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Austerity breeds worker resistance throughout Europe

Published Feb 1, 2012 8:04 PM

‘Down with the government, Troika out!’ Protest of PAME in Athens at the hotel where the Troika were staying.
Photo: KKE

As January ended, so did several meetings where representatives of the global 1% gather to decide the fate of hundreds of millions — the 99%.

The first one was the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where 2,500 billionaires, bankers and politicians met to decide how to best expand their domination of the globe.

This year they were preoccupied with the problems caused by the ongoing and intractable capitalist economic crisis.

A Jan. 29 Associated Press report of the meeting described it this way: “The five-day gathering of business and political leaders ends without the enthusiasm of past World Economic Forums. … Europe's crippling debt crisis dominated the world's foremost gathering of business and political leaders, but for the first time the growing inequality between the planet's haves and have-nots became an issue, thanks largely to the Arab Spring uprisings, the Occupy movement and other protests around the globe.”

Europe’s bankers and government leaders held a separate continentwide meeting in Brussels and another, more specific one, in Athens. In both they were trying their best to dump the costs of the crisis on the backs of the European working class.

The European Union has dispensed with even sham democracy in Italy and Greece. They have forced the appointment of banker-technocrats to key government posts to replace politicians who had lost the ability or the will to impose the austerity programs the bankers think can resolve the crisis in favor of big capital. Their aim was to make the workers pay the lion’s share of the costs of the crisis.

The International Monetary Fund had just reduced its forecast for worldwide growth of the economy from its earlier September prediction. Now it expects a recession in Europe — meaning the economy will shrink rather than grow.

Across the continent, the working people who must sell their labor in order to live were rising up. The Occupy movement set up igloos in Davos, workers struck in Brussels, and unionists demonstrated in Athens. But that wasn’t all.

Belgium
First general strike since 1993

Belgium is a small, industrialized, heavily unionized country in northern Europe. Its economy is in relatively good shape compared to those in Greece and Italy. The government nevertheless recently announced plans to cut social spending and raise taxes.

European leaders had scheduled a one-day meeting on Jan. 30 in Brussels, which is the “capital” of the E.U. This was bad timing, especially since the agenda for their meeting was at its heart how to squeeze more out of the European workers.

So Belgium’s workers greeted Europe’s leaders with their first general strike since 1993. Despite a vicious anti-union campaign in the corporate media, joined by all the traditional capitalist political parties, there was high participation in the walkout.

The strike stopped production in both the Flemish- and French-speaking regions of the country. Trains and trams closed down. In the ports of Antwerp and Zeebruge, despite government threats to use force against the unions, ship traffic was halted. Workers blocked the industrial areas of Liege and Charleroi in Wallonia starting at 4 a.m.

There was no way Europe’s political leaders could miss the strength of the action. Instead of their flights landing at the international airport just outside Brussels, they were rerouted to the Beauvechain Air Base 25 miles southeast of the city center.

The capitalist politicians are caught between two menaces to their rule: their capitalist system that has reached a dead end, on one side; and a working class that is beginning to wake up and fight, on the other.

According to a report in the Jan. 31 issue of the German progressive daily Junge Welt, the campaign against the strike by the Belgian government and the pro-capitalist media and political parties failed. More than that, it served to provoke the workers’ anger and mobilize them for the strike.

Greece
Unions protest ‘Troika’ meeting

The popular name for the three hated partners — the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Union bureaucracy — is the “Troika.” The 99% may hate the 1% in their own country, since each European country has its own capitalist ruling class that exploits the rest of the population. But the Troika introduce the element of foreign economic rule.

These days, even where local rulers might concede to massive worker resistance, the Troika intervene to tighten the austerity belt even further. No cuts, no loans, say the Troika.

That’s what the Troika’s representatives were telling the Greek government in January. Prime Minister Papademos himself is a banker-technocrat recently installed by the Troika to replace the veteran social-democratic politician George Papandreou, a third-generation Greek political leader.

On Jan. 25, “at the crack of the dawn the All Workers’ Militant Front (PAME) carried out a dynamic protest in Athens outside the hotel where the delegation of the Troika is staying and called on the working people to rise up against the government, the plutocracy and their allies. The protesters of PAME blocked the central entrance of the hotel and shouted slogans from the loudspeakers expressing the opposition of the workers and the people to the policy that leads them to bankruptcy and impoverishment.” (inter.kke.gr)

Later, the demonstrators took down and burned the flag of the E.U. that had been hanging on the hotel.

PAME is a militant union confederation that is close to the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). PAME sometimes acts at the same time as other union confederations, at other times on its own. It has called dozens of general strikes, national and regional, in the past two years.

The latest was on Jan. 17, when the three labor centers held a major strike throughout the wider Athens region. That strike’s aim was to respond to the government’s anti-worker measures, which include cutting salaries by $200 to $275 a month, abolishing seasonal bonuses, while introducing privatizations, flexible (for the bosses) working hours, increasing anti-popular taxes, etc.

The KKE considers the economic crisis unsolvable through capitalist measures.

Italy
Rebellion in Sicily spreads

Like Greece, Italy now has a prime minister appointed by and beholden to the banks — Mario Monti, an economist and former member of the European Commission. Because Monti replaced the reactionary billionaire misanthrope Silvio Berlusconi, there was little popular resistance to this abuse of what remained of Italy’s capitalist-dominated democracy.

Appointed as 2011 ended, Monti’s task was to impose severe austerity on the workers, while forcing the bosses to pay some of the taxes they consistently avoid, and to do this without arousing mass rebellion.

In mid-January, however, demonstrations and strikes began in Sicily, an island south of the Italian peninsula that historically is less industrialized than Italy’s north, though now 42 percent of fuel in Italy is refined there. Much of the population is conscious of its regional identity.

The participants were not just the workforce in traditional unions, but included truckers, fishers, farmers and shepherds, who were also protesting the sharp increase in gas prices — 40 percent over the previous year — reminiscent of the recent struggles in Nigeria.

Besides withholding labor, the demonstrators set up roadblocks that brought the economy on the island to a halt during the five-day action.

Later in the week, students joined the protests in Palermo in solidarity and burned a tricolor flag, saying it was a symbol of the Italian state, whose financial maneuvers were driving the people to poverty while enriching the usual suspects.

On Jan. 23, the truckers’ actions spread to continental Italy, blocking main traffic arteries in an action that lasted until Jan. 27. Automobile manufacturer Fiat was forced to shut down a half dozen factories starting Jan. 24 due to a shortage of components.

According to the transport union leading the protest, the strike was at the national level and was related to the high cost of fuel, insurance and road tolls.

Romania
Widespread if undefined resistance

The end of Romania’s post-World War II participation in the socialist bloc came in 1989, when a military coup’s firing squad executed President Nicolae Ceausescu and his partner, Elena Ceausescu. This brutal killing was celebrated in the capitalist West.

At that time, Romania’s population was 23 million. It had no foreign debt, which the regime had paid off in full despite the unpopularity of the measures taken to accomplish this.

Currently, after 20-plus years of integration into the capitalist world, Romania’s population has dropped to 21 million, half of its 8 million jobs have been lost, and 3 million Romanians have emigrated. The foreign debt is now about $150 billion.

In other words, Romania, along with the rest of Eastern Europe, has for the last two decades become a semi-colony ruled and plundered by Western European imperialist banks, much as Central America is plundered by U.S. imperialist banks. This fate is undoubtedly the nightmare of those in the peripheral West European countries — Ireland, Portugal, Greece — who can imagine their country swallowed whole by the European Central Bank if there is no resistance.

In May 2009, under a plan agreed to with the IMF and World Bank, Romania got a $17 billion loan on the condition of reducing already low government worker salaries by 25 percent and pensions by 15 percent. Last December, even before getting more IMF demands, the Romanian president announced a virtual privatization of all public hospitals.

Many campaigns erupted to this plan on Facebook, Twitter and in the media, and the president withdrew his proposal. But it was too late. The accumulated indignities finally unleashed an avalanche of public protest that began Jan. 13, with public demonstrations in Bucharest, the capital, and in Cluj, Sibiu, Targu Mures and other cities.

In Bucharest there was street fighting with the police. By the evening of Jan. 14, three demonstrators had been injured and 29 arrested. The political leadership of the movement in Romania may be unclear, but it is clear that there is lots of unhappiness with the new capitalist system.