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A genuine alternative
 
  • A genuine alternative must include:
  • A full repudiation of the debt. Any form of bailout can only bleed the workers dry. 
  • Seizure of assets where capitalism is no longer able to productively develop them. We either own them as public services or we have involuntarily bought them through NAMA.

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  • A bank controlled by the workers - after all, we own all the capitalist ones. 
  • Workers Control of national resources in the process of being given away to transnationals. 
  • An international confederation of workers resistance across Europe. 
All of the above presupposes an independent workers movement which can only be built from the existing resistance and from a political opposition to ICTU's policy of collaboration. 

A no vote will give new life to resistance. Alongside the votes in Greece and France it will establish that austerity is not something that workers accept but something imposed upon them, and thus justify further resistance.

And further resistance will be necessary. There is no possibility that a series of votes will persuade the bondholders, the IMF and ECB to set fire to hundreds of billions of debt. We may not be asked to vote again on this one, as it does not block the European strategy, but our enemies will be striving to apply the crushing blows of the Austerity Pact and bring a more brutal form of capitalism to life in an Ireland of perpetual austerity.

It is important that we build a movement that will continue after the vote and that sees itself as an action movement rather than an electoral one. The simplest process would be for the household charge movement to become a more general anti-austerity movement.

The movement must orient towards the working class. It should challenge ICTU now that it is effectively out of the shadows and in support of austerity. It should call on unions that say they are for a no vote to break with ICTU and to campaign actively as part of the resistance. Nor should it wait for any section of the bureaucracy: rank and file movements should be formed across the unions to assert the rights of the ordinary members. 

The tide is turning. We have had four years of austerity and endless promises that capitalism would recover. Instead we have continued chaos and a merciless attempt to drive the living conditions of the working class back into the 18th century.

Now workers across Europe are saying no. We must join with them to reject capitalist austerity and begin the journey to a socialist society, based on human need.

 


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