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Socialist Democracy Bulletin October 2011 Contents:
Our leaders claim victory in their dealings with the European Central Bank and IMF. We are to pay a smaller rate of interest and take longer to pay but the outcome is that we will pay more and pay for longer. In any case global politicians and financiers are finally admitting what we already knew - that it is they who caused the crisis and their only solution is to keep feeding our wealth to the bankers. The capitalist system is growing more and more unstable. At the same time traditional workers leaderships like Labour and ICTU have collapsed into the arms of the bosses. Workers need a defence. That defence should be led by a working class party. A party can assert the interests of the workers. There should be an utter repudiation of the debt - we shouldn't pay a cent. We should support grassroots action in communities and in workplaces to resist all the attempts to transfer money from our pockets to the bankers. We should fight the firesale of public services and natural resources. Criminal financial structures should be scrapped and a bank set up under workers control to guarantee jobs, wages, services and housing. Struggles in all these areas will breakout, have broken out, spontaneously. What a working class party can do is unite all these struggles. Individually they may be isolated and defeated. Collectively they would represent an unstoppable force. All too often we seem to be pleading with the capitalist leopard to change its spots and act more humanely. A workers party would target the working class itself, calling on it to arise and break the bonds that fetter our lives.
The need for a trade union rank and file has never been greater. There is a great fight to be fought. The trade union leadership are on the other side of the barricades. Workers need to see an alternative line of march that doesn't leave them at the mercy of capital. Fine Gael claim success in their dealings with the European Central Bank and IMF. Success means that the workers will pay for generations. Meanwhile the European powers scrabble for survival and are willing to sacrifice Ireland to do so. The trade union leadership have signed up with the employers. As part of their agreement they are required to propose specific cuts and then implement them. ICTU wanted a plan B. Other ways to pay the bill and extra investment. The billions to be paid do not allow this and they end up part of the offensive. That tells us that we must have nothing to do with proposals to pay the debt. The workers programme must be to resist paying a cent - to occupy and seize services that are under threat. To implement that programme we must not be hamstrung in the structures of the unions, ossified by generations of social partnership. We must organise across unions and include the mass of the unemployed. 'Grass Roots Left' [Britain] Conference
A new political season is beginning in Ireland and the socialist movement is gearing up for a new round of activity. Plans include a mass rally, a non-payment campaign on the household and proposed water charges and a rank and file movement in the trade unions. The individual elements of these plans are to be welcomed but, put together and compared with the position following the election and the June ULA convention, the movement has retreated significantly, both organizationally and politically, from the rather modest gains made then. The organizational retreat should be self-evident. Following the election and the June convention the question of the United Left Alliance developing into a political party was still open. That no longer seems to be the case. It now seems to be defined as a loose alliance, with a great deal of friction between the core groups of the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party. In addition, the ULA is not seen as the central organizing structure for resistance but rather as a facilitator for broader alliances. So the ULA facilitates an open meeting with other political groups to plan a broad demonstration. The component parts organize a "don't pay" campaign but the structure is an anti-water charges committee rather than the ULA. The planned rank and file trade union movement is also composed of the component parts of the ULA rather than the ULA itself. The organizational retreat is accompanied by a political retreat. In the aftermath of the election the central issues were repudiation of the debt and a working class party. Now the central and on-going campaign is to be a non-payment campaign based on "people power" and constituency organizations. The movement is in a bind. Only a minority support debt repudiation, but a broader movement would lack the political tools to fight. The contradictions were most evident at
the water and household charges meeting.
Questions about policy and strategy led to a hostile response from the Socialist Party. The tactic was non-payment and the strategy was civil disobedience. Mass non-payment would drive back the state, the European Central Bank and the IMF. Organizational and political weaknesses are linked to dependency and to a strategy of drawing in broader forces, so the plans for a mass demonstration depend on an alliance with groups like Sinn Fein and the trade union leaderships, ignoring Sinn Fein’s policy and the role of the trade union leadership inside government /ECB/IMF offensive. Activists are able, at the non-payment rally, to announce the "support" of Jimmy Kelly of UNITE with any questioning of his role to date. A major plank of Joe Higgins argument was that we now have a choice - to pay or not to pay. This had not been the case with earlier pay cuts and levies. Given the choice, people would choose not to pay. Things aren't so simple. Public sector workers were balloted on the Croke Park agreement, it was endorsed, and no on-going opposition emerged in the unions. There has been a general election. A large number of voters supported Fine Gael and many working class voters voted Labour. Both parties stood in support of the austerity. The point of the "choice" argument seems to be that workers instinctively oppose the austerity and that the task of socialists is to make the call for mobilization. The evidence seems to be that the workers, although very angry, have been convinced that there is no alternative to the austerity. The task of socialists then is to make that case. It may be that the workers, or a section of the working class, are driven to desperation and spontaneously erupt. Socialists then would not be needed to make a call, but rather to propose the elements of an alternative programme. That programme would need to counter the capitalist offensive as a whole, rather than one element of it. Again Joe Higgins suggested that the main issue was the extraction of revenue. This is true - the many charges, levies, pay cuts, pay freezes, pension cuts and so on are part of a drive to save money that can then be given to the European Central Bank as interest payment. However, as government and banks say over and over again, there is a long term need for restructuring to increase Irish competitiveness. That means that wages have to go down and stay down. Pensions and public services can be regarded as a "social wage" on top of the cash wage packet and have to be cut as well. Central to this strategy is the privatisation of public services. Not only does this very rapidly transfer wealth from public to private hands and reduce services to rock bottom provision, it effectively wipes out longstanding rights and speeds up the "race to the bottom" in wages and conditions. The imposition of charges is a way of converting services to commodities in order that they can be more effectively privatized. We can't select an element of the offensive and decide that we will take a stand there and there only. This is equivalent to an army deciding to hold one point in a battlefront. It would be an invitation to be outflanked and defeated. A struggle around household charges would rapidly need to address issues such as electricity and gas privatization. A global fight requires an alternative to the capitalist programme of austerity. It requires a workers’ programme. The starting point is the absolute repudiation of the debt. This needs to be transformed from a slogan into specific actions that the workers can take. That will include non-payment and civil disobedience, alongside industrial action, guerrilla strikes in specific industries, general strikes, seizures and occupations. The overall aim should be to cripple the government and the institutions carrying out the austerity programme while at the same time building independent workers organizations that can break from the collaboration of the union bosses and the influence of the capitalist parties. The central independent structure of the working class, able to put into practice the many elements of the struggle, is a working class party. The ULA is moving back from this task. Many supporters may believe that they are simply putting off the issue until the time is right. In this they are mistaken. The time to begin building the workers party is now, not down the road when fragmentation and betrayal by traditional leaderships have weakened us further.
Brian Hughes The decision by Sinn Fein to nominate Martin McGuinness as a candidate for the Irish presidential election has left the 'liberal' Dublin intelligentsia in a state of apoplexy. Their attitude is one of 'how dare this Northern nationalist think that he is fit to be president'? The Southern media then row in with lots of stories about McGuinness's role in the IRA. The 'liberal' commentator Fintan O'Tooole says he is an unsuitable candidate and should face possible war crimes charges. Whilst this shows us that this partitionist mentality is alive and thriving, the real story is ignored. Sinn Fein decided to throw their hat in the ring once Fianna Fail announced that that they would not be standing in the election. Gerry Adams and Co aim to replace FF as the dominant nationalist party and they see McGuinness's nomination as advancing this position. Workers feeling the brunt of austerity attacks should be depressed by this development as McGuinness will advance no fightback politics in his campaign. Sinn Fein are trying to win an election
for a ceremonial post and will put forward a populist programme appealing
to all and sundry to vote for smiling Martin. The politics of Sinn Fein
are moving to the right at a rapid pace and this election campaign will
bear this out. It follows hard on the heels of Sinn Fein arguing in the
South for opposition to the IMF/ECB offensive and accepting Tory cuts in
the North. They have also led calls in the partitionist Stormont Assembly
for corporation tax to be slashed, whilst ignoring how the low corporation
tax in the Republic has been a disaster for the South's economy and the
living standards of workers.
How a man who rang the bell with arch bigot
Ian Paisley at the New York capitalist Stock Exchange in 2007 and said
that he would meet Britain's Queen Elizabeth if elected would offer hope
to workers is beyond me. Irish workers do not need a re-run of Fianna Fail
part two. They need their own party and real class warriors.
There is a growing optimism within ruling circles in Ire-and that the worst of the crisis is over and that the country is on the road to recovery. This has been boosted by the recent revision of the terms of the EU/IMF bailout and the release of figures indicating strengthening economic growth (GDP expanded by 1.6% in the second quarter of the year, a rise of 2.3 per cent on the same period in 2010). These developments prompted one government minister to declare that he was starting to see “light at the end of the tunnel”. However, when we examine the data more closely we fine that the grounds for such optimism are rather tenuous. Bailout For a start, the revisions to the bailout, a reduction in the interest rate by two per cent and an extension of the loan period from seven to fifteen years, does nothing to reduce the overall burden of the debt. Indeed, under the new terms Ireland could actually pay more, with more being extracted over a longer period of time. In the short term the lower interest rate will reduce annual repayments by around €600 million. This sounds a lot but because of the size of the debt will only mean a reduction in annual interest payments from €10 billion to about €9.4 billion. Despite revisions the terms of the bailout are still impossible to satisfy. That they were revised was a recognition that the original terms would have resulted in a default occurring much sooner. While the new terms are just as draconian they delay default and allow creditors to extract as much as they can from Ireland in the intervening period. The debt agreement also leaves open the possibility of a second bailout. Two speed economy While the Irish economy has grown in the past two quarters, heralding a technical end to an almost four year long recession, what growth there has been is largely accounted for by exports (growing by over 6 per cent this year) and is also largely concentrated within the foreign owned manufacturing sector. Such export lead growth has given rise to the belief that the country can “trade its way” out of recession. But as long as multi-nationals drive exports they will have a limited impact on the domestic economy. It will also do little to improve state finances given the low level of corporation tax. There are also indications that growth in this sector is starting to ease, with the latest NCB Purchasing Managers’ Index for the manufacturing sector showing a fall for the second month running. This is linked to the slowdown in the world economy and the general fall in manufacturing activity. All this serves to highlight the two-speed nature of the Irish economy and the degree to which it is dependent on international developments. The domestic side of the economy continues to stagnate. So alongside positive the GDP figures we have data covering the same period which indicates that personal consumption declined by 2.4 per cent; net government expenditure fell by 3.3 per cent; and investment was down by a huge 14.4 per cent. Other negative indicators include the unemployment rate (forecast to rise to almost 14 per cent), with 31,000 fewer people employed in 2011 than in 2010; the growing number of insolvencies; and falling retail sales. Banks Another factor weighing on the Irish economy is the on-going banking crisis. Despite various once and for all solutions it has not yet been resolved. Irish banks continue to post losses and hold massive liabilities. The high level of mortgage indebtedness, with 90,000 mortgages (11 per cent of the total market) in arrears or having to be restructured, could be a trigger for another crisis within the banking sector. This has the potential to raise losses in the banks to €100bn, with the knock on effect (given the state’s support for the banks) of increasing Irish state debt to €250bn. Of course, the financial crisis is not apart from the rest of the economy - the continuing stagnation of the domestic economy, manifested in high unemployment, declining incomes and the fall in property values, feeds into it. Austerity What is also feeding into the weakness of the domestic economy is the on-going programme of austerity that has seen deep cuts in public spending and increases in charges and taxes. This is to continue into the foreseeable future with the government set to unveil a further four-year programme of austerity that will have at its heart the privatisation of public services and assets. The government has also indicated that its budget in December will be even more draconian than planned, with cuts likely to exceed the €3.6bn already announced. So amidst the claims that things are getting better, for many Irish people things are bad and about to get worse. While this may appear to be contradictory what it actually highlights is the class nature of the policies being pursued by the Irish Government and the EU. These have more to do with making the working class pay for the crisis than reviving the economy (indeed austerity and debt have served to dampen economic growth). This is the measurement of success for the ruling class. The recovery they envisage is one that rises on the back of a decimated working class and a reversal of many of the social gains made over the last fifty years. |