Ireland: A Colony Once Again

Ireland: A colony once again, this time under the heel of the European Bank and the IMF

Chapter one of a savage battle between workers and capital

John McAnulty, Socialist Democracy 18 November 2010

Some sense of the convulsion gripping Ireland today is given by the editorial in the leading bourgeois journal, the Irish Times – an editorial made even stranger by the paper’s past support of Irish historical revisionism and the advancement of a post-nationalist argument that dismissed the whole idea of self-determination for Ireland and for her people as an issue in the modern world.

(Is it this that the men of 1916)…. died for: a bailout from the German chancellor … Having obtained our political independence from Britain to be the masters of our own affairs, we have now surrendered our sovereignty to the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Their representatives ride into Merrion Street today….

The current crisis was provoked by the collapse of Irish capitalist strategy on 30th September and the acceleration of the pace of collapse into chaos following remarks by Angela Merkel, the German chancellor at the Seoul G20 summit.

The initial strategy of the Dublin government was always insane. Ireland’s economy is a dependent one and Irish capital has only one strategy – subservience to transitional capital. In order to reassure the bond market they gave a cast-iron guarantee to their own decayed banks and to the major European banks who provided the money. The solution was the effective nationalisation of the failed banks, the creation of a bad bank, NAMA, and massive austerity, driving down wages, jobs and services. The mixture was seasoned with the support of the trade union leadership, who demanded a ‘better fairer’ way of paying the banks while remaining in social partnership with the government. The final decoration for this concoction was a massive dose of lies that consistently underestimated the levels of bad debt within the Irish economy.

The whole edifice came crashing down on ‘Black Thursday’ – 30th Sept when something approaching the true size of the bank bailout was revealed. A strategy aimed at assuring the bond market that every penny would be screwed out the working class began to work in reverse when the size of the debt grew past the point where it became a plausible strategy. The interest on Irish debt grew to over 9% and effectively Ireland was bankrupt.

Speaking in Seoul, where she is attending the G20 summit, German chancellor Angela Merkel said in response to the Irish difficulties:

“We cannot keep constantly explaining to our voters and our citizens why the taxpayer should bear the cost of certain risks and not those people who have earned a lot of money from taking those risks.”

The strategy of Irish capital descended to farce. Merkel had no supporters in the Irish government. The idea that Irish capital would not squeeze workers of the last drop of blood was greeted with horror.

Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan welcomed supportive comments from Britain, France and Germany. Lenihan promised to unveil a four-year programme of austerity measures ahead of the Budget in December. This will involve doubling a savage cut of 3 billion euro to 6 billion euro and a €15bn ‘correction’ over the four years.

The minister said: ‘Our EU partners have confirmed their full confidence in the budgetary strategy being pursued by the Government. It is imperative that next month’s Budget be passed in the Dáil’.

The Irish government believed that by giving an absolute guarantee to bond holders they could placate the market. Now they find that it is the sheer implausibility of that promise that is bringing them down.

They boasted that there was no need to borrow money anyway until 2011. It was the strategy of Mr Micawber – the hope that something will turn up. From that point on control of the economy began secretly to shift to the European Central bank.

The growing Irish crisis has consequences for Europe. If Ireland might be unable to meet the bill then other weak economies might also default and this is reflected in the rising interest rates they are charged, thus twisting the spiral of crisis further. The ability of the European powers to handle the crisis is called into question and the euro weakens. When Merkel called into question the central tenet of Irish policy the pace of events accelerated. Merkel was swiftly corrected by the major European powers who indicated that it was simply a proposal that at some point in the future gambling in property speculation might not always guarantee a 100% return for the major banks. In any case it was a statement steeped in the rankest hypocrisy. Many of the bondholders depending on their pound of flesh are in fact the German banks whom Merkel represents. But by then the damage was done and panic turned to rout.

The imperialist strategy in their new Irish colony is to provide sufficient funds from the ECB to calm the fears of the market and then to embark in a huge experiment to see how much can be sucked out of the Irish economy over and above the astronomical proposals already in place. It is likely that many of the proposals will be drawn from the Greek experience, even though it itself shows signs of failure and has not seen a return of stability.

Conditions will include the reform or outright cancellation of welfare programmes, privatisation of State assets, cuts in capital spending, an immediate increase in VAT and a widening of the VAT base, increases in excise duties, and a widening of the property tax base. Public pensions will include the linking of the retirement age with changes in life expectancy, cuts in the highest pensions, the changing of the base upon which public sector pensions are paid so that they are linked to average lifetime earnings, the lowering of the ceiling on pension payments and the restriction of access to early retirement. Perhaps the most dramatic effect will be in the speed with which standards of living are driven down and the speed with which assets are stripped out of public and semi-state bodies.

Perhaps the biggest weapon that the capitalist have in their armoury is the connivance of the Trade Union leadership in the general strategy of capital, hidden behind a layer of bombast.

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions is to hold a major national demonstration on Saturday, November 27 in Dublin in protest at existing budget proposals:

David Begg, the ICTU secretary, said; “Congress believes there is a better, fairer way to do this …… Simply put we need to extend the period of adjustment and focus on jobs and growth”.

In other words we should take longer and spend more on undefined investments – a crazy scenario when the effect of a longer borrowing time would be to add billions more in interest charges and when an investment strategy demands that we borrow even more at a time when the crisis amounts to an inability to borrow any money at current interest rates applied to Ireland – this in a context where the ECB will be setting the targets and the Dail will be totally irrelevant!

There has been a protracted tussle between Europe and the Irish government when they wriggled to avoid the loan. The reason for the dispute is simple. The offer that Ireland can’t refuse is meant to protect the euro, not Ireland. It will increase Ireland’s debt and freeze it for years in special measures even more extreme than the unprecedented cuts proposed already. So there are enormous political risks for the Irish capitalists:

There is the enormous loss of face and political authority involved in the return of the country to the status of a colony.

There is the loss of the power of nationalism – a big element in defusing resistance is claims that ‘we are all in this together’ and that ‘we must stand together to save the country’.

The nationalist ideology underpins the social partnership with the trade union leaderships. Will they be able put forward a programme of collaboration with the IMF?

Above all the Irish capitalists fear a call from Europe for a fairer tax regime. They are convinced that the past success of the Celtic Tiger can be explained by a policy of setting a 12.5% rate of corporation tax. If they are forced to levy at the European average they fear that the basic assumption of their strategy – that austerity now will be rewarded by a return of the good times – will unravel and they will be swept away in the ensuing explosion.

The genie will not be put back in the bottle. Angela Merkel, the leading representative of European imperialism, can (at least for a few hours) wag her finger at the bondholders. The dependent representatives of the Irish neo-colony cannot. The trade union bureaucracy, joined at the waist to Irish capital by decades of social partnership, cannot. Yet Irish capital is doomed if it does and doomed if it doesn’t. The bill is too big to pay. Even if Ireland receives a European bailout the question remains. How is it to pay the bailout? Interventions by the European Central bank and the International Monetary Fund presume some failure by native capital and the ability of outside agencies to impose harsher austerity. This is not the case here. Irish capital has done everything it can to wring salvation from the hides of the workers. The austerity can be made harsher, but that is likely to lead to complete collapse. ECB and IMF intervention merely increases the pressure on the weaker European economies, calls into question the stability of the Euro and of the European project itself. Given the absolute failure of the Seoul conference to achieve agreement and head off global currency wars, there is no government in Europe that can feel safe.

Irish workers can cut the Gordian knot. Don’t pay! Repudiate the debt! It’s not our debt! We’re not “all in this together.” Close the dud banks – seize the assets of the speculators – set up a workers bank to manage the real economy. What have we to lose? We will find ourselves at war with the bond market, but they have already declared war on us. The proposal of an independent capitalist Ireland put forward by the majority of the 1916 rebels ran its course on November 18th, 2010. We need a new declaration of independence – the declaration of freedom from capital. Irish workers, struggling for freedom, can link up with the vast mass of European workers and oppressed who find themselves standing a short distance behind on the road we are on and struggle for a free Ireland in a United Socialist states of Europe, a beacon of hope to the entire world.

We lack one thing – self-organisation – the organisation of the working class in its own interests. That means a hard struggle against the crooks and shysters to claim to lead us. That struggle cannot be avoided.

This is a Stick Up!

Are you feeling dispossessed?  I know I am.  We often think that capitalism’s “primitive accumulation” ended with the Highland Clearances.  Far from it.  Capitalism has always gained by others’ loss.  That’s the way it works and today is no different. Such dispossession, such accumulation is at the very heart of capitalism’s modus operandi.  There wouldn’t be a United States without the continental theft and the theft of a continent’s labor.  And we aren’t alone.

In the previous decade, those booming 90’s, growth was built in large part on “accumulation by dispossession”.  Whether the dispossessed were the state economies of the East or the rights and gains of workers  “guaranteed” in the West by Social Democracy.  The privatization craze of the 80’s and 90’s as well as this decade is just such a dispossession.

It takes many forms; it is legal and it is illegal.  It is violent and it is done with a smile.  It is done by legistlature far more often than by army.  Though force is often the only tool available and the ruling class is not hesitant to avail themselves of it.  After all, free people do not willingly submit to being robbed. Alas, we are slaves.  But a slave that knows they are a slave ceases to be a slave in the same way and takes the first, giant, step to freedom.

And they don’t just dispossess the poorest and the weakest; the peasant and the wage slave.  On occasion they have sought to dispossess their strongest rivals.  Bad things happen when this goes on.  While the Cold War might have put a damper, out of class necessity, on the competition and conflict between imperial powers the “natural” state of affairs is the kind of bloody conflict of the first half of the previous century.  (How quickly the ruling classes ran to their own national institutions and banks once the crisis came upon them!)  This crisis may very well usher in new blocs of powers and fiercer competition among them.

This is especially true if US capitalism comes out of the crisis noticeably damaged.  There are emerging powers, there are contenders to the throne.  There is waiting in the wings.  There are competing (and entwined) interests between nations and national blocs whose very entanglement may well heighten competition in other areas adding even more instability to the situation.  O’Casey’s “chasis” may not be upon us, but who would say with a straight face that we, that capitalism, has moved so far forward that a repeat of the horrors of the previous century be impossible?  Not I.

Today other dispossessions are taking place.  Home after home thought to be “owned” by workers, in the millions now, are being taken back by the banks, by the capitalists.  And not just in this country, but in many of the wealthiest countries workers are finding themselves, once again, propertyless.  And only with property, with capital, comes political power.  This is especially true when our real social power, our labor, remains not our own and yet our own.  The less we flex our power, the less powerful we are.  Alienation the devil be.

Marxist economist David Harvey is fond of saying that if neo-liberalism meant, in the end, a consolidation of class power by the capitalists then in no way does this crisis signify the end of neo-liberalism, for class power and capital are being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands by way of the crisis.  How many big banks existed in the US just a year ago?  And today?

Here Harvey briefly talks a little about accumulation by dispossession; its history, its current reality and what it might mean for the class struggle.

Socialists and the US Financial Crisis

Peter Solenberger
25 October 2008

The US financial crisis, in the context of the underlying world economic crisis, gives revolutionaries in the US an opportunity to discuss our socialist politics with many more workers and youth than we’ve been able to reach for many years. For years we’ve mainly participated in stumbling reform movements that failed to win reforms and discussed socialist politics with the few activists who cared to listen.

Now with the capitalists throwing off their neoliberal pretensions and demanding that the government bail them out, we’re able to say, “Yes, government intervention, but for the workers, not for the capitalists, and under the democratic control of the workers, not the dictatorship of capital.”

Workers are angry. For thirty years they’ve been told that there’s no money for jobs, no money for wages, no money for pensions and health insurance, no money for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, no money for education, and no money for infrastructure. They’ve mostly accepted the government’s spending a trillion dollars a year on past, present and future wars, since that’s for “national security.”

But now they’re being asked to accept the government’s spending trillions of dollars ($2.25 trillion paid or pledged so far) to bail out the banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions whose speculation has gotten them into trouble. They feel lied to and cheated. Much of the middle class feels the same way. A sign held up to the Wall Street skyscrapers in a September protest of the bailout captured this sentiment with the words, “Jump, you fuckers!”

Ratcheting up the rate of exploitation

Thirty years of ratcheting up the rate of exploitation underlie this anger. Average weekly earnings for US workers peaked in 1972. Working-class and lower-middle-class families have struggled to maintain their living standards since then by having more family members work more hours for more years. Women, including the mothers of young children, men and women of retirement age, and teenagers generally have jobs, if they can get them.

The real after-tax income of working-class households has risen modestly for all but the poorest, but nearly all of the increase has been needed to compensate for the unpaid labor that family members can no longer provide. Labor productivity has continued to rise, but workers have gained little from this, as the capitalists have shifted income and wealth to themselves and their entourage.

Workers are particularly incensed because they know that the US economy is entering a recession and there will be no bailout for them. The recovery from the 2000-2001 recession was weak. Many workers laid off then, especially older and less skilled workers, couldn’t find new jobs or could find only jobs at much lower pay, often part-time or temporary.

Since then, although overall employment has risen, layoffs have continued and workers laid off or entering or reentering the workforce have often had to take low-paid, part-time or temporary jobs. Many who have kept their jobs have had to take cuts in pay and benefits. Inflation has reduced the real wages of nearly all workers. The real average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory workers, 80 percent of the workforce, have fallen 2 percent in the past year alone.

While the US gross domestic product continued to grow through the first half of 2008, by most other measures the US economy has already entered a recession. By the official government statistics the number of unemployed workers has increased by more than two million from a year ago. The real number is much higher, counting those who are working fewer hours than they want to work and those who have given up looking for work. Conditions will worsen as the recession deepens.

The impact of the financial turmoil

Workers have been hurt by the housing bubble and the ensuing financial turmoil. During the bubble speculators bought apartment buildings and houses and raised rents. Now many renters are being evicted as the speculators dump their properties or declare bankruptcy. During the bubble many workers paid more for houses than they could afford, thinking that their value would continue to rise. Many took adjustable rate mortgages with low down payments and low initial interest rates, thinking that their economic situation would improve enough to pay the higher rates later. Now millions of these buyers are losing their houses to foreclosures, because they can’t pay their mortgages and can’t sell their houses.

Most workers are heavily in debt with mortgages, car notes, student loans, and credit cards. While credit was easy, they could juggle loans to ensure that all got paid, although sometimes with penalties for late payment. Now they can’t get the credit they need to juggle the loans and are having to forgo not just luxuries but necessities. They no longer have the refuge of bankruptcy, since a 2005 law makes declaring bankruptcy more difficult and less protective.

Retirees with money in stocks or mutual funds have been hard hit, since the value of their assets has fallen by a third or more and they have no way to replenish them. Workers trying to save money for their children’s college education and their own retirement have been hit too.

As always, the situation of Blacks and Latinos is worse than that of whites. Blacks and Latinos have higher rates of unemployment, lower wages and income, fewer assets, and more poverty than whites. With manufacturing and government retrenching, Black and Latino workers have less access to the relatively well-paid, unionized jobs that once provided a way out of poverty. Last hired and first fired, they have less to fall back on, since the neoliberal regime of the past thirty years has shredded the social safety net. Immigrant workers are even more vulnerable, since they can’t invoke the little protection the law gives citizens and they may be forced to leave the country if they lose their jobs.

Women have been especially hurt by the deteriorating economy, since in this patriarchal society they are usually the primary caregivers, as well as wage laborers. Even in the best of times trying to hold a job or develop a career and simultaneously take care of children, partners and often parents is daunting. With the loss of jobs, wages, benefits, social welfare, and homes the demands on women can become overwhelming, especially if they have to face them alone.

The underlying crisis of the real economy

Capitalism in its imperialist stage is the root cause of the economic crisis. In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism Vladimir Lenin described imperialism in words as appropriate today as they were nearly 100 years ago when he wrote them.

But very brief definitions, although convenient, for they sum up the main points, are nevertheless inadequate, since we have to deduce from them some especially important features of the phenomenon that has to be defined. And so, without forgetting the conditional and relative value of all definitions in general, which can never embrace all the concatenations of a phenomenon in its full development, we must give a definition of imperialism that will include the following five of its basic features:

(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital”, of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.

The curve of world capitalist development combines three underlying curves: a secular rise in labor productivity and production, a fifty or more year alternation of periods of relatively rapid expansion followed by periods of relative stagnation, and an eight to ten year business cycle.

In the early 1920s the Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev first noted the fifty or more year alternation of periods of relative expansion and stagnation and wrongly described them as “long waves,” thinking they could be explained by purely economic factors analogous to those explaining the business cycle but acting over a longer period of time. Leon Trotsky rejected this purely economic understanding of the phenomenon and explained it in terms of capitalist equilibrium and disequilibrium involving not just the dynamics of capital accumulation but also the social, political and military relations among classes and among nations. Ernest Mandel and others revived Trotsky’s concept in the 1970s.

World War I through the aftermath of World War II was a period of capitalist disequilibrium marked by economic convulsion, wars and revolutions. The 1950s and 1960s were a period of capitalist equilibrium. The period saw several recessions and many struggles, including union struggles, national liberation struggles, struggles by racially and nationally oppressed groups, and struggles by women, lesbians and gay men, and youth. But these were in the context of a world economy that was expanding relatively rapidly and class and international relations defined by bourgeois democracy and the welfare state in the imperialist countries, the Cold War coexistence of Stalinism and imperialism, and the shift from colonialism to neocolonialism.

The 1970s opened a period of capitalist disequilibrium which continues today with no end in sight. Economically, capitalism had accumulated such immense productive forces that further investment on the scale of the previous twenty years wasn’t profitable enough for the capitalists to undertake it. In the 1950s and 1960s the world economy had expanded rapidly enough so that the capitalists could make massive concessions to the workers and the oppressed to buy social peace. As economic growth slowed, the capitalists shifted their strategy from investing to expand productive capacity to jacking up the rate of exploitation. Socially and politically, the demands of the workers and the oppressed collided with the capitalists’ diminished ability to make concessions and profits at the same time. The capitalists retreated through the first half of the 1970s and then, as the movements of the workers and the oppressed lost momentum, launched a counteroffensive.

The Soviet Union, although not capitalist, went through an analogous process in which its economy slowed to a point where it could no longer deliver the rising living standards that, combined with diminishing repression, had held the country together. As the Soviet Union collapsed, the Stalinist bureaucrats transformed themselves into capitalists or administrators of newly capitalist states. The Eastern European bureaucrats generally failed to transform themselves into capitalists but instead became social-democratic or nationalist politicians in capitalist states quickly drawn into the orbit of European and US imperialism. The Chinese bureaucrats, learning from these experiences, have carried out a transition to capitalism under tight party and state control. The workers in the new capitalist states, like those in the old, are exploited at a level that would have seemed impossible thirty years ago.

Capitalist restructuring and working-class retreat

Workers have lost ground partly as a result of technological changes that have allowed corporations to restructure themselves at workers’ expense. Improvements in computers and telecommunications have allowed employers to replace workers with machines and to decentralize production. They no longer need the huge concentrations of workers they once needed. They can more easily shift production to other parts of the country or abroad, where unions are weaker, wages are lower, and governmental regulation is more lax. They can sell or spin off operations, subcontract, and outsource.

The technological changes and restructuring have increased labor productivity, but their main goal and effect has been to weaken the ability of workers to organize and resist, as the capitalists promote competition by playing off one group of workers against another.

Workers could have countered these developments by higher consciousness, better organization, and more militancy, as they have in the past. But they’ve been blocked by the bureaucratic leaders of the unions, the social movements, and the reformist political parties. These leaders do not want to risk their careers and social positions by leading militant struggles. They try to steer their organizations toward collaboration with the capitalists, rather than struggle, despite overwhelming evidence that collaboration leads to surrender or defeat.

In the US the Democratic Party occupies the space that a reformist workers’ party would occupy in a more politically developed country. The union and movement bureaucrats claim that backing the Democrats is the way to get the government “on the side of the people” and a prerequisite for improving the situation. The Democratic Party politicians welcome this endorsement, since without it they would have no leverage, but they take their orders from the capitalists who fund them and whose media can make or break them. Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election, initially protested George Bush’s theft of the election, and then stood down when the ruling class told him to do so “for the good of the nation.” Barack Obama was once a community organizer and a believer in Black liberation theology, but he renounced his former beliefs to get the $700 million in campaign contributions and the media blessing he needed to win the presidency.

The recession and the financial crisis

The world capitalist economy is entering a recession. The business cycle has peaked and is turning downward. The capitalists are cutting back investment, because they have excess capacity in most industries and are able to produce far more than they can sell. They can still make killings in the bottleneck sectors of oil and other commodities, but the high prices there are mostly a drag on the rest of the economy and are coming down as the recession develops.

The workers and the lower strata of the middle class are cutting back consumption, because they have lost jobs to layoffs and income to wage cuts and inflation and have too much debt. Foreign demand for US goods and services has picked up some with increased US productivity and the falling value of the dollar, but the US still imports far more than it exports, reducing demand for US production. Government spending, mainly on war, is the economy’s last prop, but short of a world war that alone can’t hold off a recession for long.

The financial crisis dramatically underlines the problem of speculation in the current capitalist economy. Unable to make as much as they want through jacking up the rate of exploitation of workers in the real economy, the capitalists resort to financial manipulation to increase their take. Some of this is simply swindling workers or each other by fraud or enticing their victims into lending or borrowing that they would not have agreed to if they’d known the true risk. But much of it is the collective irrationality of speculation.

Looking for extraordinary short-term gains, the speculators bid up the prices of stocks, futures, derivatives and other financial instruments that are or purport to be claims on future profits. They bid the prices well above what could be justified by the profits that the real economy of production and distribution of goods and services can yield.

For a while the speculators get fabulously and fictitiously rich, because every bad investment they make they can find some other sucker to take off their hands for even more. They play musical chairs moving from one bad deal to another until the music stops. Those who are left standing go bankrupt, and the others move on to the next game. In the past ten years we’ve seen the stock market bubble that burst in 2000, the real estate bubble that burst in 2007, and the commodities bubble that is bursting now.

A sharp recession is inevitable because of massive overproduction and overaccumulation in the real economy. An obvious question is whether the financial crisis will transform the recession into a depression. We can’t know for sure, but at this point that seems unlikely.

Having learned from the disastrous stock market crash of 1929 and the contained crashes of 1987 and 2000, the capitalist governments are moving quickly to shore up the banking and insurance system by guaranteeing loans, deposits and exchanges, arranging mergers, buying risky mortgages and other bad assets, infusing capital by buying non-voting preferred stocks that give them no managerial control, and in some cases temporarily nationalizing the institution. The US government has paid or pledged $2.25 trillion so far, and the Japanese, European, Canadian and Russian governments have paid or pledged correspondingly large amounts.

At this point it seems that the outcome of the financial crisis will be a massive consolidation of the US and world financial system. In the US half a dozen banks with one to two trillion dollars in assets each will survive, linked to a network of smaller regional and local banks. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,the two big mortgage holders now in government conservatorship, will be returned to their stockholders, possibly broken up into more manageable pieces. The financial system will be more regulated but basically back in business.

Even if the US and world economies escape a depression, we can expect a continued ratcheting up of the rate of exploitation through the sharp recession developing now and the weak recovery that will follow. The conditions of the workers and of the lower middle class will continue to deteriorate, as the capitalists continue to shift income and wealth to themselves and the upper middle class.

The deteriorating conditions of life, the increasing social inequality, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and whatever country US imperialism targets next, political shocks like Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the Sensenbrenner anti-immigrant bill, and the daily corruption, violence and injustice of capitalist society will eventual provoke a fightback. At that point all the parameters will change. Revolutionaries will participate in and lead mass struggles that could actually realize the socialist vision we propose.

A socialist response to the crisis

Meanwhile, revolutionaries should take advantage of the moment, which may be a moment of political epiphany for the working class. Workers are angry. They feel lied to and cheated. They are also scared. In their thinking, if not yet in their action, they are more open to collective and radical solutions than they have been in many years, since the situation seems desperate and the capitalists have resorted to collective and radical solutions for themselves.

Socialists should propose solutions to the crisis on the theme, “Bail out the workers, not the bankers,” following the transitional approach of the Communist Manifesto:

This cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.

The solutions should include:

1. No evictions, foreclosures or utility shutoffs.
2. No bailout of the Wall Street speculators. Reclaim their stolen wealth and prosecute them for theft.
3. Nationalize the banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions. Allocate investment and credit for human needs, not speculative profits.
4. Nationalize the transportation and energy industries. Develop mass transportation and clean, safe, sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels.
5. End the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bring the troops home now. Not a penny, not a person for imperialist war.
6. Fund jobs, wages, pensions, healthcare, education, housing, mass transportation, and alternative energy.
7. Elect committees of workers and consumers at all levels from workplaces and neighborhoods to a national planning commission to oversee the nationalized industries and the public sector generally, to ensure that they serve the people, not business, and to prevent abuses in what remains of the private sector.

The thousands of organized socialists and tens of thousands of unorganized socialists in the US can’t realize such a program of action or even much more modest reforms. Only the workers and the oppressed can emancipate themselves. But we can participate in struggles as they emerge and in the political discussions they provoke. By this we can contribute to building the mass revolutionary parties and other organizations the working class needs to emancipate itself.

*Peter is a member of Solidarity in Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti and veteran revolutionary activist in the Detroit area.

Monthly Review’s Rick Wolff Speaks on the Economic Crisis

I’m not sure about some of Wolff’s last formulations on what constitutes communism and how to get there, but I thought this lively talk rightfully refocused the discussion (if a little schematically) on some of the underlying reasons for the present crisis.  Wolff has written some of the best essays on the crisis (see Monthly Review).  His analysis here of the general trends is right on.  Well worh viewing.