The application by some governments of quantitative easing (the printing of more money) in response to both the Global Financial Crisis and the economic crisis unleashed by the COVID Pandemic has helped to raise interest in the heterodox economics approach of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as the appropriate approach economic development in countries such as Australia. While there are definitely important insights that can be drawn from MMT to inform appropriate budgetary responses, particularly in times of economic crisis, advocates of MMT tend to oversimplify the budgetary problems facing sovereign states during crisis, particularly those states which unlike Australia are not imperialist powers, even if a relatively weak one, and are instead in a dependent position within the global economy, but more importantly, mistakes where the real political struggle around budget priorities exist within the context of neoliberal politics.
MMT is a heterodox macroeconomic approach that focuses on the role of the government in the creation of money/currency and how, with the ending of the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1971 and the end of the convertibility of US dollars to gold, governments gained greater freedom in their monetary policy due to not being bound by the need to be able to honour their currency with gold.
Central to MMT is the idea that no government which is a sovereign issuer of its own currency can ever go bankrupt as they are able to create more money, and that doing so is preferable to a government borrowing money as it avoids the need to pay interest on such a debt. Some advocates of MMT argue that this glimpse of the true nature of the economy fundamentally unravels the core premise of neoliberal austerity which has seen the deprioritisation of spending public services across the globe.
However, the reason we have seen aggressive attempts globally to wind back social spending is not that the neoliberals genuinely believe there just isn’t enough money to spend on public services. Instead, neoliberal austerity is driven by a desire to transfer as much of the wealth being produced into the hands of capitalists, a process that is driving unprecedented levels of wealth concentration. Everything else is simply verbiage to prettify and obfuscate this drive to boost and concentrate profits. In this context, the answer of “printing more money” is still the question of “how do you maintain a sufficient level of profit growth to maintain the capitalist system?”. Shifting this priority will take a struggle against capital and its governments, and all too often MMT tends to push its advocates away from this conclusion into a tangential argument about whether there is genuinely a limit to the money supply.
By shifting the terms of debate to the question of “is there a limit to money”, advocates accept what are really false arguments of capital and their representatives in government as having been given in good faith. While the neoliberal drive has relied heavily on the appearance of a lack of alternative choices, Thatcher’s insistence that “There is No Alternative” being one of the greatest examples, the reality is that in the midst of arguing for the need for surplus budgets, most advanced capitalist countries have happily racked up deficits but at the same time they have been shifting spending priorities, so simply arguing “there are no limits to the spending” is unlikely to address the reality that these governments want to prioritise spending on subsidising business profits rather than on social spending.
This reality can be seen in the examples which MMT advocates point to as proving their point. For many MMTers the increase in government spending, as if from nowhere, in response to the COVID pandemic and in response to the Global Financial Crisis of the late 2000s, is evidence of the truth and power of MMT as a solution. Whilst this does show that governments can spend more, we need to also recognise that spending has also primarily been focused not on meeting the needs of the general population but on maintaining company profits and avoiding mass defaults - indeed the US government’s bailout of US automakers was tied to workers accepting cuts in their working conditions. Moreover, this spending has not been sustained, not because it “cannot be”, instead it has been intentionally wound back and the previous rounds of spending used as a justification of future austerity. This is not to say that the creation of money cannot be a solution to government finances. However, it does highlight that it is necessary to see the questions of how much money the state spends and on what as being primarily political.
Related to this problem is a tendency of MMT advocates to dismiss the question of taxing the rich as not important, as the government can meet its budgetary needs via money creation, and thus from an MMT perspective taxation only really plays a role in the currency circulation which can include, if a government so chooses, wealth redistribution via social spending. There are a number of problems with these positions. It tends to detach money from the real economy and part of the reason we are seeing unprecedented levels of market capitalisation and accompanying individual concentrations of wealth, is that money is not circulating and is instead being drawn from the real economy into speculation in the stock market. More importantly, there is a tendency to reduce the question challenging the concentration of wealth to an at best secondary question - when in reality it should be the primary one of moving to a point of contestation as to who should control the means of production and not just the means of creating money. This problem is highlighted by John Christensen and Nicholas Shaxson regarding how to respond to the massive tax avoidance highlighted in the Panama Papers. “To illustrate this clash, take the words of UK Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell during the Panama Papers tax haven scandal that “every pound avoided in tax by the super-rich is a pound desperately needed by our National Health Service, our schools and our caring services.” We’d strongly agree with this statement — though Bill Mitchell, a prominent MMT economist, attacked it as a “dangerous and misguided narrative for progressives to engage in,” because it “fuels damaging myths” about how the tax and spending system works”.
An easy and ready dismissal of MMT is that its application would simply result in a repetition of the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic in the early 1920s or Zimbabwe in the late 2000s. However, as Mitchell and Fazi point out there were other factors at play here that triggered hyperinflation most notably disruptions in the supply of goods, not simply the creation of additional money, moreover, they point the example of the creation of additional currency during in Germany between 1933 and 1937, which enabled the Nazi government to rebuild the German economy.
The MMT discussion of the potential risk of inflation, which partly relies on the accurate assertion that creating more money will be no more inflationary than any other stimulus effort such as borrowing more money. They tend to treat the impact of increased money supply in the economy as not just felt via inflationary pressures within a national economy - because most economies are in trade relationships with other economies, changes in volume on money can impact on exchange rates which in turn impacts on trade in those goods being sold internationally will experience a reduction in price on international markets, whilst imported goods will cost more. This can be beneficial to both exporters and manufacturers reliant primarily or exclusively on internal markets - as with the falling value of the currency both become more competitive - if it goes too far it can cause considerable dislocation in the internal economy of a country.
Moreover, if we accept that hyperinflation is a potential problem, even if not primarily driven by the creation of money, then we have to also recognise that MMT’s focus on money as being the solution to modern problems of the economy - particularly where shortages are caused not by a lack of money, but a lack of goods - which we have begun to see during the COVID pandemic due to dramatic shifts in consumption patterns of certain goods, most notably personal protective equipment and vaccines, and as a result of disruption in manufacturing and supply chains due to the virus and accidents such as the blocking of the Suez Canal in March by the Ever Given.
In these circumstances simply creating more money or giving more money to people will not solve these supply issues, indeed it will potentially exacerbate the problems and give rise to Inflation at least in part of, if not the whole of the economy.
While MMT focuses on the ability of governments to simply create money in order to overcome problems with either needing to stimulate the economy or to enable necessary and vital government programmes. These are not the only challenges facing the global economy. Moreover, by articulating an almost evangelical view of having unlocked the secrets of the economy its advocates tend to forget that primarily the issue of spending and consumption in national and international economies are not primarily driven by economics, but instead by politics - with economics being a justifier for political positions.
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Global wealth inequality is reaching historic highs. Inequalities have been both highlighted and exacerbated by the current crisis. However, while the world’s super-rich are obscenely wealthy, most discourse around this issue fundamentally misunderstands and misrepresents the nature of much of this wealth – which, in turn, can distort our view of what addressing this inequality should look like.
Deindusrialisation and financialisation
As the global, post-war long boom came to an end in the late 1960s and early 1970s, capital began to intensify a range of processes that had been at play in the economies of the advanced capitalist countries. Most notable of these was the process of deindustrialisation, as capital shifted manufacturing from high-wage, heavily organised factories in the metropolitan centres of the Global North to the periphery – initially of the imperialist countries themselves, and then to former colonies and neo-colonies of the Global South.
This shift temporarily boosted profits and provided spaces for these profits to be reinvested, but this was possible only up to a point (though repeatedly, capital shifted from one low-wage country to the next in response to worker organisation and resistance). Capital still faced the problem of what to do with the new profits being generated, and to maintain profit growth the capitalist class sought desperately to find new areas to invest in.
While new technologies have developed and state-owned industries have been pried open through privatisation, the main source for investment and reinvestment of profits was in the financial markets, where new and more bespoke products, with ever more rapid exchanges and turnovers, were developed as mechanisms through which to make money. This process of shifting investment and money out of the real economy and into financial markets is known as financialisation.
The 60 stock exchanges around the world currently have a total capital value of $69 trillion. The growth in financial markets over the 45 years can be seen in the S&P 500 index, which tracks the value of the top 500 stocks and equities on the US New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ and Cboe BZX Exchange.
The S&P 500 had an average closing price of 21.0 points in 1930. This rose to 86.18 in 1975, and to 3,050.00 in 2020. Similarly, the Irish Overall Index, which has measured the value of stocks on the Irish Stock Exchange since 1989, has grown from a closing price of 1,586 in 1989 to 6,464 on 3 August 2020.
Stock market detached from economic performance
This growth in the value of capitalisation on a stock exchange, while significant, does not necessarily reflect the same level of growth in the real-world performance of the underlying companies and equities. These two factors can be significantly out of step with each other, resulting in financial assets being either significantly over or undervalued.
When they are overvalued, which can occur for a range of reasons, a bubble can form. When the two values come back together, considerable losses, both notional and real, can occur (up until an individual sells their assets all gains and losses are purely notional).
So what does this mean for the wealth of people like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg? These individuals are undoubtedly obscenely wealthy, and they have significant political power based on their wealth and control of large companies that play a central role in the global economy.
However, as impressive as it can sound to say that Bezos is worth $190.6 billion, or that his wealth has increased by $74bn this year, much of this wealth is simply not real. These statements are supposed to sound impressive to build on the myth of these great capitalists ‘creating wealth’.
If we were to seize all of Bezos’s wealth and turn it over to the public good we would not gain $190.6bn. Instead, we would have a – not insubstantial, but far smaller – amount of money, and have a percentage share of a company with an annual revenue of $280.52bn and net profits of $11.588bn, profits that would be sharply reduced as we dismantled Amazon’s super-exploitative employment practices and its parasitic relationship to other businesses.
The reality is that the bulk of the growth in the “value” of Amazon – which has seen its share price increase to a high this year of $3,312.49 compared to an average price of $1,789.19 in 2019 – has not been driven by a significant increase in the performance of the company, but rather by a perception of Amazon and other similar companies as a safe bet by some investors, and by hedge funds looking to make money from speculation based on this perception.
The Financial Timesreported on 20 August that we have entered a new renaissance for hedge funds using a macro investment strategy (strategies based on assessment of shifts in geopolitical and macroeconomic trends in countries), saying: “The main fund at Brevan Howard, the firm headed by billionaire Alan Howard, was up over 21 per cent in the first half of 2020; Paul Tudor Jones’s flagship fund at Tudor Investment Corporation has gained 8 per cent through July; and Chris Rokos’s Rokos Capital Management has climbed 24 per cent through to the end of July, according to investor documents and people familiar with the matter.”
It continued: “Caxton Associates has returned 31 per cent this year, according to investors, while a fund run by the firm’s chief executive Andrew Law is up 42 per cent. Meanwhile, Louis Bacon’s Moore Capital, which last year decided to eject the remaining external investors from its flagship funds after a long barren stretch, notched up a 25 per cent gain in seven months through July.”
None of this is to say that we should not aim to nationalise large companies, and put them to the use of meeting the needs of people. But we need to be aware that the amount of real value locked up in these companies is overstated, and has much more to do with stroking the egos of the rich and reinforcing ruling-class myths than it does with the actual potential social good these companies could perform.
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Top image: Jeff Bezos. Photo by Michael Prince/Forbes.
In the last week, news has leaked regarding companies in receipt of JobKeeper wage subsidies either paying their executives large bonuses or paying out dividends to shareholders. This development has led to claims that these companies are rorting JobKeeper. However, while these payments are clearly immoral, far from being a rorting of JobKeeper, they are entirely consistent in the government’s intent of JobKeeper as primarily a subsidy to business.
When JobKeeper was legislated I described it as “for companies still employing people in work, the subsidy is more a subsidy to their profits rather than a wages subsidy”. This was because rather than provide a wage subsidy from which workers could build their income towards their pre-COVID level if work was available, the subsidy established an amount of payment which eliminated the need for a business to pay its workers wages for their work until they had performed the equivalent amount of work as the subsidy. This had the effect of both ensuring that hundreds of thousands of workers experienced a significant decline in their income whilst companies and organisations could redirect revenue that would normally have gone to covering wages to other things including paying executive bonuses and dividends to shareholders.
So while people are right to be angry at companies prioritising bonuses and dividends, we need to be clear - they aren’t “rorting” JobKeeper, they are using it precisely how it was designed to be used. The actions of these companies demonstrate the pressing need for a genuine wage subsidy scheme that guarantees the incomes of all workers regardless of contract type or residency status.
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Radical Left movements across the globe face multiple challenges that place human survival at stake. At the same time, our movements are currently not strong enough to effectively challenge capitalism and the determination of the capitalist class and their representatives to prioritise profits over human life and survival of the planet.
This poses the question of how we can start to cohere and build the capacity of the popular classes and oppressed people to unite and struggle for a better world. One possible source of inspiration for strengthening the movement may be the Transitional Programme, which was written by Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky in 1938 as part of a process to cohere and regroup consistently revolutionary forces.
What is the transitional programme?
The Transitional Programme, or The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, was the key programmatic document of the Fourth International at its founding in 1938. The programme was drafted by Trotsky with the aim of bridging the historic divide between the revolutionary movement’s minimum programmes (demands raised within the movement, and particularly in parliamentary campaigns, regarding the reform of capitalism) and maximum programmes (the actions that would be taken upon the seizure of power by the working class).
The aim was to build into the minimum programme demands that would more sharply challenge the power of capital, and demonstrate to working people the limitations of democracy under capitalism while building their confidence in achieving something more – these were the “transitional demands”.
The context of the transitional programme
The transitional programme was written in late 1930s, a period during which the labour movement was surging in many countries, but had also suffered heavy defeats at the hands of fascism (Germany, Italy) or was involved in revolutionary struggles that would result in defeat at the hands of fascism (Spain).
It was also expected that the world was heading to a new inter-imperialist war that would be aimed at the overthrow of “actually existing socialism” in the Soviet Union.
Within this context, the tiny Trotskyist movement had been going through an extended period of seeking to unite and build a new revolutionary and anti-Stalinist pole within the workers movement, including the semi-mass centrist parties Workers Party of Marxist University (Spain), the Independent Labour Party (Britain), and the Revolutionary Socialist Party (Netherlands), which involved or were founded by left-oppositionists. This effort ultimately failed with only the Revolutionary Socialist Party participating.
In this context, the programme was aimed at providing an ideological weapon with which the small Trotskyist forces in the global workers movement could agitate around and build both influence within the movement and support for the programme, either in whole or in part.
The Transitional Programme is made up of three distinct types of demands. These are:
immediate demands, primarily around economic issues;
democratic demands around expanding and strengthening democratic rights; and
transitional demands aimed at fundamentally challenging the power and authority of capital itself.
It is important to remember that the Transitional Programme was not intended as a final and finished document; it was instead intended as a framework for revolutionary organisations to develop their responses to known challenges, but also new challenges to the development and dynamics of the class struggle. So while it is possible to simply deploy an existing demand from the programme in response to the struggle of today, it is also just as viable to develop new responses to any challenges that emerge.
Immediate demands
Immediate demands are probably the simplest and easiest demands to understand and develop. They are aimed at responding to the immediate struggles of the day and are essentially based on the target of the demand either stopping doing something, or begin doing something.
Examples would be calls for a doubling of unemployment benefits or an increase in funding to higher education. A problem with immediate demands is that, once achieved, they can and will be undermined by capital and the state.
Democratic demands
Democratic demands seek to either defend or expand existing democratic rights or establish new ones. Examples of democratic demands include demands around expanding the franchise or citizenship, expanding rights and protections such the demand for marriage equality or anti-discrimination legislation, or expansion of community control over their own lives such as minority language rights or establishment of the right to recall elected representatives.
Again, these advances are always subject to being rolled back or subverted by capital and the state, such as the weakening and defanging of environmental protections that has transformed many such agencies into bodies that effectively authorise polluting the environment, rather than protecting the environment from pollution.
Transitional demands
Transitional demands go much further than either immediate or democratic demands. They don’t simply seek to address something happening right now but seek to fundamentally undermine the power of both capital and the state and shift power into the hands of working people. While still capable of being subverted (because everything is) they are far more robust than the other two types of demands.
Examples of transitional demands include:
Escalator clauses, through which, in addition to any negotiated pay rise, workers receive automatic pay rises in response to inflation. This acts to not only increase wages, but to protect wage gains from inflation, ensuring wage growth not just in absolute but relative terms;
Sliding hour and wages scales. This demand seeks to protect both jobs and wages of workers, particularly during periods of technological change, by responding to any attempt to shed jobs by requiring working hours for workers to be reduced instead of jobs being cut, and the hourly pay increased in order to maintain weekly wages. The demand means that the benefit of technology improvement flows onto working people in the form of reduced working hours rather than simply boosting profits and resulting in increased unemployment.
The nature of the transitional demand
A key debate that has existed around the transitional demand is (1) whether it is achievable under capitalism, or (2) whether it is simply a document for a transition period.
On the second point, this is clearly a misunderstanding of the role of the programme. While it was developed in a period where the Trotskyist movement expected and predicted an expansion of the class struggle in which the question of the transition to socialism would be posed, it was not the situation that they immediately faced, and their forces were not such that they would be in a position to be applying their programme.
Moreover, it does not make sense for many of the demands within the programme to be raised in periods of transition – whether this is a situation of dual power (where there are both capitalist and working-class organs of power existing side by side) or in a workers’ state (the working class would not need to be making demands in this situation, the organs of workers power would just act). Instead, it was an agitational document aimed at engaging workers in the here and now.
With regard to the first point, it is not knowable what capital, and its representatives in government, will concede, at least in the short-term, in the hope of maintaining control and power with the aim of subverting any concessions as the movement ebbs and recedes. The bigger and more conscious the movement, the more desperate capital will be to offer concessions in the hope of returning to a period of peace.
Moreover, individual transitional demands have been achieved and won by the labour movement. For example, cost-of-living allowances, which provide wage increases to workers in response to inflation, have been a feature of a significant number of US union contracts since the 1950s. This is a consequence of US unions, most notably the United Auto Workers, adopting the escalator clause as part of their bargaining demands as a consequence of the influence of Trotskyist-led locals pushing these demands in the late 1940s.
Transitional demands for today
While a modern-day transitional programme would feature a lot of the original demands, it does need updating in order to meet the challenges of today – particularly in relation to the challenges around climate change, indigenous rights and anti-racism struggles, globalisation and the #MeToo movement.
Such transitional demands could include, but should not be limited to:
Demands focused on expropriation and bringing major polluters under workers control to fund just transitions to environmentally sustainable zero-carbon economies;
Requirements that any company operating in multiple counties must abide by environmental, labour and anti-discrimination legislation not only in its ‘home’ country but in all the countries it operates in, with communities in other countries able to bring suits under these laws;
The defunding and disarming of police, with these services brought under the control of local communities of colour;
The criminalisation of efforts of officials holding power to discourage or undermine the prosecution of sexual assault allegations;
Free movement of all working people with the right to a liveable income for all working-class people, whether in employment or not;
Taxation on speculative financial transactions;
A four-day work week with no loss in pay (with commensurate reduction in working hours for workers who do not work full-time);
No bailouts or government contracts for companies based in tax havens;
Any government-funded bailouts must be tied to commensurate state equity in the firm, with the establishment of mechanisms for industrial democracy in the firms;
A ban on redundancies in profitable companies, or firms in receipt of bailout money;
Free paid training for workers who are in industries that are affected by the transition to a carbon-free economy.
The transitional programme and its associated demands is not a magical solution. The work of the Left will not be, and is not, completed by raising a particular demand, no matter how brilliant its formulation. The purpose of demands is to create mechanisms in which potential solutions to the problems confronting working people can be posed to them – with the aim of winning people to that solution, but also to the need for political action to achieve it.
By drawing people into action in support of concrete demands we can build the confidence and organisational capacity of the class to take action in their own interest and the social power of all working people. And by doing this, we can build a movement that is sufficiently confident and powerful to meet the existential challenges we are faced with.
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Triumphalist comments about the end of capitalism or neoliberalism abounded in the aftermath of the global financial crisis in 2008, just as there are many people today who believe that the current crisis is the end of neoliberalism or capitalism.
Unfortunately, neoliberalism and – more importantly – the capitalist system will not just end of their own accord. Both, while prone to crisis, are extremely resilient, and are adept at turning their own crises into a rationale for deepening rather than reversing their dynamic.
It is not inevitable that the current crisis will see a strengthening of capitalism and its dominant ideological frame – they can both be defeated, but their defeat will not just happen. It will be the result of conscious resistance, not happenstance or luck.
Capitalism is prone to crisis. This tendency towards crisis, particularly in its late monopoly stage, is due to the ripening of a number of contradictions inherent to capitalism. However, capitalism is resilient as a system and has demonstrated over more than a century that there is no crisis it can’t overcome if the working class is prepared (i.e, can be made) to pay the price.
Importantly, crises – particularly destructive crises – help to renew capitalism, sweeping away uncompetitive capital, and creating the space for a renewal of capital accumulation, however briefly. Destructive crises also enable a renewed assault on the rights of working people and on social spending that working people have won in previous struggles.
This is a central feature of the neoliberal offensive over the past five decades of its history: to seize every crisis, impose its own doctrine, smash working conditions, privatise the economy, and dismantle the welfare state, shifting government spending to prop up profits rather than support working communities.
Neoliberalism constitutes a political project aimed at weakening the political power of the working class, asserting the political power of the capitalist class and seeking to establish profitable avenues for capital investment1.
Key features of neoliberal projects include:
Facilitating the free movement of capital by removing barriers to capital investment and shattering trade barriers;
Increasing barriers to the movement of workers, which results in increasingly constrained rights and marginalisation for migrant workers (this includes open calls to movement being linked to migrants’ wealth);
Opening government services to capitalist competition, whether through direct privatisation; corporatisation; ‘public-private partnerships’;
Access by government agencies or the introduction of ‘voucher systems’ to enable government subsidisation of the entry of private capital into the provision of social services;
At the same time, deregulating the cost of these services. This is often articulated in terms of enhancing consumer ‘choice’;
Reduction in government social spending, primarily premised on the justification of the need to rein in deficits, although this has rarely been achieved. Throughout the neoliberal decades the US’s budget had regularly been in deficit. Instead spending reductions occur primarily as a consequence of declines in government income via the narrowing of the tax base to be more heavily reliant on working people, and a redirection of government spending away from social spending on the working class and the promotion of worker-funded retirement funds.
COVID response as a deepening of neoliberalism
As with the global financial crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic and its associated crisis has been described as the death knell of neoliberalism, if not capitalism. In particular, the massive government stimulus packages that have been enacted in many countries to prop up economies have been seen as a decisive shift in the outlook of these governments.
However, government spending is not necessarily in contradiction with neoliberalism. Moreover, as both Philip Mirowski and Naomi Klein have pointed out, neoliberals are adept at turning economic crises, which are clearly exacerbated by neoliberal policies, into opportunities to deepen neoliberal attacks. Neoliberal states, while ideologically promoting budgetary surpluses, have massive spending programs primarily aimed at subsiding capitalist profits.
While government responses to the Covid-19 pandemic have seen massive levels of spending on stimulus packages, this spending has overwhelmingly been directed at propping up profits. For example, wage subsidies are for the most part really a subsidy to business profits with mechanisms built in to allow stripping away of workers’ rights.
At the same time, the spending on stimulus has triggered widespread discussion among the media and establishment of the ‘dangers’ of government deficits and the need to limit the length of the stimulus packages, particularly subsidies, irrespective of the length and dynamics of the crisis.
In addition, there has been a discussion of the need to ‘pay’ for the response to the current crisis at the same time as enabling capital to recover and rebound. These calls lay the foundations for two parallel pushes. First, a move to further curtail social spending, most likely with accompanying privatisation of public services, which will result in both a massive increase in the cost of these services and a corresponding drop in quality. Secondly, a move to further reduce company taxes whilst shifting the burden of paying for government spending even more heavily into working people.
Building working-class power today
Given this trajectory, how do we build a better system – one in which workers lives are prioritised over profits? How do we build a world where nature is valued and protected?
While the call for the creation of socialism in the here and now is appealing, nowhere on the planet do working people have the level of organisation and confidence necessary to achieve this objective now. Instead, we must build the power and confidence of the working class as it exists today in defence of existing rights; in demanding steps forward, no matter how limited; in guaranteeing livelihoods, in the hope we can extend and expand them; and building the capacity to win more.
In the short term this means:
Ensuring that working people, whether they are in employment or not, and whatever their residency/visa status, have liveable incomes; and
Ensuring that all those workers engaged in employment have safe working conditions, which in the context of Covid-19 has never been more urgent.
In the medium to long term this will involve:
The struggle to maintain liveable incomes, particularly for those on government pensions;
Mass construction of energy-efficient and high-quality public housing;
Massive reinvestment in the public health system both in terms of capacity and working conditions for the workers within it;
Support for public research within the universities and independent research centres; and
A just transition across the economy to move away from fossil fuels and to transform the economy to one based on meeting human needs rather than constant growth, in order to draw down the atmospheric carbon dioxide.
It is not enough to simply call for a better world, it is necessary to mobilise and struggle to achieve it. At the same time, it is necessary to recognise that with the extent of the pandemic and the necessity for social distancing, in most industries and social sectors social mobilisation and industrial action will be extremely difficult.
Our immediate demands of both governments and capital are for action to ensure economic livelihoods, and to ensure that workers and communities are able to operate in as safe a way as possible. As the economy reopens, our ability to disrupt and mobilise will increase, as will our political horizons and demands.
The federal government announced on March 30 that a wage subsidy package would go to parliament aimed at encouraging companies contemplating job cuts and stand-downs to retain and pay workers for the duration of the economic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Coalition had explicitly ruled out wage subsidy packages. But its turn-around has come after pressure from unions and employer groups. While the decision has been widely welcomed, the package is inadequate to meet the looming crisis. It has also come too late to help tens of thousands of workers already stood down.
The bailout is a wage subsidy to employers considering laying off workers. It has been set at $1500 a fortnight — 70% of the median wage — irrespective of how much was earned or how many hours worked.
The payments will be available for a maximum of six months: they begin on May 1 and will be backdated to March 30. They will cover workers dismissed between March 1 and March 31 at qualifying companies.
The subsidy will apply to all workers, including casuals, provided that the casual employee has been employed for at least 12 months.
However, the criteria for casual workers to qualify is still unclear, particularly if they have had breaks between jobs over the previous 12 months.
To qualify, a business with a turnover of less than $1 billion will have to have experienced a drop in revenue of 30% or more. Businesses with a turnover of more than $1 billion will have had to experience a reduction of more than 50%. Sole traders are included in the scheme.
While this wage package provides thousands of workers with some comfort, like the previous stimulus package it is inadequate.
First, payments to businesses begin far too late, which means that companies, particularly those with cash-flow problems, will sack or stand-down workers prior to May 1. This is why it should be brought forward.
Secondly, the wage guarantee amount is inadequate: it will leave thousands of working people facing financial oblivion.
Thirdly, all casual workers, irrespective of how long they have been working for a particular employer, should be eligible. It has been estimated that 1 million casual workers will not qualify. The fact someone is employed casually does not reduce their needs: indeed, their precariousness means they have less resources to survive this crisis.
Fourthly, the loss threshold for companies to qualify for the wage subsidy is too high. We do not know how long the pandemic will last. While some companies will qualify now, many will not and they will still be trying to survive with reduced revenues, meaning that thousands more will face stand downs and job cuts.
Responding to the new package, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) has renewed its call for a wage subsidy for all workers, regardless of their contractual or employment relationship, citizenship, residency or visa status.
The ACTU argues the payment should be lifted to $1375 a week and modeled on the schemes introduced in Britain (80% of a worker’s wage) and Denmark (75% of a worker’s wage). (The Danish scheme is aimed at putting the economy, outside of essential services, into mothballs to slow the virus spread.)
ACTU secretary Sally McManus said: “The union movement has worked doggedly to make sure this government understands the grave situation Australian workers find themselves in. Less than three weeks ago, the Morrison government wouldn’t consider the notion of a wage subsidy.
“We now need employers to keep people employed and keep paying their wages. We are calling on all employers to do their part.
“We also want to see workers who have been let go re-employed.
“A wage subsidy program needs to have safeguards to ensure people are kept in employment and that any taxpayer money flows to the workers. The government has made clear that this is a wage subsidy and not a wage replacement program, and we would expect to see people maintain their wage levels during this program.”
This will be difficult. With so many companies standing workers down, the ability to mount workplace pressure is extremely limited. Where it is possible, however, pressure will be needed on management to maintain wages and employment.
Equally important is the need to maintain pressure on the federal government to boost wage subsidies and ban sackings.
It may feel impossible to shift the government further. But, given that in just three weeks it has moved from offering cash to small- and medium-sized businesses to a $137 billion wage subsidy for millions of workers, we can see that it is susceptible to pressure.
We can protect the livelihoods of working people and, post pandemic, look to transform society to put people before profits.
This article is posted under copyleft, verbatim copying and distribution of the entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved. If you reprint this article please email me at revitalisinglabour@gmail.com to let me know.
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As part of the Morrison Coalition government’s second COVID-19 stimulus package, treasurer Josh Frydenberg announced that workers would be able to draw on their superannuation savings by $10,000, this and next financial year, to meet immediate needs.
It highlights the Coalition’s inadequate response and its determination to shift the cost of its failure onto working people. At the same time, it is bailing out corporations.
Since its inception, Australia’s superannuation system reinforces and reproduces the inequality within the labour force and extends it into retirement.
The system shifts the responsibility of supporting retirees from government onto working people, via a system which defers and redirects wages into the superannuation system.
This deferral has allowed capital to inject billions of dollars into financial markets, predominantly the Australian one: Australian Superannuation Funds held $2.9 trillion in assets in July 2019.
It has allowed the government to justify its failure to provide adequate retirement pensions to workers because they are supposed to have enough superannuation to rely on in retirement.
As a result, Australia has the second highest rate of retirees living in poverty in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, with 35.5% of people over the age of 65 living in poverty, the overwhelming majority being women.
While the superannuation system is flawed, it is important that it does not become even worse. Forcing workers to draw on their superannuation to survive during the COVID-19 crisis will decimate the superannuation accounts of millions of workers.
Many of these people will already be among the most vulnerable and low-paid workers: they are unlikely to be able to rebuild their superannuation accounts. This will result in many workers living in poverty in their retirement.
If the crisis deepens for an extended period, there is a danger that workers will be pressured to to draw down even further on their savings. This will put workers at risk of losing the built-in insurance in superannuation funds that requires their balance be above $5000.
Age
Average balance: men
Average balance: women
20-24
$5,924
$5,022
25-29
$23,712
$19,107
30-34
$43,583
$33,748
35-39
$64,590
$48,874
40-44
$99,959
$61,922
45-49
$145,076
$87,543
50-54
$172,126
$99,520
55-59
$237,022
$123,642
60-64
$270,710
$157,049
Source: Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia
Beyond the short and long-term impacts on individual workers forced to draw on their superannuation savings, this proposal will potentially spark a liquidity crisis for the superannuation funds and thereby impact all workers.
The funds only hold so much cash at any one time which, in addition to being a form of investment, is used to reimburse funds to members.
If struggling workers start drawing down their superfunds, this will add pressure to those funds which may be forced to liquidate other assets, most likely shares. This will prompt superfunds to sell even more stocks, wiping out more of the value of shares and reducing the savings of all members.
Under these circumstances, speculators such as Gerry Harvey will be in a position to buy shares at much lower value and position themselves to profit handsomely from the COVID-19 crisis. This is in addition to the same profiteers receiving a direct government stimulus.
Many workers will not have any other option but to draw on their savings. But unions must demand that companies and the government guarantee workers’ wages during the COVID-19 crisis so workers do not need to draw on savings.
Moreover, we must demand that the aged pension, along with all other welfare payments, be lifted to at least the new level of the jobseeker benefit.
This article is posted under copyleft, verbatim copying and distribution of the entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved. If you reprint this article please email me at revitalisinglabour@gmail.com to let me know.
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In the face of the economic havoc caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is not enough to call for a rent strike and moratorium on mortgage repayments. At best, it simply displaces the lack of income into other parts of the economy and, at worst, it could deepen the impact of the economic crisis on working people.
Despite widespread concern over housing affordability, as a stand-alone tactic such calls are insufficient. Instead, progressives should be campaigning for secure incomes for all working people, something that would not only allow them to pay rent and mortgages, but equally importantly it would allow them to eat.
As the pandemic deepens, many more industries and companies will close. That will mean many working people, although technically employed, will be without incomes.
Even with treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s announcement that job seekers will have their payments doubled for six months — a huge relief for the unemployed — for many this will fall far short of meeting their financial needs and obligations.
There are a number of immediate risks if people were to stop paying rent.
First, they risk being evicted from their home. While this may not happen immediately, it is a struggle that they may not be in a position to win.
Secondly, a rent strike runs a serious risk of displacing the income crisis to another part of the economy.
While many people will have limited sympathy for the plight of landlords, and many could wear a reduction in income, this is not going to be the case for all landlords, especially retirees, whose superannuation is tied up in a rental property and for whom the non-payment of rents could lead to their immiseration.
If there was to be a rent or mortgage strike, it should be limited to those whose incomes have been significantly reduced. Those who remain working, or whose employers continue to pay them during periods of shutdown, should continue to pay rent.
Doing so will help ensure the circulation of cash and allow those services that remain in operation to be paid for the goods and services being provided. Additionally, the payment of rents and mortgages will have a counter inflationary effect.
The key question should be how can we collectively maintain incomes in this unprecedented COVID-19 emergency. Governments should mandate employers to continue to pay the wages of all their employees, regardless of their contract status.
If this is no longer possible, the government should directly subsidise wages – rather than the Morrison government’s current plan to refund tax payments and underwrite loans.
By doing this, large corporations such as Qantas, should be partially or totally taken back either through formal nationalisation or via a share transfer. No worker should lose their job or income in the current crisis.
Right now, governments must fund jobs and incomes by creating more money to be released into the economy. By subsidising wages, the government would be able to position the economy not just for a more rapid recovery in the wake of the pandemic.
It would also be in a position to prioritise the expansion of sectors, such as manufacturing, which are necessary to boost sustainable energy to transform the country’s power supply to meet the equally vital challenge of climate change.
This article is posted under copyleft, verbatim copying and distribution of the entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved. If you reprint this article please email me at revitalisinglabour@gmail.com to let me know.Read more...
Walking in the footsteps of its predecessors, the government wants to impose a new challenge to pension rights. They intend to move quickly to take advantage of the summer to make it a "dialogue" with the unions, and release the bill in September.
As the Solidarity Trade Union reaffirmed Friday, July 5 to the Prime Minister, the new attack on social rights is unacceptable, on the contrary they need to cancel the previous counter reforms - the financial resources are available.
The lengthening of the contribution and qualifying periods, the flagship projects of both managements and the government will lead to later retirements and lower pensions for all!
The Trade Union Solidaires is part of the united initiative of trade unions who reject any social decline.
The Trade Union has proposed an inter-union national mobilisation by early September, aimed at building a broad front.
It will be on Tuesday, September 10, and has been the called jointly by the CGT, FO, Solidaires and the FSU.
The Board of the Pensions, the Moreau report, and the government, all highlight the need for 20 billion euros for 2020. But in 25 years, by lengthening the contribution period, the decline in the retirement age, the introduction of the discount, the indexation of pensions relative to wages, increasing the number of years taken into account for the reference wage, and the additional lower yield, € 40 billion will have already been taken out of the pockets of workers (as employed, unemployed or retired). That's it: not one quarter more, not a euro less!
We call for strengthening the united collectives that are being built in communities and build, from the united appeal of CGT, FO, Solidaires, FSU, an expanding movement against social regression.
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For the big-business media like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and CNN television, the big news from Greece involves what is going to happen to Greek bonds, the euro, the European economy and the world economy. For these media and their owners, the hundreds of billions, even trillions of dollars at stake explain this emphasis.
But the true essence of the events in Greece is the heroic struggle of the Greek working class, in this small country of 11 million people, to defeat the cruel, draconian austerity being imposed by the European big banks.
This struggle is vitally important for workers and the poor throughout the world and deserves solidarity and support worldwide.
Economists predict that given the recent vicious cuts imposed by the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and accepted by the Greek government, the Greek economy — already in five years of recession — won't come out of its spiraling downturn until at least 2015.
Four right-wing cabinet ministers and two socialists resigned from the coalition regime because they refused to identify themselves with this new round of austerity. For its own ultra-nationalist reasons, the Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS), a small, near-fascist party, left the cabinet.
The coalition cabinet still managed to patch itself back together, and the Greek parliament voted Feb. 12 to accept this austerity plan.
Meanwhile, 25,000 union-organized protesters were demonstrating outside Parliament, which was protected by 3,000 police, who used tear gas against the demonstrators. On the edges of the protest, youth battled police, some throwing firebombs, and parts of Athens were on fire.
Vicious austerity cutbacks
What people now call the Troika — the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund — is demanding the following vicious cuts in return for a bank bailout:
• Cutting the minimum wage for private sector workers by 22 percent and for those newly hired at the minimum by 32 percent; workers at the minimum have already lost 45 percent of their 2009 wages;
• Collective bargaining agreements between the unions and companies in a particular sector of the economy are abolished;
• Cuts in supplementary pensions, soon to be followed by cuts to basic pensions;
• 15,000 public sector employees will lose their jobs this year followed by 150,000 two years after this, in an economy where unemployment is officially over 20 percent;
• Cuts in social services; those in health care will place human lives in danger;
• Stepped up tax enforcement against self-employed workers and small businesses in order to support the tax exemptions of big capital.
Since the minimum wage is the benchmark for most union/company agreements in Greece, lowering it will lower all private sector wages.
Workers fight back
In a working-class response to this latest wave of austerity, the three main unions in Greece called for a general strike on Feb. 7, which was widely followed. The strike stopped train and ferry services nationwide, while many schools and banks were closed and state hospitals worked with skeleton staff.
The steelworkers union, which had been on strike for 100 days, led a march on Parliament. There were some scattered sharp skirmishes between protesters and cops on the edges of the crowd, which drew a lot of press attention — more attention than did the tens of thousands who were protesting.
Some demonstrators burned a German flag, reflecting popular anger at the German government's role in imposing this new round of austerity. According to the website of the Greek Communist Party, there were protests and demonstrations in 62 cities around the country. (inter.kke.gr)
The E.U. finance ministers then called for “implementation before disbursement” (additional cuts), for the Greek Parliament to endorse the measures on Feb. 12, and for the Greek parties in the coalition government to sign promises to maintain this agreement even after the upcoming election.
All three Greek unions reacted by calling another general strike, this time for 48 hours on Feb. 10 and 11. The strike protested the depth and extent of the cuts being imposed, as well as the deadlines the Greek government had to meet.
PAME, the union confederation associated with the Greek Communist Party (KKE), broke the ground for the general strike by leading a large march through Athens in a driving rain storm the night of Feb 9. Ilias Stamelos, a leader of PAME, condemned the new austerity measures as barbaric and called on the working class not only to drive out the parties in government but also to overthrow the class which is in power. (inter.kke.gr)
Feb. 10 strike even stronger
The strike on Feb. 10 was even more solid than the earlier one. Two major unions – GSEE, which represents workers in the private sector, and ADEDY, representing civil servants – marched on Syntagma Square, while PAME marched to the Ministry of Labor.
PAME workers occupied that building, and others hung a big banner on the outside of the ministry, reading: “No to the new massacre of the people, Down with the government, The Troika must go, Disengagement from the EU.”
There were also large rallies in ThessalonÃki, Piraeus and other major cities throughout Greece.
The next day, Feb. 12, the unions held a big demonstration in Athens' main Syntagma Square that encircled the Parliament building to try to prevent members from entering and approving the austerity plan.
Aleka Papariga, the general secretary of the Greek Communist Party, released this statement: “Even if the workers give their own flesh to pay off the debt, the savage bankruptcy will not be averted. Consequently, there is one solution: Disengagement from the EU and unilateral cancellation of the debt. This is the solution; anything else will constitute a tragedy for the workers.” (inter.kee.gr)
The two parties in the coalition government — PASOK and the New Democracy — have formally agreed to uphold this austerity plan after the upcoming elections, which could come as early as April. There is no guarantee they will win the election, according to some polls.
According to the Kathimerini newspaper, there is a sharp rise in support for left parties. Its early February polls show 12 percent supporting the Democratic Left, 12.5 percent supporting the Greek Communist Party and another 12 percent supporting the Coalition of the Radical Left. Greece's Green party might also enter parliament for the first time, Later polls showed an even bigger leftward movement.
Workers in Greece’s Attica region, which includes Athens, are fighting austerity. Their strike last week was in solidarity with people losing their jobs and facing unpaid and cut wages.
Rank and file workers addressed strike rallies. Their speeches were broadcast by workers occupying the Alter TV station.
Workers at Intracom, a large telecommunications and defence company, also began a rolling strike last Tuesday which is continuing.
And steel workers continue to strike.
There are increasing numbers of workers with confidence to take action.
It is politically significant.
The Greek government is in negotiations with banks over organising a “haircut” (partial write-off) on its bonds.
They say this will cut Greek debt. But it’s designed to save the banks, again.
There is now a push from below for a general strike in the first week of February.
The trade union leaders are holding back because they are negotiating with bosses over collective bargaining rights.
But the way it is developing we’ll have more strikes and a united response to the attacks.
The government has crossed all limits. It’s not enough that the workers, the unemployed, the young people, pensioners and professionals are plunged into misery—Finance Minister Venizelos went so far as to announce in Parliament—we should also be happy to be “under control”! The PASOK government and the interests of capital that it represents, in absolute harmony with the Troika, felt extremely positive shortly before announcing their slaughter package! The humiliation is almost perfect. At the same moment as their policy becomes bankrupt, and as working families are driven into bankruptcy, the holy alliance of government, the EU, and the IMF want to make us believe that there is no other way to save the country from bankruptcy. In reality they are the ones who lead us into bankruptcy under the control, and according to the terms of, the banks and multinational companies, the EU and the Greek industrialists (SEV).
There is another path, the path of the anti-capitalist break with the ruling order, in order to impose the interests of working people: by stopping the payments to the bankers and the cancellation of debt, by withdrawing from the euro zone and leaving the EU, by the nationalization of banks, state-owned enterprises and enterprises of strategic importance under workers’ control and without compensation, through a radical redistribution of wealth, by increasing wages, pensions and public spending in order to cover social needs and to create jobs by an adequate capital tax and the redistribution of profits through the cancellation of bank debts for those without vast fortunes, and for the unemployed.
We wont pay your poll taxes!
We shall bring about your downfall
The unified mass political movement will open the way, an uprising of all workers and of the entire population is needed here and now! With unlimited strikes and a nationwide general strike, with occupations as they have already begun in the ministries, with militant demonstrations, and with the democratic coordination of the branches that started fighting and of the rank and file basic trade union units, things can move beyond the bureaucratic leaderships of GSEE (private sector) and ADEDY (public service). Through the united struggle of student occupations and unlimited strikes we can win! It is time for a popular uprising that will lead to the overthrow of the government of shame, that will unshackle the rule of EU, IMF and capital and that will seal the defeat of the black bloc of PASOK, ND and LAOS. All the forces of the Left and the movement involved in the struggles must contribute through their joint action to an unprecedented revolutionary movement.
ANTARSYA fights for the abolition of capitalist barbarism as a whole and is involved with all its forces in the current conflict.
ANTARSYA, 21 Sep 2011
-ANTARSYA is an alliance of the anti-capitalist revolutionary left in Greece. It includes OKDE-Spartakos, Greek section of the Fourth Inrternational, and SEK, Socialist Workers’ Party, member of the International Socialist Tendency.
This is the first footage I took on my phone at the Occupy Melbourne Protest. The police are starting to push the protest from the intersection of Swanston and Burke Streets. They would keep pushing until we reached Trades Hall. I will be putting some more footage up from the day soon.
Earlier in the day police had violently attacked the camp in city square a making large number of arrests. The eviction has been justified on the basis of the legality, or lack, of camping in public spaces.
This is a message of solidarity sent by participants in the International Council of Car Workers (CITA) to the European Conference of Workers in the Car Industry, held at the International Institute for Research and Education in Amsterdam on May 28-29, 2011. We have also published Declaration of the European Car Workers’ Conference an overview at Creating cross-border links between militants and Ford Blanquefort, an example from the same event.
Dear colleagues,
As participants in the International Council of Car Workers (CITA), we give greetings and wish you much success for your European meeting of car workers. Thank you for your invitation. Unfortunately, for reasons of timing, we cannot be with you.
At the 6th international Council of Car Workers, in late 2009 in Germany, with 450 participants from 17 countries, we adopted an international program of struggle for car workers. It took into account a comprehensive restructuring of the global industry and the consequences of the battle of mutual destruction of the carmakers for car workers and their families.
In fact, tens of thousands of jobs have been destroyed, wages have been reduced, in particular in the United States, Russia, Spain and Italy, not to mention the closure of the Opel plant in Antwerp. In Europe, Opel has reduced its workforce by 10,000, or 20%. Opel workers in Bochum (Germany) have been informed of massive layoffs of about 1,200 jobs.
The initial impact of the world economic and financial crisis was attenuated by partial unemployment and, often, an increase in compensation. With scrappage schemes and significant discounts an even deeper collapse of production was avoided in many countries. But now, the increase in exploitation, the concentration of car companies and considerable job destruction has become more apparent.
In many companies, daily struggles are on-going against increased exploitation, for higher wages and so on. The huge expansion of production capacities, particularly in the BRICs, is based on each group’s hope of outdoing its competitors. We must therefore expect new restructurings related to closures of factories, massive layoffs and so on.
Against the various attempts at division by management, it is necessary to forge the unity of workers around the whole world!
In the factories, political debate is lively and not only on the immediate issues of work. Because the capitalist system is showing its overall decay, like its inhuman energy policy, indifferent to deaths, like the nuclear disaster in Japan, its economic and financial crises and its wars in Afghanistan, Libya, Ivory Coast and so on.
The Fukushima nuclear disaster brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets in Germany. The international working class should get even more involved in the fight for the preservation of the natural environment. Among other things, this question is very important in our activities because the crisis of the environment and the exploitation of workers have the same cause: the pursuit without end of the maximum profit. The fight to save the bases of life for humanity, the struggle for a better future, without exploitation and oppression, requires class awareness and organization. Our Council has always said: we will think beyond the system of capitalist profit and we will discuss a social alternative.
We hope that your meeting will be a success and we want to take this opportunity to invite you also to our 7th Council of Car Workers from May 7-20, 2012 in Munich, Germany (more information can be read on our site: www.automobilarbeiterratschlag ))
Militant greetings and solidarity,
Fritz Hoffman, Ulrich Ittermann, Birgit Schumann
(participants in the International Council of Auto Workers)
Jean-Francois Cabral, Sandra Demarcq
Published in the NPA weekly Tout est a nous (TEAN), 30/06/11.
Republished from International Viewpoint
July 2011
The national conference of the NPA brought together 240 delegates, elected by the 3,100 members who had voted in 92 local aggregate meetings. The purpose of the conference was to decide the NPA’s approach to the upcoming elections, presidential and legislative. The vote of the members gave a majority of 50.4 per cent to Motion A, thus deciding to launch our presidential campaign without putting our candidature in parentheses.
On Saturday, the first debate began around our approach to the elections. The principal divergence between the delegates of Position A and those of Position B (40 per cent of the delegates) related to the strategy of the NPA towards the Left Front. Position C (5.8 per cent of the delegates) considered that the approach proposed by Position A has was not sufficiently revolutionary.
The general profile of the campaign
The discussions on Saturday afternoon centred on the profile and the main lines of our campaign. As a result of these discussions, broad agreement took shape around the idea that our campaign should respond to the crisis of the capitalist system and its consequences for the population and the working class. This crisis, which is at the same time economic, financial, social, environmental, energy and food, has disastrous effects. Faced the with governments of both right and left which orchestrate the austerity plans in the service of the ruling classes, the need to give our social camp the confidence that is necessary to fight back is a common preoccupation. But differences have arisen on the way that this campaign should be conducted. Some comrades of Position B are afraid that there will be a “workerist and sectarian” campaign and the comrades of Position C are worried that there will be a campaign which would not refer sufficiently to measures of a break with capitalism.
On Saturday evening, our comrade Philippe Poutou was designated as presidential candidate of the NPA by 122 For, 50 Against, 11 Abstentions and 47 NPPV (did not take part in the vote). Some comrades in particular were opposed because they considered it regrettable that our candidate is not a woman, in particular one of our two spokespersons. But a majority considered that the social and political profile of Philippe illustrated best the project of our organization during this crisis period of capitalism and made it possible to unite the party.
The launching of the campaign
On Sunday, the discussions in workshops made it possible to deepen the various axes of our campaign : working conditions, sharing out of work, jobs and precarious work, wages, ecology, discriminations, cancellation of the debt, youth… As an anti-capitalist organization, we want to link the defence of the demands that arise in the daily life of the population to the discussion on how to win them, by the mobilization of the working class, in order to organize society according to other interests than those of the capitalists.
At the beginning of the morning session, a discussion also took place on the urgency of succeeding, all together, in overcoming the barrier of 500 sponsorships of elected representatives that the law imposes on us. This is the immediate task, the most urgent thing for everyone. At the conclusion of the national conference, a declaration was adopted, with 62 per cent of delegates voting in favour, in order to unite the organization around its campaign. Position B wished to make a public statement putting forward the basic disagreements and is calling for the constitution of a public current next October.
After this national conference, the challenge is now to put the internal discussions in the background, to unite the NPA and to turn the party outwards, towards struggles and towards the electoral campaign which must give coherence to our interventions, by linking them to our project of society.
Published in the NPA weekly Tout est a nous (TEAN), 30/06/11.
-Jean-Francois Cabral is a member of the leadership of the NPA.
-Sandra Demarcq is a member of the Executive Committee of the New Anti-Capitalist pary (NPA) in France, and a member of the leadership of the Fourth International.
Revitalising Labour attempts to reflect on efforts to rebuild the labour movement internationally, emphasising the role that left-wing political currents can play in this process. It welcomes contributions on union struggles, internal renewal processes within the labour movement and the struggle against capitalism and imperialism.
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