Is neoliberalism finished? Have they all gone now?

Decades of rampant neoliberalism, and now Western economies are being faced with the bill. Decades of wage cuts, privatization, public service cuts, the shifting of wealth from production to finance, are now handing over the bill to various States. [Italiano] [Castellano]

Is neoliberalism finished? Have they all gone now?

Decades of rampant neoliberalism, and now Western economies are being faced with the bill.

Decades of wage cuts, privatization, public service cuts, the shifting of wealth from production to finance, are now handing over the bill to various States.

For decades we have had to listen to the fairy tale that the market would make everyone rich, that everyone would be able to afford everything, that the Stock Exchanges - a sort of goose that lays golden eggs - was just the thing to assure us a happy old age after a lifetime of precarious work.

And throughout these decades, capitalist accumulation has become more and more rapid, more and more voracious, eating away at profits everywhere, undermining safeguards, interfering with our common goods; wealth has become increasingly concentrated, the cuts have been widened, increasingly fewer people have increasingly more, and ever more people have ever less. Less income, fewer rights, less work.

And now that the bill is on the way, the various States are reminding us of their existence. Called on to answer for their national debt, called on to support the banks, national and private, called on to force feed their citizens whether they like it or not with draconian measures deemed necessary for the stability of the markets (even though stable markets do not create earnings - markets ned to grow if they are to be stable). And if local politicians are not up to the job, then the world of finance can lend its own men to the world of politics.

It is pointless for all of us to seek to become financial experts and sweat to find the cure to save capitalism from itself: capitalism will save itself - at our expense, in its intention, anyway - and at the end of the crisis the scissors will make even wider cuts. It will save itself if the ECB injects liquidity to save the banks and reasure the markets; it will save itself if Greece and maybe even Italy default, be in a controlled default or not, and if they partially reduce the debt or leave the euro and start to coin their own currencies again.

The costs of all these operations will be paid by all of us, by those who work, by students, by migrants, by the weakest links of this chain that will never be strong until it is broken.

It is we who must save ourselves, defend ourselves from capitalist expropriation and interest-driven policies that are always ready to defend the strong against the weak, the rich against the poor.

We have to say that the money is there, that it must be taken from those who have it and give it not to the banks but to the workers and the unemployed; that schools, healthcare systems and the environment must be protected and strengthened and not destroyed; that cuts are necessary, but in the higher layers of the hierarchies; that it is the directors, the managers and the politicians, the ones who have knowingly created this situation, not the lower levels, who are hitting the very ones to are saving what can be saved, keeping things ticking over, guaranteeing minimum services.

Too easy? Perhaps... but we anarchists know that it will not be the State who will defend us from Capital, we know that only self-organization and struggle can change what appears to be an unescapable future, a pit of misery that is after all a pit of injustice. We know that all this can be turned around if we all use the arms of solidarity and rights.

National Secretariat

Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici

14 November 2011