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| Crisis in Europe is the Crisis of the Imperialist World System |
 by Steve da Silva - BASICS Issue #20 (July/Aug 2010)The economic crisis unfolding in Europe today is the crisis of a putrefying world imperialist system. All across Europe, working people are being confronted with the concerted attack of the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the form of imposed “austerity measures”, which will result in raided pensions, job losses, slashed wages, and massive cuts to social security and the public sector. The pretext for the wave of “austerity measures” now being imposed is what is being called Europe’s “sovereign debt crisis”. Most of the EU countries have total debts ranging from 50% to 115% of their GDP and annual budget deficits up to as high as 14% of GDP. By these measures, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland appear to be in the worst positions. In early May 2010, the IMF, the European Central Bank, and the European Union passed what they are calling a 750bn-euro “stabilization package”, “bailing out” the governments that they placed into such dire fiscal crises to begin with. As a condition of the “stabilization” plan, by 2014 all EU countries must slash their budget deficits to below 3% of GDP and their overall debts to below 60% of GDP. This can only come by way of an unprecedented attack on working people and must entail a thorough restructuring of the state in the interest of capital. Blaming the workers for the current fiscal crisis in the EU is absolutely ludicrous considering that it was less than two years ago that nearly every central bank in the imperialist countries forked over trillions of dollars in “bailout” packages to financial corporations. In the EU alone, these bailouts totaled approximately €4 trillion. These same corporations and the financial institutions that represent them are now demanding that workers pay for the fiscal crises created by capitalism. In fact, there is no other way from within the parameters of the imperialist world system for the current crisis to be resolved. The “austerity measures” being imposed on European workers today is merely the acceleration and intensification of the program of neoliberalism that has been attacking workers and peasant peoples everywhere for the past thirty years. Since the 1980s, workers in every country have been on the defensive against attacks on their wages and social security. The blocs of monopoly capital that constitute the financial basis of institutions like the IMF and the World Bank have kept held at bay the crisis of the overaccumulation of capital (i.e. idle capital unable to find investment) through a combination of measures by: • Steadily increasing the exploitation of workers; • Continuously cutting corporate tax rates; • Raiding the public sector for its assets; and • Plundering the planet of its natural resources. The effect of neoliberalism on the Third World has been most devastating and has taken its toll on billions of people. In exchange for IMF and World Bank loans taken on by Third World ruling classes (propped up and in many cases installed by the imperialists), these societies were “restructured” in the interests of foreign capital and at the expense of workers, peasants, and smaller domestic capitalists. Wages have been driven down, subsidies to water and food have been slashed, and state support for domestic industries were eliminated to make way for big foreign capital. But as the exploitation and plunder of the Third World comes up against its necessary social limits, the turn to intensify the exploitation of workers closer to the imperialist centers has come. It’s no accident that the peripheral countries of the Eurozone – Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland – are being hit first and the hardest. These attacks on the workers have been met with the largest wave Europe-wide mobilizations, strikes, and general strikes in decades. It is crucial for those of us trying to comprehend the current crisis that we are very clear about where this current system is taking us. The largest corporations and blocs of corporations in the imperialist world system strive for the highest possible profits and the greatest degree of control over world markets. In their struggle for growth and survival, monopoly capital must of necessity carry out a combination of the following measures, which we know all-to-well to be characteristic of “neoliberal” capitalism: • The raiding of public assets as a means to open up completely new markets; • Intensifying the exploitation of workers everywhere; • Continuation of mergers, acquisitions, and hostile takeovers of stronger firms over weaker ones as a means of reducing competition between firms in similar industries; • Keeping consumption and debt levels as high as possible, which comes into contradiction with the tendency to impose wage structures that can less and less sustain the debt and consumption levels of yesteryear; • Plundering and raiding the resource-rich regions of the world, which has expressed itself in the most violent forms in the past decade with the wars and occupations in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Haiti; • Most ominously, the threat of a violent redivision of the world market by the imperialist countries by means of world war as a means to eliminate the competition of some bloc of monopolies in the world. The current wave of “austerity measures” is just the most recent phase of the crisis of the world imperialist system. The attack on working class people in Canada has intensified in the last two years and it can be expected to worsen as the overall crisis sharpens. Tags: |
| Last Updated ( Monday, 05 July 2010 18:57 ) |