Posted by John, April 22nd, 2011 - under Neoliberalism, PIIGS, Resistance.

Tags: Fighting back

For decades the ruling class in the United States has waged a one sided class war against American workers. There has been a massive shift of wealth to that tiny minority that owns or controls the machinery and factories, mines and offices. This is where we workers produce the wealth they steal.

For example wages in the US have been falling for over 3 decades. Tax cuts have overwhelmingly favoured the rich.

So confident is the US ruling class that is is supporting Tea Party Republicans whose agenda has been to openly attack workers’ rights and their ability to further resist cuts to their wages and conditions. (Obama’s agenda is to produce the same result but with agreement rather than confrontation. However that is another discussion.)

Wisconsin surprised the ruling class. Workers occupied the Capitol for 17 days with teachers and others striking in defence of union rights and health insurance schemes.

The labour movement has been reinvigorated. Sort of. To quote Marx out of context ‘the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.’ The task is to overthrow the muck of ages in the US labour movement through struggle. Wisconsin may herald the beginning of cleaning out the Augean stables of reformism and decline.

But Wisconsin exists not on its own but as part of a wider resistance to decades of neoliberalism. In Europe Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain or the PIIGS are on the brink and the crisis of capitalism and overaccumulation there has produced massive resitance. In Iceland the government fell and the people have twice rejected referendums in support of bailing out the bankers. In France there have been a number of general strikes against the Sarkozy austerity program, a program which may intensify if the PIIGS debt crisis spreads to their bankers in Germany and France.

In Ireland five socialist members of the United Left Alliance were elected to the Dail earlier this year, promising to use it as a platform to resist the neoliberal austerity program.

In Greece there have been eleven general strikes in the last 18 months against the Socialist Party’s austerity program. The program has entrenched poverty in the class but not yet worked to save the bankrupt bosses. The ruling class is demanding more and more attacks on workers and the anger, already at high levels, may increase and turn the one day strikes into something more, something that threatens the whole edifice of Greek captialism and its impoverishment program.

In the Arab world the masses are challenging the neoliberal agenda of their dictators, demanding food and freedom, justice and jobs. The US is trying to retain power in the region through a combination of force and cajoling, of support for Obama-like ‘change’. Changing leaders however does not change the system that produces poverty and unemployment.

It doesn’t, if Egypt is any guide, even produce real democracy. This is because democracy threatens the local bourgeoisie and US imperialism.

Here in Australia 30 years of class collaboration has produced a massive shift in wealth to the bourgeoisie. According to a recent ACTU Economic Bulletin: ‘The profit share of national income is now near the record highs it reached in 2008, while the wages share of income is the lowest since 1964.’

We can’t predict what the spark will be in Australia for the resistance to the neoliberal agenda, but the events in the US, Europe and the Arab world give us great confidence it will happen.