted by Richard Seymour

I don't have time, and I'm feeling a little unwell thankyouverymuch, but I can't not mention this. Greece, as you all know, is on the precipice of default. The debt situation is unsustainable, and borrowing with strings attached is accelerating the crisis. But the government is in denial, insistent on sticking to the austerity remedy, ready to force through yet another round of cuts, including 20% wage cuts across the public sector and extensive privatization. It was only when I was speaking on the Eurozone crisis in Amsterdam a while back that the full scale of this expropriation was made apparent to me by a member of the audience. The sale of Greek public assets worth $71bn at fire sale prices, as a condition of the loans from the IMF and European Central Bank, includes not just the sale of public industries, not just the post offices and airports, not just the infrastructure, but acres and acres of prime real estate.

Today, parliament was due to vote on the latest cuts package. A 24 hour general strike was called, and hundreds of thousands of striking workers converged on parliament to cordon it off. Throughout today, the workers, together with the aganaktismenoi (outraged), have been periodically engaged in direct combat with riot police who are trying to disperse the protests (there's a live feed of the protests here, footage here). Signals from comrades, rumours from Twitter, feedback from mailing lists, etc., suggest that this is a significant departure from previous demonstrations in which the police like to finish off a protest by isolating factions of it and meting out a punishment beating. Instead, thousands of riot cops with batons, tear gas and water cannons have been fighting with the mainstream of the protest in Syntagma Square in an effort to break it up. And the protesters have held their ground. This could be seen as analogous to the way in which the Papandreou government has desperately sought to time and pitch their cuts and sell-offs to isolate specific sectors of resistance and beat them one by one - yet the scale of the cuts has necessarily produced a generalised response that has a real chance of defeating the government.

Notably, it is just workers who are involved in the struggle against the cuts. Not so long ago, an incoming PASOK government was able to carry the benefit of the doubt as it appealed to voters to support its cuts package. It could do so far more plausibly than their right-wing New Democracy predecessors. As a consequence, told that the alternative to cuts was bankruptcy, a majority acquiesced for a brief time in the cuts. In seemingly no time at all, the benefit of the doubt was frittered away, and now there is an extraordinarily broad coalition against the cuts, with some 80% opposing more austerity. Even small business owners are joining in over the near doubling of VAT. I don't know what implications this has for the Greek power bloc, which is probably extremely narrow, but the divisions at the level of the state suggest that there's a crisis of hegemony within the bloc, as well as over society as a whole. Mason describes the Greek state losing the functions of a state.

This doesn't necessarily have to benefit the left. The pitch of struggle is self-consciously militant, inspired by the Egyptian revolution and its shockwaves. The aim today would presumably be for the government to lose the vote and fall. But the government may not lose the vote, or if it does, the ruling class and the EU and IMF may find other means to force through austerity. The New Democracy would probably win any election in the short run, and - despite their opportunistic opposition - would attempt to do much the same. And if the working class response is not equal to the challenge, if the class begins to retreat, if repression gets the better of them, then there are some very dark possibilities. The Nazis are already mobilising in armed gangs, taking advantage of the despair and the rising street crime, and scapegoating immigrants. In fact, one of the features of this crisis is the asynchronicity between ideological, industrial and parliamentary effects. It is quite likely that the right will be able to benefit electorally from anti-austerity struggles in the short term, particularly where social democratic parties are the ones imposing austerity. That's certainly true of both Greece and Spain.

Nonetheless, the Greek struggle should be seen as part of a rising tide of class struggles globally, signposted by a series of mass strikes in Europe last year, the Middle East revolutions this year, and Spain's Tahrir moment. And their chances of success are increased by their tendency to generalise rather than remain sectional responses. This is why the UK government is threatening unions, warning them off coordinated strike action, especially after civil servants voted for strikes. The Greek example should tell us a lot. Greece is much further down the road of austerity than Britain is, and has a much more vibrant tradition of militancy. The entrenched, utterly inflexible position of the ruling class, backed of course by the US and EU ruling classes, shows the scale of mobilisation that is necessary to shift them, never mind defeat them. Yet, it may in the end also show how brittle the system is.

ps: As I write, there are rumours that Papandreou has offered to resign, and it's become clear that the administration can't govern. It is reported that Pasok is now in power-sharing talks with the New Democracy to form a grand cutters' coalition. If this is an example of Caesarism, then it is of a deeply reactionary kind that is likely to become more common in the present conjuncture. This would obviously raise the stakes for workers resistance. The ruling class would presumably rally behind any such coalition, determined to show its unity, and embark on a new round of offensives - politically, ideologically, and industrially. The media will reinforce again and again that there is no alternative; the state and the employers will go after the unions and left parties that back militancy, and parliamentarians will argue - as they have in the past - that strikes undermine the Greek economy and make the crisis worse. Pasok will bring pressure to bear within the labour movement, and the Communists (KKE) will be subject to a new round of red-baiting due to their influence in the unions. This makes it all the more important that none of the momentum that the working class has built up is squandered. But it also raises the obvious questions of political organisation. If traditional left-reformism leads to this cul de sac, then it's a certainty that alternative modes of organising the working class and its alliances will be hotly debated in the coming months. I doubt a single revolutionary party is yet in a position to offer that alternative, but the radical left and anticapitalist alliances such as ANT.AR.SY.A - which quadrupled its vote in the last regional election - can involve revolutionaries in productive relations with other political forces while sharply posing alternatives to the mainstream parties within the working class movement.

Labels: austerity, capitalism, capitalist crisis, class struggle, eu, greece, imf, imperialism, resistance, working class

Saturday, February 05, 2011

Mubarak resigns from NDP posted by Richard Seymour

So, the NDP was, like Ben Ali's ruling party, the RCD, until recently an affiliate of the Socialist International. Uh huh. But now it's been expelled. More significantly, Mubarak and the leaders of the NDP have just stepped down. Why? Does this mean Mubarak is on the way out? Well:

Robert Springborg, professor of national security affairs at the US Naval Postgraduate School, said the army was manipulating the situation by dragging out a resolution of the crisis.
He said the army's aim was to focus the anger of the uprising against Mubarak rather than the military.
It's political jujitsu on the part of the military to get the crowd worked up and focused on Mubarak and then he will be offered as a sacrifice in some way. And in the meantime the military is seen as the saviours of the nation.
The military will engineer a succession. The west – the US and EU – are working to that end.
We are working closely with the military … to ensure a continuation of a dominant role of the military in the society, the polity and the economy."

Update: just as soon as I'd posted this, it emerged that Arab television broadcasts did not confirm Mubarak's resignation as head of the NDP. The story may be disinformation.

Labels: dictatorship, egypt, eu, middle east, mubarak, revolution, US imperialism

Friday, January 28, 2011

Europe, immigration and the Right. posted by Richard Seymour

For interesting reasons, some parts of the Left, who are otherwise consistently anti-racist, are amenable to the argument that migration drives down wages and, perhaps, places a burden on welfare systems and the public sector. This is an argument that many in the Labour establishment, and its supporters in the media such as Polly Toynbee, have been trying to popularise. It is accepted by Ed Miliband, and Ed Balls sank his leadership campaign early on with a stance on immigration that allowed the Tory leader to characterise him as Labour's Alf Garnett. The fact that Labour is behind many of these arguments means that they become much more widely accepted than they would among working class communities.

While most leftists would not accept the argument put out by some that migrant workers are today's equivalents of industrial scabs, helping the bosses break the 'indigenous' working class, there is a seemingly powerful motivation for (usually white) leftists to accept parts of the right-wing orthodoxy about immigration. Unfortunately, what this does is externalise a problem that is constitutive to capitalism: that being the necessity for a reserve army of labour*, and enforced competition for resources among workers**. It misreads symptoms of neoliberal capitalism as effects of migration. As it is particularly bound up in the British context with EU expansion, and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of workers from A8 and A2 countries, it also involves a particular mis-reading of the EU itself, which has to be understood as part of the global regionalisation of capitalism which is also evident in North America and south-east Asia, for example. That regionalisation, its institutionalisation (the EU Treaty), securitisation ('Fortress Europe') and militarisation (through NATO expansion and various attempts at building an EU defence force to suitably manage crises like that in the former Yugoslavia), has been the basis for all of the elegiac tributes and militant screeds concerning Europe and its Enlightened legacy.

What has happened in the UK is that those frequently at the margins of the capitalist system have made for timely scapegoats for acute crises in employment and local services that in fact express chronic stresses. Though the evidence is overwhelming that migrant workers bring added growth, added value and thus greater tax receipts to any local economy, there have been attempts by politicians, locally and nationally, to blame an increase in the local migrant worker population for failures in service delivery.

In fact, the added demand on local services that is blamed on immigration has been vastly over-stated. A combination of legislative hurdles and reluctance to claim means that in the case of housing and benefits, most migrant workers don't claim. At the height of migration from A8 countries in 2006, less than 1% of social housing lettings went to those migrant workers - this belies the claims that immigrants are being placed at the front of the queue for such services. To the extent that the demand for public goods did increase in certain areas, the government had more than enough opportunity to anticipate what was coming and then adjust for the difference. The evidence shows that the increase in funds resulting from migration was more than sufficient to meet the challenge. The vast majority of immigrants, over 80%, are of the ages 18-35. They do not tend to bring dependents, and they offset problems posed by the ageing of the UK population. Were they to not here, the resources available for public services would be less, or national insurance contributions or other taxes would have to rise. Where there were acute problems, whether there was local immigration or not, this was the result of systemic under-funding produced by the endemic problems of capital accumulation and the reluctance of social democracy to add to the tax burden. The attempt to square that circle with the use of PFIs only stored up further fiscal problems.

By some, usually right-wing populist, accounts, it would seem that the EU just is a scheme to reduce labour costs by allowing unimpeded free migration and thus increasing the demand for jobs. But there are good reasons why migration does not simply increase the reserve army of labour. First of all, as I've argued before, migration can increase total employment in a country because the lower costs of reproducing labour mean it is feasible for an employer to open up a job that would otherwise not be available, and also because the increase in growth tends to result in an increase in investment. Secondly, migration in the EU does not flow in one direction. What happens is that people move where the jobs are, where their skills are most needed, and thus the employment of available labour is maximised within the constraints of efficient capital accumulation.

This is the whole point: the EU is a regionalised accumulation system, and the effect of immigration within it will not be greatly different from that of migration between Glasgow and Sunderland, which no one finds objectionable. The fact this spatial re-organisation of capitalism took place under a neoliberal regime where the aim was to reduce the bargaining power of labour, hold down public expenditures (and thus corporate taxation) and increase the rate of profit, means that there will be attempts to organise the system in such a way as to weaken labour. But there is not much evidence for any profound distributive effects of migration. Such effects as do exist are sectoral, not significant, offset by countervailing effects elsewhere, and contingent on a host of other factors such as the strength of trade unions in an industry and the enforcement of regulations like minimum wage laws. (See here, here, here and here). The growth effect, however, is significant, and all workers benefit from that. In fact, the erection of barriers to the movement of labour is the most effective way to undermine those advantages.

The blaming of immigrants, usually accompanied by scaremongering about there being too many people, is precisely a way of racialising a social problem produced by capitalism. This goes much deeper than the distribution of resources, and the rising level of unemployment required to make capitalism efficient. Rather, these are attributes partially of the hollowing out of parliamentary democracy, the whittling away of the franchise and of the ability of the working class to impose some of its interests on capital. Neoliberal capitalism was designed to exclude certain political options, to exclude much of the working class from the electoral system, and coopt its leadership on new, subordinate terms. What is happening is that this disenfranchisement is culturalised, expressed as the cultural and identitarian emasculation of this spectral 'white working class'. This gives the Right the opportunity to rephrase its political slogans. Its hostility to the EU is based on its preference for a national capitalism hitched to US-led 'hyper-globalisation' (Andrew Gamble's phrase) which, if anything, entails an even weaker position for labour. But it can articulate its demands in terms of democracy (usually interpreted as 'sovereignty') because the EU, while it isn't the cause of Britain's democratic nadir, is a profoundly undemocratic set of institutions. It can appear to offer something to the working class because while the EU did not produce high unemployment and low public spending, it has supported and bolstered this particular capitalist praxis.

The attacks on immigrants by those evincing concern for the working class, and often 'the white working class', are themselves an attack on the working class and the Left. It is tried and tested, effective right-wing political mobilisation. People on the Left, even the centre-left orbiting Labour, should not be tempted to reproduce the assumptions of the Right in this argument, because if they do they will lose. The most effective response is to mobilise within the working class, particularly the organised working class, to defend immigrants and combat the racism which aims at their marginalisation and subjection.

*This is variously called the 'natural rate of unemployment' (Milton Friedman), the 'non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment', or 'structural unemployment'.
**This is called relative scarcity.

Labels: capitalist crisis, eu, europe, immigration, multiculturalism, neoliberalism, racism, reactionaries, socialism, white working class, working class

Monday, October 18, 2010

French struggle kicks off posted by Richard Seymour

I know some of you have been asking me to do a write up of the extraordinary resistance sweeping France. The sort of vengeful fury engulfing Sarkozy's crumbling administration makes us feel hopeful, and, a little bit jealous. We want to pore over the details, extract lessons, enjoy the prospect of a major power in the EU failing to impose its austerity, and measure the reality against the republic of French stereotypes in our minds - those demmed revolutionaries! Well, I can't do it. Or not just yet anyway. Until I can and do, here's John Mullen explaining things:

Strikes and demonstrations are rocking France as union federations join with students and left-wing activists for mass protests against a planned "reform" of the country' pension system championed by President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Last week saw the two more national days of action honored by all the country's main unions. On one of the days, October 12, more than 3 million joined a one-day general strike call. However, some groups of workers are continuing their actions between days of action, deciding day by day whether they will keep striking.

The strikes are hitting hard across the whole economy, but the biggest threat right now are the oil workers, one of the best-paid section of the French working class, whose actions at port facilities and the country's 12 refineries are causing shortages of gas and diesel fuel. Charles de Gaulle International Airport will run out of fuel early this week if the strike keeps up, grounding planes at the country's main airport...

While we're on the subject of resistance, here's Panos Garganos on the Greek insurgency, from the latest ISJ.

Labels: austerity, capitalism, capitalist crisis, cuts, eu, france, greece, neoliberalism, recession, socialism, spending cuts