IWL’s First of May Declaration
We are hearing assurances that the crisis is about to run out and yet, new problems surface that can deepen it at any time.
The government of Iceland, whose banks have caused enormous damage to other banks, essentially British, wanted their population to take over their debt. Of course, the Icelanders refused to do so and the problem is still unsolved. The crisis in Greece, one of the smallest economies in the European imperialist block is a clear evidence of the weakness of the recovery and the dangers still lurking on the horizon. And with this scenario, we can still see how financial lechers are still drawing profit out of the crisis. Millionaire business is made with credit for Greece, American banks and financial enterprises, who received astronomic amounts, now declare enormous benefits.
Governments and employers are taking advantage of the crisis to augment exploitation. Those who are beginning to get out of the crisis are the entrepreneurs, not the workers and the world’s toiling masses. The economic recovery, which is still weak and may collapse any minute now, does not stand for the recovery of salaries and lost social achievements. The contrary is true. There has been some recovery for the rich while the toiling masses are suffering clear losses.
At this stage of the crisis, the raid on popular achievements is worse than ever
Greek administration is told to make sever cuts in the public deficit i.e.: cut down social expenses. Imperialist governments get busy saving the financial system promising that it will not affect health, education and old-age pensions for the workers and popular sectors. The extra help for some workers of some countries – not all of them – did nothing but partially alleviate the suffering of some sectors. Now the governments are up against tremendous public deficits due to the money they gave up to the bourgeoisie. Employers have already received great amounts of money and now they say the need some more to keep on living. Jobs, however, were not provided and unemployment keeps on accruing. IMF and ILO reports show that unemployment will keep on increasing, they say that until 2011. It has already reached about 10% as a worldwide scope. And hit the most vulnerable sectors (immigrants, young people, and women) most.
The crisis is not the same for everybody. The rich have had great losses but only few have lost everything. They are still millionaires and lead luxurious lives. However, for the toiling masses the crisis spells real tragedies because their already meagre salaries either vanish altogether or are badly curtailed. The insurance money that some countries could offer the unemployed are running out fast and, with the alibi of very high public deficits, governments do not pose to grant new aid. And we are now talking of the imperialist countries, which might afford such aid, for in the rest of the world who has lost his job has no other income.
Capitalists know that, in order to overcome the crisis, they would have to raid on the living standards of the workers and nationalities much more fiercely while they proceed to colonise depending countries much more.
This is the task that all the governments of the world are up against. What they propose is to curtail even further the labour rights, facilitate layoffs making them even cheaper, reducing social budgets for public health and education. Entrepreneurs also increase the pace of work and days of work without any taking on new people.
We have seen how in these months employers have accelerated their plans of privatisation of public services and how dependent countries give up their energy resources to the multinationals (concessions and laws for exploitation of hydrocarbons in Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, etc.)
Barack Obama raid the rights of the toiling masses
Before he was proclaimed president, Obama negotiated with Bush a millionaire aid for the bourgeoisie and, already as president, all this packet of economic help for financial entities and car industries. Let us remember how his support for GM was subject to the acceptation by the workers of enormous cuts in their rights: pensions, salaries and health plans).
We can also highlight that in the USA, Barack Obama managed to get a health reform through the Congress. This reform was cheered all over the world as progressive while it actually meant more privatisation of health and a way of shoving the cost of it onto the shoulders of the workers who will be compelled to feed the accounts of private insurance companies.
We must warn American workers and the workers of the whole world that with this discourse of “nothing more can be done, we need everybody’s consent”, Obama and all the remaining bourgeois government on this planet are busy reducing labour and social rights.
Also on the international scope, Obama is trying to impose his plans through negotiations and using the prestige he still has. That is how, after the earthquake in Haiti last January, he managed to get his troops to occupy that country directly and in Honduras he got the toppled president Zelaya to accept the plan that definitely set him apart from resuming presidency and so it was the coup makers who organised their elections.
And yet these important accomplishments in some places cannot conceal that in other places they do manage top make headway. There is Afghanistan, where in spite of the enormous increase of troops, he can neither advance nor negotiate with the Taliban. The continuity of the war in Iraq and in Afghanistan and its extension to Pakistan are turning into an increasingly serious problem for imperialism.
The “progressive” governments are applying the same prescription for the workers
It is especially shameful to see that while unemployment is increasing and how this affects the young people most, “progressive” governments propose a higher age roof for retirement, the way Zapatero did in Spain. Furthermore, in that country they are now pretending to impose a new labour reform to make layoffs cheaper.
In Venezuela, economic crisis is affecting the toiling masses. When workers decided to fight against layoffs and for the defence of their salaries shrinking due to the inflation, Venezuelan government joined forces with the multinationals, persecutes workers who fight and jails trade union leaders.
At the same time the Lula administration handed over in Brazil the Lula administration handed over 370 000 million reals to bankers and great companies in order to save them from the crisis while for the destruction produced by floods in Rio de Janeiro not more than 200million could be found. Now we can understand why, with the crisis rampant, Brazilian banks managed to increase their profits by 23% more than last year.
What the Cuban government does for the equally badly hit by the crisis island does not differ much from the above cases. Raul Castro has announced that a million jobs will have to go. Today, this government is in the service of the multinationals that have penetrated Cuba to loot freely the workers of that country and their trade unions are controlled by the state. Capitalism brought its entire course with it and now that health and education – once their pride and an example for the world to follow – unemployment and poverty begin to surface. Cuban workers will have to fight to defend their jobs and for that purpose, they will have to achieve democratic freedoms that they lack today.
The tragedy of immigrant workers, women, oppressed races and the youth
But neither has the crisis affected everybody the same. As it could not be otherwise, the most exploited and oppressed layers have been affected most severely. Immigrant workers have seen racist aggressions and suffer evictions from the richer countries. Immigrants have been the first to lose their jobs, for it is easier to dismiss them as they have the worst jobs and fewer labour guarantees.
Women, as we have warned a year ago, were going to be badly affected by the crisis; this piece of information has been confirmed. The loss of jobs has caused the oppression of working women accrue. Each woman who loses her job recoils from her emancipation for she has to have a salary of her own not to depend on her partner. At present, many women who have lost their jobs have had to accept underpaid employment, in worse timetables and of lesser qualifications just to be able to keep their families and what is more, they have greater difficulties to get organised in unions.
We can also see how the crisis blocks up the road to the world of labour and emancipation for young people. We can also see that the policy of privatisation of education impedes the access of young people of the proletarian or popular stock to education, which is increasingly for the elites only.
In many countries, Indians and Negroes see how their oppression accrues as the labour market shrinks. The same as the immigrants, they suffer from racism but in their own countries. Native populations have been attacked by the greed of the multinationals to exploit the land.
The toiling masses begin to move in different parts of the world
A year ago workers found themselves facing up to a ruthless offensive of the governments and the employers. Workers did not manage to halt the hard blow that the beginning of the crisis meant. The messages from governments and trade union bureaucracies calling for peace and inviting to trust that recovery will promptly begin had an impact on the toiling masses who had only a distressing future ahead, where closures of factories and massive layoffs were everyday news.
Trade union bureaucracies acted as the main contention dams. They accepted closures, layoffs and reduction of rights and only in the best of the cases they asked for higher indemnity payments. Trade unions try to isolate the struggles, stop them from reaching their goal, preventing them from spreading. They only mobilise when they can see no other way out because of the pressure coming from the grassroots, but even then they try to control them and paralyse them. That is why, even today many struggles are defeated and the employer can keep on attacking without any united resistance. That is why unemployment accrues.
There have been important struggles in 2009, among which we must include that of the indigenous peasants in Peru, who defeated the Alan Garcia administration in Bangua; the heroic over 5 months-long struggle of the Honduran people against the military coup; the mobilisation against the dictatorship of the Ayatollahs in Iran; the resistance of the Palestinian people and the first massive mobilisations in Greece. These have been significant battles, but we must bear in mind that, for reasons quoted above, the working class did not walk out in worldwide movement strong enough to defeat the attack underway.
The panorama begins to change in 2010. Workers took note of the fact that public money has been given away to capitalists while there was no guarantee for their jobs and their wages. Now that the governments wish to recover the money that had given away to the capitalists by taking it away from the workers, there is a budding reaction of the toiling masses. In the whole world, especially in several European countries, mobilisations and strikes crop up one after the other. Furthermore, there have been demonstrations of students and immigrants in the USA; struggles are steady in Argentina, Mexico, etc. and there was an insurrection in Kirguizistan. We must highlight the Greek general strikes opposing the imposition that workers should pay for the enormous state deficit generated to favour financial entities. We are therefore face to face with something that may be an important massive ascent. Now what it is all about is that the mobilisation should take place and spread so as to revert the situation in which the economic crisis has left us.
Struggle for the recovery to be for the workers
Workers and exploited of the world have no other way out. We cannot expect solutions of our problems coming from any bourgeois government; we have no alternative but to fight, fight and fight. To defend our jobs, defend our right to get medical attention as well as free and public education, defend our right to a decent old-age pension so that young people, women, Negroes, Indians and immigrants should have work and have their rights respected.
The government plans are to defend entrepreneurs, capitalists. If we want a solution that will be beneficial for us, world’s workers and exploited, we have to fight against those plans. We must counter the measures proposed by capitalist governments with proletarian measures, explaining that there is no solution to the crisis except with socialism. Capitalism cannot give us a future of peace and prosperity. It only ensures opulence for just a few and increasing poverty for all the others.
Recover class unity…
The economic crisis has evidenced the fact that all the governments in the world have had a common strategy: shove the crisis on to the shoulders of the working class and all the exploited. And yet, we, the workers are still divided country by country and within a given country, we are separated from each other due to the role of the trade union bureaucracy, as we have already seen above. However, we can also see that when we do get together to fight, we are strong enough to fight. We know that in order to defeat the plans of poverty we have to fight a relentless battle: if we are to win our struggle must be tenacious and increasingly strong. And we also know that in order to win we need is the unity of all the proletarian organisations but… to fight. That is why we must publicize all the struggles where victory is achieved, of every struggle where workers achieved class unity and solidarity. We must demand from the trade unions centrals that they should stop acting as lackeys of the governments and common a mobilisation and, at the same time, we must confront these trade union bureaucracies for their lack of consistency, for building up unity with the governments and employers and not with the workers and for not taking the struggle to the end. Along this path we can build workers organisations that will be really democratic and combative that would serve us to confront the new attacks that we shall have to face soon.
… and internationalism
The First of May was proposed by the II International so that workers all over the world can show off our strength and unity. That First of May carried the banners of demanding and 8-hour working day in the whole world. Today, with the unemployment is getting worse and worse, we must demand that we should work less so that everybody should work, instead of the brutal increase of the pace and time of work. Let us demand reduction of the working day. On this First of May we must once again walk out to fight together for our demands and show our support for the peoples who are fighting against imperialism.
That is why we believe that it is more necessary than ever for workers to get organised internationally, but not the way president Hugo Chavez proposes when he pretends to build a V International by driving workers together with representatives of the bourgeoisie. We, in the IWL, are convinced that the only International that we are interested in building is one of the workers, with workers leading all the exploited and oppressed against this system that can only offer us paucity. That is why we are fighting to reconstruct the IV International, the one the hoisted the banners of Lenin and the October Socialist Revolution. We fight to destroy capitalism. We fight for international socialism.
For the defence of our jobs and for decent salaries!
Against the rescue plans for the bourgeoisie!
For the union of all the exploited against all the employers’ governments!
Long live the struggle of the world working class!
Long live the First of May!
