COMMUNISM HAS NO BORDERS
About economy in Europe and in North America
By Daniel Paquet
dpaquet1871@gmail.com
Let’s deal with a piece of news from USA. The New
York Times writes: “The unions representing
the faculty (on strike since the beginning of September, Ed.) say the sticking
point is the university’s insistence on a multiyear pay freeze, followed by
raises that would depend in part on the level of tuition income from
students. The unions say they have
agreed to save the university money by significantly increasing what professors
pay for health insurance. The Brooklyn
Campus, in Downtown Brooklyn, and the C.W. Post faculty in Brookville on Long
Island have most of the university’s nearly 18,000 undergraduate and graduate
students.” (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/).
While some national union leaders in USA
discovered the modern panacea to guarantee a future for “their” workers, that
is long term business-workers cooperation; the Irish unions came to another
conclusion: “More than ever, the trade
union movement needs to find an independent political voice for engaging and
leading its members, based on a total rejection of the neo-liberal medicine
being force down workers’ throats.
[…] But the real problem, we (the
Communist Party of Ireland, Ed.) would argue, has been the failure of the
movement to represent and give leadership to its members. One of the root causes of this is the long
involvement of the trade union movement in social partnership.” (Socialist
Voice, Social partnership is dead,
September 2011, Dublin, p. 1).
Thinking that they speak to an illiterate mob,
the US authorities deign to stammer a few words. So, “speaking at a Labor Day (Sept. 5th,
2011, Ed.) rally yesterday in Cincinnati, Biden (the current deputy President
of the USA, Ed.) said unions are the only non-governmental power with the power
and capacity to stop the onslaught against the middle class. The middle class is under the most direct
assault in generations. The other side
has declared war on labor’s house and it’s about time we stand up. Oh la la, is it not a flourishing and
beautiful stand for the Man involved in everything but jobs’ creation in his
own country? (http://blog.aflcio.org/2011/09/06/biden-only-unions-can-stop-middle-class-onslaught/
Let’s turn back our head to the Irish
communists: “Despite the fact that class
is not determined by income, there are enough commentators in the media, and
indeed within the trade union movement, who are happy to see class purely in
terms of income, who maintain that Ireland has a majority middle class, with a
working-class rump and a lucky few at the top.
And they cite Ireland’s wage levels as proof of the middle-class
majority. The argument goes further,
stating that higher wages alone will make more people middle class in Ireland –
that somehow class is a life-style choice, not a social relation. […] With more than a third of the work force
engaged in semi-skilled and manual work, it is not that surprising that so many
people exist on low wages. This is
hardly a life-style choice. The jobs, quite simply, are not there to
support the myth of a middle-class majority in Ireland.” (Socialist Voice, The myth of a middle-class majority,
Dublin, September 2011, p. 2).
Nevertheless, the US People’s World (the CP USA electronic newsletter) insists: “The jobs that disappeared in the Great
Recession were middle-class, and the fewer jobs created now pay a lot
less. The study, by the National
Employment Law Project, based on comprehensive federal occupational and wage
data, found that from the start of the Great Recession – also known as the Bush
Crash- in the first quarter of 2008, through its statistical end two years
later, 60 percent of the jobs lost were middle-income. In current dollars, those jobs paid between $
13.53 and $ 20.66 per hour. Based on
40-hour workweeks, that’s between $ 28,142 and $ 42, 973 per year. And 4 million of those jobs went up in
smoke. […] And it is important to remind readers that
the U.S. still faces a deficit of 11 million jobs.”
What about the US northern junior partner,
Canada? According to the newspaper La Presse, the Canadian Minister of
Finances, M. Flaherty, declared at Ryerson University, early September, “ the
Canadian economy remains very fragile […]
World economy was weak during those last months, and being a trade
nation, we must acknowledge that perturbations abroad have –and we cannot avoid
it- an influence on our economy.”
(September 1st, p. 2)
The same day, one of the most important company
in Canada and a “strong” capitalist asset in the province of Québec, Bombardier
“declared sky-rocketing profits by 53% for the second quarter of this
year”. The company is now the first
railroad and the third airplane builder in the world. In 2011, the net benefits spanned from 138 to
211 million $.
In Europe, “the flagships of the French
economy, the giant corporations listed on the CAC 40 stock index and the
genuine multinational corporations, made a total profit of around 47 billion
euros, up 7.4% over the same period in 2010.
Of course, the results remain contrasted, and while 27 corporations have
improved their net result, 13 have experienced a fall. Nevertheless, it is to be noted that only
Carrefour and Veolia Environnement made a loss, all of their brethren having
made a profit.
[…] In
the first half of 2011, the Renault group made record sales with 1.4 million
cars sold. On a world market that was up 5.9%, Renault’s sales rose by 1.9%
compared to the first half of 2010. […] Renault now sells 39.5% of its cars outside
Europe.” (l’Humanité in English,
-www.humaniteinenglish.com - Economic Activity Down, Unemployment Up, Paris
Stock Index Rejoicing, Paris, 2011-09-09).
The apparent recovery is due in part at the
cost of wages and jobs, with an increase in the off-shoring of production. Elsewhere
in Europe, workers suffer also from the crisis, especially the working class in
Greece. It was no news that the
Communist Party of Greece (KKE) led the people’s movements to fight back
against the PASOK government policies, supported by the conservative party
(ND). In a recent statement, the KKE
wrote: “In France, in Britain, in
Austria the retirement age and social-security contributions of the workers are
on the increase. In Italy, in Spain, in
Ireland unfair taxes have increased dramatically. In Austria, in Poland, in Romania, in the
Czech Republic, in Ireland, the salaries of the workers are being significantly
reduced as well as the number of public sector employees.
In Greece, the real causes of the inflation of
the public debt rely on: “the fiscal
management of the governments of ND and PASOK to the benefit of the monopoly
groups in the post-dictatorship period.
Basic common characteristics are the legal tax cuts for the
profitability of big capital, extensive tax evasion and the goldmine of state
support for the business groups.
[…] That is to say, during all
the previous years, the state borrowed
in order to serve the needs of the profitability of capital and now it is
calling on the workers to pay. […] In the period 1981-85 the government followed
a social-democratic form of management,
with the aim of assimilating a section of the workers through clientelist
hiring to the public sector, the nationalization of problematic private
businesses, etc.
[…] In
2009, Greece’s military spending was 4% of GDP, in comparison to France’s 2.4%
and Germany’s 1.4%.
[…] Whatever the result of this struggle between
various sections of capital and imperialist states, the offensive of the ruling
class will continue and escalate in order to ensure cheaper labour power, the
acceleration of the restructurings and privatizations, the selling off of
public property to the monopoly groups.
[…] The
state revenues are sufficient to pay the salaries and pensions. […] In
2010, Greece bought six frigates from France (2.5 billion Euros) and six
submarines for Germany (5 billion Euros). The solution for the workers is not to return
to the past, to the protectionism of the capitalist economy at a national level
but to move forward to people’s power, to socialism. […] It should demand that big capital pays for
the social security funds and not the people’s families. […] If
the government actually resorted to borrowing because it cannot pay salaries
and pensions then the overthrow of the monopolies power must be
accelerated. The development path of the
people’s economy, socialism can pay salaries and pensions utilizing the rich
domestic natural resources. (Athens,
15/7/2011, Political Bureau of the CC of the KKE).
The “bogeymen” and the inspiration
The conservatives, big capital are
ideologically losing ground. They now
intimidate people, especially in USA where they try to resuscitate the shadows
of the past, e.g. like during the years of witch-hunts: “Great trade unionists like Phil Raymond,
Nadia Barkan, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, James Ford, William Z. Foster, Wyndham
Mortimer and the list goes on –we all know about the racist bill-boards that
one dotted the highways of this country with Martin Luther King. Jr. seated
next to Communists at a school training civil rights activists and then there
are people like W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson- what was their ‘crimes’? ‘Friends’ of the party like Smedley Butler
often spoke side-by-side with Earl Browder and the Minnesota Farmer-Labor
party’s two socialist governors, Floyd Olson and Elmer Benson were very vocal
in claiming Communists as their friends while Communist John Bernard of
Minnesota’s Iron Range was elected to the United States Congress on the
Farmer-Labor ticket.” (Alan Maki, local district spokesperson CP USA, http://mnmarxist.blogspot.com/2011/09/many-activists-are-coming-to
resent.html)
On the other hand, the Canadians for Peace and
Socialism (CPS) “provide critical support to the CPC (Communist Party of
Canada, Ed.). […] We do not advocate the building of another CP
of Canada. We struggle for a correct Leninist
line for the CP and we persist in that struggle. The CPC has strengthened some of its
positions and still has some way to go on others. It is susceptible to petty bourgeois radical influences
and that is inevitable as new forces come into the party that is not
proletarian in origin. That in my
opinion has been the underlying weakness of the post-war history of the CPC as
mass working class base was eroded by the combination of the cold war and the
class collaborationist role of leadership of social reformism. The working class of Canada has paid a very
heavy price for anti-communism, the ideology of the bosses. What is commendable about the CPC is that of
late it has improved its electoral work and unlike the CPUSA has not succumbed
to liquidationism and maintains its press, builds the YCL. It continues to struggle to improve its
theoretical and ideological work.
[…] A Communist is someone who
accepts the responsibility for the whole class struggle and for the whole
international communist movement and that includes even when we believe it has
weaknesses. Communists struggle for unity and do so with what is at hand always
keeping in mind that we must take as many convinced workers, farmers and
intellectuals with us.” (E-mail of Don
Currie, CPS; to Daniel Paquet, Monday September 5th 2011).
Communist
News
La Nouvelle
Vie Réelle
marxistas-leninistas
latinas hojas
Le sourire
de l’Orient
ARCHIVES
La Vie
Réelle
Pour la
KOMINTERN now!
L’Humanité
in English
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