The question of how to stop the Con-Dem government’s programme of cuts lay on the table, but remained unresolved at the massively attended Coalition of Resistance conference in London on Saturday.
Around 1,300 people from around the country thronged in and out of the overflowing conference hall to hear dozens of speakers in different parts of the building and nearby halls.
The opening plenary featured school students and heard the newly-elected UNITE leader Len McCluskey leader of Britain’s biggest trade union. McCluskey pointedly ignored calls by Bob Crow of the transport union RMT and Mark Serwotka of the PCS civil service union, who spoke in favour of co-ordinated strikes.
Earlier last week, McCluskey breathed fiery words calling for "an alliance of resistance" he claimed would “rock the establishment” and force the Con-Dem government to step back from its plans to "decimate the very fabric of the welfare state".
But, adhering to the Coalition of Resistance’s founding statement, which talks only of general “opposition” to cuts, the notion of taking effective action to disrupt the state’s plans, was not part of his script.
CoR co-founder former NATFHE General Secretary Paul Mackney said it was in transition from being a pressure group to becoming a mass movement. Its success, he said, will be measured not by “programmatic elegance but by the breadth of the movement” – implying that united action was everything and clarity of purpose unimportant.
There were a few references to the raging crisis in Ireland which brought together EU finance ministers in an emergency summit in Brussels yesterday. But in practice, participants struggled to go beyond the low-levels aims set out in the CoR’s founding documents. From the platform, there was a studious avoidance of using the “capitalism” and “crisis” in the same sentence.
In the “analysing the crisis” debate, a wide range of people discussed the nature of the crisis: was it only financial, was it deeper, was it systemic? Keynesian and Old Labour solutions such as increased state spending, more taxation flew thick and fast as did proposals for various levels of protest up to and including General Strike. Film maker Ken Loach, who denounced the trade union leaders and Ed Miliband, was one of the few to point out that there was a crisis of the capitalist system that could not be remedied by policies such as “taxing the rich”.
A group of campaigners from North East England put forward a resolution proposing a “representative structure based on democratically elected representatives from local/regional groups”. In the event, the 120 people were nominated to a national committee due to meet in the coming weeks.
The big turnout and open spirit of the conference, despite its generally limited politics, shows a huge willingness to build a united movement against the government. The ongoing campaign by school students, some of whom will be picketing with rail and tube workers in London today and rallying in Trafalgar Square tomorrow, shows the enormous determination of a new generation not to cave in and to take their struggle to the wire.
They, and millions of working class people who are being offered only mealy-mouthed words by their leaders, are owed a lot more than patronising support. They deserve a real explanation of the crisis and a way out of it that can mount a serious challenge to the bankrupt capitalist system.
The raging debt crisis in Ireland, which on Saturday saw 50,000 people on the streets of Dublin on a bitterly cold day, with their leaders calling for a “campaign of civil disobedience”, was up against the fact that the mainstream opposition parties are signed up to the same cuts as the discredited Fianna Fail-Green government.
Struggles around Europe – from Portugal to Ireland, from students to public sector workers – are up against the same brick wall. The strategy of taking the struggle against the cuts forward to the formation of People’s Assemblies that can become the vehicle for transforming economic and political relations, is the red-hot issue of the day. Come to the December 11 event and start to go beyond resistance.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
For revolutionary solutions to create a sustainable, not-for-profit economy in place of global capital alongside a real democracy based on People’s Assemblies. Visit our web site at www.aworldtowin.net
Showing posts with label Coalition of Resistance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Coalition of Resistance. Show all posts
Monday, November 29, 2010
Friday, August 06, 2010
The crisis and spending cuts: cause and effect
The Lib Dem-Tory government stands accused of making cuts in public spending that are purely “ideologically driven”, that are “unnecessary” and being carried through just to please their rich City friends.
In launching the Coalition of Resistance in The Guardian this week, former Labour cabinet minister Tony Benn wrote: “We reject these cuts as simply malicious ideological vandalism, hitting the most vulnerable the hardest.”
In the same spirit, writer and blogger Richard Seymour claims that “there is no urgent need to pay off Britain’s debts”, and that the cuts agenda was driven by big business interests. This view is shared by many trade union leaders.
If, as is suggested, the Coalition’s intentions are essentially “ideological” and not necessary, it follows that they can be stopped in their tracks and even reversed by a great deal of protest and systematic opposition.
After all, the cuts are but a policy decision taken by a right-wing government when there are other options available. Or so it is implied. So if sufficient pressure is applied, the Coalition might be persuaded to change course.
This is the first of several difficulties with this approach. It helps to foster the illusion that the Coalition could be for turning and that there are more rational, progressive options available.
Nor is it true that all sections of business support the cuts programme. There are at least 1 million private sector jobs that are dependent on public sector contracts who are already losing out, while the risk of plunging the economy deeper into recession are very real.
What is sidestepped and even ignored is the profound and deepening crisis of the capitalist system as a whole as the source of the cuts. In fact, the term “capitalism” isn’t used by Benn once in his otherwise forthright appeal to come together to fight the cuts.
The truth is that the budget crisis facing Britain is but one aspect of the great unravelling of decades of debt that sustained the global economy and the financial system.
Debt increased at every level, from consumers to companies to banks to whole countries. A survey by the McKinsey Global Institute found that average total debt (private and public sector combined) in ten mature economies rose from 200% of GDP in 1995 to 300% in 2008. In Iceland and Ireland, debt-to-GDP ratios reached 1,200% and 700% respectively.
In 2007, the bubble began to burst when poor Americans were unable to pay for their subprime mortgages. The following year, the global financial system went to the edge of collapse, plunging capitalist economies into a deep recession which is worsening.
Even The Economist had to acknowledge the connection. In a special edition on debt, the magazine acknowledged: “Hyman Minsky… argued that these debt crises were both inherent in the capitalist system and cyclical. Prosperous times encourage individuals and companies to take on more risk, meaning more debt. Initially such speculation is successful and encourages others to follow suit; eventually credit is extended to those who will be able to repay the debt only if asset prices keep rising (a succinct description of the subprime-lending boom). In the end the pyramid collapses.”
There is, therefore, a material cause-effect relationship between the crisis of the system as a whole and the mountains of debt that leave the British state having to find £40 billion a year in interest payments on government bonds. Attempts to buck financial markets failed in Greece, Ireland and Spain, which led all the major British parties to pledge substantial cuts during the election campaign
Capitalism has to drive down living standards to sustain the profit system and the cuts are part of this onslaught. We don’t need to try and find a substitute budget to help capitalism out of its problems. The challenge is to develop an alternative to capitalism itself and build a coalition of forces to challenge for state power through a network of People’s Assemblies.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
In launching the Coalition of Resistance in The Guardian this week, former Labour cabinet minister Tony Benn wrote: “We reject these cuts as simply malicious ideological vandalism, hitting the most vulnerable the hardest.”
In the same spirit, writer and blogger Richard Seymour claims that “there is no urgent need to pay off Britain’s debts”, and that the cuts agenda was driven by big business interests. This view is shared by many trade union leaders.
If, as is suggested, the Coalition’s intentions are essentially “ideological” and not necessary, it follows that they can be stopped in their tracks and even reversed by a great deal of protest and systematic opposition.
After all, the cuts are but a policy decision taken by a right-wing government when there are other options available. Or so it is implied. So if sufficient pressure is applied, the Coalition might be persuaded to change course.
This is the first of several difficulties with this approach. It helps to foster the illusion that the Coalition could be for turning and that there are more rational, progressive options available.
Nor is it true that all sections of business support the cuts programme. There are at least 1 million private sector jobs that are dependent on public sector contracts who are already losing out, while the risk of plunging the economy deeper into recession are very real.
What is sidestepped and even ignored is the profound and deepening crisis of the capitalist system as a whole as the source of the cuts. In fact, the term “capitalism” isn’t used by Benn once in his otherwise forthright appeal to come together to fight the cuts.
The truth is that the budget crisis facing Britain is but one aspect of the great unravelling of decades of debt that sustained the global economy and the financial system.
Debt increased at every level, from consumers to companies to banks to whole countries. A survey by the McKinsey Global Institute found that average total debt (private and public sector combined) in ten mature economies rose from 200% of GDP in 1995 to 300% in 2008. In Iceland and Ireland, debt-to-GDP ratios reached 1,200% and 700% respectively.
In 2007, the bubble began to burst when poor Americans were unable to pay for their subprime mortgages. The following year, the global financial system went to the edge of collapse, plunging capitalist economies into a deep recession which is worsening.
Even The Economist had to acknowledge the connection. In a special edition on debt, the magazine acknowledged: “Hyman Minsky… argued that these debt crises were both inherent in the capitalist system and cyclical. Prosperous times encourage individuals and companies to take on more risk, meaning more debt. Initially such speculation is successful and encourages others to follow suit; eventually credit is extended to those who will be able to repay the debt only if asset prices keep rising (a succinct description of the subprime-lending boom). In the end the pyramid collapses.”
There is, therefore, a material cause-effect relationship between the crisis of the system as a whole and the mountains of debt that leave the British state having to find £40 billion a year in interest payments on government bonds. Attempts to buck financial markets failed in Greece, Ireland and Spain, which led all the major British parties to pledge substantial cuts during the election campaign
Capitalism has to drive down living standards to sustain the profit system and the cuts are part of this onslaught. We don’t need to try and find a substitute budget to help capitalism out of its problems. The challenge is to develop an alternative to capitalism itself and build a coalition of forces to challenge for state power through a network of People’s Assemblies.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
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