The Idler
23rd December 2012, 15:32
The Pain in Spain (http://socialiststudies.org.uk/socstudy86.shtml#spain)
Socialist Studies
No.86 Winter 2012 (http://socialiststudies.org.uk/socstudy86.shtml)
The Pain in Spain (Rests Mainly on the Working Class)
Some 5.7 million workers in Spain, equivalent to almost one in four workers, are now seeking work, according to official figures from the Spanish government. The country's unemployment rate rose to 24.6% during the April to June of this year. That is the highest rate since the mid-1970s (BBC NEWS 27th 2012). Spain is the fourth largest economy in the Euro-zone and requires a €100 billion loan to bail out its bankrupt banking sector. As a condition for the loan the Spanish government has to introduce €67 billion of cuts in expenditure over the next three years.
There are 1.6 million empty houses throughout Spain, many outside the capital, Madrid where protesters have created a tent city similar to the ones erected by the homeless in many of the States in the US. Spain is already in economic depression. Half of workers in Spain between 18 and 25 are out of work. Youth unemployment exceeds 50%, matching the figures in Greece.
The latest spending reduction by the government, which includes 63% cuts to coal subsidies, has resulted in thousands of job losses and has provoked desperate but futile resistance by miners. The cutback came just as the government spent billions rescuing the banks whose exposure to the housing crisis runs into billions of Euros. This June, some 8,000 miners went on strike facing wage cuts and job losses. Striking workers blamed the government, bankers, German politicians, the Central European Bank, Brussels bureaucrats, the IMF, everyone but capitalism.
In response to the high levels of unemployment Red Cross grassroots clinics in Spain have sprung-up everywhere to provide food hand-outs and emergency money to desperate unemployed workers to feed families and pay bills. Workers have two years on unemployment benefits then they have to fall on savings, friends and families then begging.
Shortly 25 % of those unemployed will have nothing and will be forced to beg. There is also mass migration by workers who have the ability to leave the country to find employment abroad, like South America. Workers from Spain living outside the country have increased by 20%.
Sonia Madrid Vega, an unemployed teacher, was recently interviewed by a journalist from Britain. She told him:
We buy less, we eat less. We never go out and I haven't bought myself new clothes for years. All the extras go on the children, for their clothes, their shoes, their school meals. I don't know what we'll do when the savings run out...we were two young happy people with great dreams and ambitions. I can't think about what lies ahead. We thought the good times would never end, but we were wrong (DAILY TELEGRAPH 21.07.2012)
Under capitalism, there are no “good times” for the working class neither in Spain nor elsewhere in the world. If you are a worker you cannot have “great dreams and ambitions” in a society where the means of production and distribution are privately owned and where the profit motive overrides human need. To have aspirations under capitalism is a pretentious delusion.
Capitalism can only recover when profitability in the productive sectors is sufficiently restored and capitalists are prepared to invest in order to exploit labour-power and accumulate capital. Before capitalism returns to profitability there is a period of economic and social pain.
And that economic and social pain requires a devaluation of old and dead capital, both real and fictitious. Debt must be 'deleveraged' or written off, empty houses held by banks sold at a loss, company assets like airports, supermarkets and hotel chains, local television and so on must be disposed of to “vulture capitalists” at fire-sale prices, so-called “zombie” companies must go bankrupt, workers unprofitable to employ must lose their jobs, wages have to fall (as they are currently doing in Greece), the State has to cut back expenditure on so-called social services and what Marx called the “industrial reserve army” of labour must increase in size to exert greater downward pressure on wages. And this is precisely what is happening in Spain despites the strikes and riots.
The unemployed teacher’s poor grasp of the economic reasons of why she and her family find themselves living precarious and uncomfortable lives is indicative of the current low level of political understanding of capitalism and its economic laws by the working class. The thought of an alternative Socialist system free from class exploitation and the social problems generated by capitalism never entered the unemployed teacher’s mind. In her interview there was no acknowledgement of capitalism as an anti-social exploitive system with a history and a potential end in class struggle. Nor of the urgent need for workers like herself to consciously and politically establish Socialism.
All capitalism can offer to the working class is exploitive wage slavery and poverty with periodic levels of high unemployment. Workers have to learn that there cannot be a crisis -free capitalism. There are no economic policies that can prevent economic crises and trade depressions.
Workers cannot escape from lives of poverty, toil and social alienation while the means of production are privately owned. Capitalism can only be run in the interest of the capitalist class. It is their social system.
So, what can be done?
Unfortunately, the limit of the workers response to the assault on their pay and working conditions is to strike and demonstrate while a small number of workers want to fight the police. The Trade Unions in Spain called for a General Strike in March 2012 against the government’s labour reforms which led to attacks by some protesters against banks, shops including Starbucks.
Another General Strike took place in September with little more success than the previous one. General Strikes have not stopped a determined government from “liberalising” the labour market and carrying out economic and social reforms while the violence merely leads to arrests and imprisonment.
The Spanish government has secure control of the police and armed forces. Demonstrations and riots have been met by the full force of the coercive machinery of government. Stone throwing, letting off fireworks and charging lines of anti-riot police have been no match against batons, plastic bullets, tear gas and water cannon.
Strike action is limited. One of the worst times for workers to strike is in a trade depression when firms are going bankrupt and making workers redundant. The use of violence against the police changes nothing.
And turning attention towards the wild politics of the capitalist Left and the anarchists is a recipe for disaster. The Left and anarchist groups have parasitically leeched onto the discontent of millions of workers in Spain as they have done in Greece. They propose a politics of direct action of either physical violence or an assault on private property. Some behave like latter day Robin Hoods. Supermarkets are raided and the stolen food is distributed to help feed jobless farmworkers and other unemployed workers (TIMES 7th September 2012).
Another direct action tactic in Spain is to vandalise banks. As one anarchist recently wrote on her blog:
During the strike, many banks in Barcelona were targeted. The outcome were classics of the iconography of the European riots and many might argue a beautiful act of anger – colourful and dramatic. But is it politically effective? For me the key to direct action is that it has both a symbolic and a practical political effect. Symbolically it is clear that smashing the facades of banks creates a striking picture of resistance, which is why anyone doing such a thing is always surrounded by media cameras and the images easily make the front pages of the newspapers. Its direct in that it’s not asking for things to change, not asking leaders to make decisions for us, but taking control of our own lives and making the change here and now (http://randnotizen.steirischerherbst./how-to-hold-up-a-bank-on-riots-and-flamenco-dancing).
Here is the politics of the child; all rage and fury. When has breaking window glass of banks and other financial institutions ever been “a striking picture of resistance” or “taking the control of our own lives”? The symbolism is just an empty gesture politics. Nothing changes and capitalism and its institutions survive to carry on exploiting the working class.
What these political idiots forget is that the means of production and distribution including the supermarkets and the food within them are private property. They are owned by capitalists. And they are protected by the capitalist State.
When “direct action” has taken place, the police have been called in by supermarket and bank owners and arrests made. Prosecutors have obtained legal orders banning some protesters from going anywhere near supermarkets and banks. Those found guilty of theft by the courts are imprisoned.
Direct Action politics is a dead-end politics. Direct action does not lead to Socialism only to violent confrontation, imprisonment, injury and death. The Left and the anarchists no more understand capitalism than the politicians and bankers they blame for the current economic crisis and trade depression. So, what can be done?
Socialists have long been criticised for not immersing themselves in the immediate day-to-day concerns of the working class. Well, the immediate concern of the working class is to establish Socialism. This appears a hard pill to swallow when workers are losing their jobs and their houses. However, trade union action is severely limited by the trade cycle, there is no right to employment, there is no economic policy which will prevent economic crises from occurring and gains in wages and working conditions are as quickly lost as gained. Until Socialism is established the social problems facing workers will not go away.
So, workers must start to think politically in line with their own class interests. There are five interrelated political steps which Socialists suggest have to be taken.
First, workers must stop giving support to the various capitalist political parties in Spain and in other countries. They should recognise that what is needed is Socialist awareness; that capitalism is the cause of their social problems not the failing of this or that politician.
Second, they should recognise that capitalism must be replaced by Socialism – not the reformist capitalism of the so-called Spanish Socialist Party and its equivalent but the Socialism of common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
Third, workers should be aware that they have the same political interests as workers elsewhere in the world. Immigrants are not to blame for the problems of workers in Europe. Immigrants face the same social problems as indigenous workers. It was Marx who wrote perceptively in the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO that workers have no country.
Fourth, workers should not follow leaders however benign. Workers should think and act politically for themselves.
And finally, and of vital importance, workers should become Socialists and build a principled Socialist party with a singular socialist objective of replacing production for profit with world-wide production for use.
The Pain in Spain (http://socialiststudies.org.uk/socstudy86.shtml#spain)
Socialist Studies
No.86 Winter 2012 (http://socialiststudies.org.uk/socstudy86.shtml)
Socialist Studies
No.86 Winter 2012 (http://socialiststudies.org.uk/socstudy86.shtml)
The Pain in Spain (Rests Mainly on the Working Class)
Some 5.7 million workers in Spain, equivalent to almost one in four workers, are now seeking work, according to official figures from the Spanish government. The country's unemployment rate rose to 24.6% during the April to June of this year. That is the highest rate since the mid-1970s (BBC NEWS 27th 2012). Spain is the fourth largest economy in the Euro-zone and requires a €100 billion loan to bail out its bankrupt banking sector. As a condition for the loan the Spanish government has to introduce €67 billion of cuts in expenditure over the next three years.
There are 1.6 million empty houses throughout Spain, many outside the capital, Madrid where protesters have created a tent city similar to the ones erected by the homeless in many of the States in the US. Spain is already in economic depression. Half of workers in Spain between 18 and 25 are out of work. Youth unemployment exceeds 50%, matching the figures in Greece.
The latest spending reduction by the government, which includes 63% cuts to coal subsidies, has resulted in thousands of job losses and has provoked desperate but futile resistance by miners. The cutback came just as the government spent billions rescuing the banks whose exposure to the housing crisis runs into billions of Euros. This June, some 8,000 miners went on strike facing wage cuts and job losses. Striking workers blamed the government, bankers, German politicians, the Central European Bank, Brussels bureaucrats, the IMF, everyone but capitalism.
In response to the high levels of unemployment Red Cross grassroots clinics in Spain have sprung-up everywhere to provide food hand-outs and emergency money to desperate unemployed workers to feed families and pay bills. Workers have two years on unemployment benefits then they have to fall on savings, friends and families then begging.
Shortly 25 % of those unemployed will have nothing and will be forced to beg. There is also mass migration by workers who have the ability to leave the country to find employment abroad, like South America. Workers from Spain living outside the country have increased by 20%.
Sonia Madrid Vega, an unemployed teacher, was recently interviewed by a journalist from Britain. She told him:
We buy less, we eat less. We never go out and I haven't bought myself new clothes for years. All the extras go on the children, for their clothes, their shoes, their school meals. I don't know what we'll do when the savings run out...we were two young happy people with great dreams and ambitions. I can't think about what lies ahead. We thought the good times would never end, but we were wrong (DAILY TELEGRAPH 21.07.2012)
Under capitalism, there are no “good times” for the working class neither in Spain nor elsewhere in the world. If you are a worker you cannot have “great dreams and ambitions” in a society where the means of production and distribution are privately owned and where the profit motive overrides human need. To have aspirations under capitalism is a pretentious delusion.
Capitalism can only recover when profitability in the productive sectors is sufficiently restored and capitalists are prepared to invest in order to exploit labour-power and accumulate capital. Before capitalism returns to profitability there is a period of economic and social pain.
And that economic and social pain requires a devaluation of old and dead capital, both real and fictitious. Debt must be 'deleveraged' or written off, empty houses held by banks sold at a loss, company assets like airports, supermarkets and hotel chains, local television and so on must be disposed of to “vulture capitalists” at fire-sale prices, so-called “zombie” companies must go bankrupt, workers unprofitable to employ must lose their jobs, wages have to fall (as they are currently doing in Greece), the State has to cut back expenditure on so-called social services and what Marx called the “industrial reserve army” of labour must increase in size to exert greater downward pressure on wages. And this is precisely what is happening in Spain despites the strikes and riots.
The unemployed teacher’s poor grasp of the economic reasons of why she and her family find themselves living precarious and uncomfortable lives is indicative of the current low level of political understanding of capitalism and its economic laws by the working class. The thought of an alternative Socialist system free from class exploitation and the social problems generated by capitalism never entered the unemployed teacher’s mind. In her interview there was no acknowledgement of capitalism as an anti-social exploitive system with a history and a potential end in class struggle. Nor of the urgent need for workers like herself to consciously and politically establish Socialism.
All capitalism can offer to the working class is exploitive wage slavery and poverty with periodic levels of high unemployment. Workers have to learn that there cannot be a crisis -free capitalism. There are no economic policies that can prevent economic crises and trade depressions.
Workers cannot escape from lives of poverty, toil and social alienation while the means of production are privately owned. Capitalism can only be run in the interest of the capitalist class. It is their social system.
So, what can be done?
Unfortunately, the limit of the workers response to the assault on their pay and working conditions is to strike and demonstrate while a small number of workers want to fight the police. The Trade Unions in Spain called for a General Strike in March 2012 against the government’s labour reforms which led to attacks by some protesters against banks, shops including Starbucks.
Another General Strike took place in September with little more success than the previous one. General Strikes have not stopped a determined government from “liberalising” the labour market and carrying out economic and social reforms while the violence merely leads to arrests and imprisonment.
The Spanish government has secure control of the police and armed forces. Demonstrations and riots have been met by the full force of the coercive machinery of government. Stone throwing, letting off fireworks and charging lines of anti-riot police have been no match against batons, plastic bullets, tear gas and water cannon.
Strike action is limited. One of the worst times for workers to strike is in a trade depression when firms are going bankrupt and making workers redundant. The use of violence against the police changes nothing.
And turning attention towards the wild politics of the capitalist Left and the anarchists is a recipe for disaster. The Left and anarchist groups have parasitically leeched onto the discontent of millions of workers in Spain as they have done in Greece. They propose a politics of direct action of either physical violence or an assault on private property. Some behave like latter day Robin Hoods. Supermarkets are raided and the stolen food is distributed to help feed jobless farmworkers and other unemployed workers (TIMES 7th September 2012).
Another direct action tactic in Spain is to vandalise banks. As one anarchist recently wrote on her blog:
During the strike, many banks in Barcelona were targeted. The outcome were classics of the iconography of the European riots and many might argue a beautiful act of anger – colourful and dramatic. But is it politically effective? For me the key to direct action is that it has both a symbolic and a practical political effect. Symbolically it is clear that smashing the facades of banks creates a striking picture of resistance, which is why anyone doing such a thing is always surrounded by media cameras and the images easily make the front pages of the newspapers. Its direct in that it’s not asking for things to change, not asking leaders to make decisions for us, but taking control of our own lives and making the change here and now (http://randnotizen.steirischerherbst./how-to-hold-up-a-bank-on-riots-and-flamenco-dancing).
Here is the politics of the child; all rage and fury. When has breaking window glass of banks and other financial institutions ever been “a striking picture of resistance” or “taking the control of our own lives”? The symbolism is just an empty gesture politics. Nothing changes and capitalism and its institutions survive to carry on exploiting the working class.
What these political idiots forget is that the means of production and distribution including the supermarkets and the food within them are private property. They are owned by capitalists. And they are protected by the capitalist State.
When “direct action” has taken place, the police have been called in by supermarket and bank owners and arrests made. Prosecutors have obtained legal orders banning some protesters from going anywhere near supermarkets and banks. Those found guilty of theft by the courts are imprisoned.
Direct Action politics is a dead-end politics. Direct action does not lead to Socialism only to violent confrontation, imprisonment, injury and death. The Left and the anarchists no more understand capitalism than the politicians and bankers they blame for the current economic crisis and trade depression. So, what can be done?
Socialists have long been criticised for not immersing themselves in the immediate day-to-day concerns of the working class. Well, the immediate concern of the working class is to establish Socialism. This appears a hard pill to swallow when workers are losing their jobs and their houses. However, trade union action is severely limited by the trade cycle, there is no right to employment, there is no economic policy which will prevent economic crises from occurring and gains in wages and working conditions are as quickly lost as gained. Until Socialism is established the social problems facing workers will not go away.
So, workers must start to think politically in line with their own class interests. There are five interrelated political steps which Socialists suggest have to be taken.
First, workers must stop giving support to the various capitalist political parties in Spain and in other countries. They should recognise that what is needed is Socialist awareness; that capitalism is the cause of their social problems not the failing of this or that politician.
Second, they should recognise that capitalism must be replaced by Socialism – not the reformist capitalism of the so-called Spanish Socialist Party and its equivalent but the Socialism of common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
Third, workers should be aware that they have the same political interests as workers elsewhere in the world. Immigrants are not to blame for the problems of workers in Europe. Immigrants face the same social problems as indigenous workers. It was Marx who wrote perceptively in the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO that workers have no country.
Fourth, workers should not follow leaders however benign. Workers should think and act politically for themselves.
And finally, and of vital importance, workers should become Socialists and build a principled Socialist party with a singular socialist objective of replacing production for profit with world-wide production for use.
The Pain in Spain (http://socialiststudies.org.uk/socstudy86.shtml#spain)
Socialist Studies
No.86 Winter 2012 (http://socialiststudies.org.uk/socstudy86.shtml)