Public sector workers are taxpayers too!

It’s an old line but it keeps coming up: public sector strikes against pension reform are unfair to the taxpayer. It came up again on this week’s edition of Question Time  (BBC1, 3 November) in answer to the first question of the night: ‘Is it right for the public sector workers to strike when they have been offered a better deal?’ The question referred to a last-minute concession in the government’s plans to restructure public sector pensions this week, designed to head off a mass public sector day of action scheduled for 30 November. However, it hasn’t been enough to prevent a vote in favour of strike action among members of the biggest public sector union, UNISON.

Step up Home Secretary Theresa May to predictably say, no it’s not right for public sector workers to strike in these circumstances and that it’s not fair on ‘the taxpayer’:

What I think is fair is that we have an arrangement for public sector pensions that gives public sector workers…a decent pension in their retirement but also is a fair deal for the taxpayer…And remember it’s people in the private sector who have seen their pensions devastated in recent years – the taxpayers – who are paying for the public sector pensions’.

Do you see what she did there? Twice, she presents the public sector worker and the taxpayer as mutually exclusive categories and drives the usual wedge between workers in the public and private sectors, a very important tactic in Tory strategy to divide and conquer public opinion about their disastrous fiscal and economic policies. The fact that co-panellist Shirley Williams spoke directly afterwards in support of Theresa May says it all about the shameful role of the Lib Dems as junior allies in this war against jobs and pensions.

Of course, public sector workers are taxpayers too. And just like average-earning taxpayers in the private sector, they are bearing the brunt of having to bail out the banks, subsidize corporate tax evasion and the refusal of government to fairly tax the super-rich, maintain ‘public-private partnerships’ in which private companies run public services for massive profits thanks to ‘the taxpayer’ and fund dubious military adventures abroad (the drums are beating louder for war against Iran now!)

We have to resist this Tory lie and insist again and again that the public and private sectors depend on each other and that hundreds of thousands of workers across this artificial divide are underpaid, work in poor conditions and are victims of one of the most inequitable tax regimes in Europe.

But we also have to build some solidarity. Public sector unions have to speak for the thousands of private sector workers who are forbidden to be part of a union and have no recourse to employment rights. And workers in the private sector have to accept that their counterparts in the public sector are not the enemy here, that they are not the cause of their difficulties.

So is it right to strike? Bloody right it is!  The so-called concession the government offered public sector workers ahead of their strike ballot this week was, again, designed to divide and rule, promising that those within ten years of retirement from 1 April next year would not see a reduction to their pension (Note the date!)  It may even have worked to an extent. The UNISON ballot returned a 78% majority in favour of strike action but that was on the basis of a 29% turnout.

On the other hand, Shadow Chancellor of Exchequer, Ed Balls, also a panellist on the same edition of Question Time, suggests that the government’s last minute offer was calibrated for rejection. An unpopular public sector strike is just what the Tories want – a fig leaf with which to push through further cuts to public sector jobs, pensions and services.

No, comrades!  We have to stand up against this and shout a bit louder – together!

Death by credit rating…and neo-liberalism.

To paraphrase Karl Marx, a frightening spectre is stalking Europe: it is the age of the credit rating agency.  Although they have a long history, operating with a very low profile only now have their names etched themselves on the public consciousness. Denise Finney sums up their role thus:

“Credit ratings provide individual and institutional investors with information that assists them in determining whether issuers of debt obligations and fixed-income securities will be able to meet their obligations with respect to those securities. Credit rating agencies provide investors with objective analyses and independent assessments of companies and countries that issue such securities […]

“[…] The analyses and assessments provided by various credit rating agencies provide investors with information and insight that facilitates their ability to examine and understand the risks and opportunities associated with various investment environments. With this insight, investors can make informed decisions as to the countries, industries and classes of securities in which they choose to invest.” (Investopedia).

All rather benign and mundane isn’t it?  Yet, since the financial crash in 2007/08, agencies such as Standard and Poors, Moody’s and Fitch (formally, the Fitch Group) have gone a bit further than just provide “information and insight” for investors.  Between them, they have been holding a gun to the head of democratically elected governments and threatening to pull the trigger if they don’t do what they’re told. They have been disseminating what S&P call “market sensitive information” that has caused chaos on the world’s stock markets, shaken the foundations of global financial regulation and subverted sovereign governments. Normally, that kind of activity would be labelled “economic terrorism” and the perpetrators hunted down. But in the Alice in Wonderland of the global economy, it’s called “free market economics”.

It appears that the IMF or the World bank, controversial organizations at the best of times but at least accountable to the elected governments that ultimately bankroll them, no longer call the shots; it’s the CRAs. They have taken a map of the world and divided countries up according to investment grade or non-investment grade economies. The former category includes economies with the best quality companies and financial instruments and thus the safest bet for investors while the latter includes those likely to default on their existing obligations and are to be avoided like the plague. As we have seen only recently, not even the US is safe from the CRAs – it has lost its Triple A rating for the first time in the history of this kind of credit rating. The US is still a good bet for investors but the impact of that readjustment was immediate and frightening. “Nightmare on Wall St”, was the headline on MSNBC. “Dow takes 635-point tumble after S&P downgrades US credit” (8 August). And the contagion of fear has spread as fast as a London riot, with stock markets all over the world suffering record plunges.

But this isn’t a matter of abstract numbers and graphs. It threatens another global recession or even depression and thus ultimately affects us all. So why is it allowed to happen?  So far, only the Italian courts have investigated CRAs (specifically S&P and Moody’s) on suspicion of “criminal practices” such as insider trading and market manipulation. The CRAs concerned have denied it, of course, and I’d be very surprised to see any convictions.

No. There needs to be a concerted, worldwide effort to bring these agencies to account and to regulate their activities. But more importantly, we’re going to have to recognize that the financial chaos they have partly caused and on which the stock market gamblers have profited by billions is the direct result of neo-liberalism gone mad.

Time then to dig a big hole and bury this disgusting ideology for good.

Ireland. Don’t pay. Walk away.

This comes courtesy of Rab at Media Studies is Shit.

(Created by Myles123. Source: xtranormal)

Ireland’s crisis explained

I came across this gem at The Cedar Lounge Revolution.  Priceless.

(Created by Myles123. Source: xtranormal)

Dublin rocked by good-humoured demo!!

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) have organised a protest march in Dublin today and it’s just setting off on its way from Wood Quay to the GPO on O’Connell St. The demo is a protest against the government’s four-year austerity plan to raise €15 billion from the people to give it to the banks. ICTU general secretary, David Beggs, said it will be a good-humoured and well-organised event and he’s not the only one.  Queen of Irish radio, Marian Finucane, had a wee chat down the line to someone at the march, a nurse who was fed up with the whole situation after having to cancel her subscription to Sky and make other painful savings in anticipation of inevitable cuts to her income. “Is it a good-humoured event there?” Marian asked her. “Oh yes, very good-humoured!” says the nurse. “Oh good!” sighs a relieved Marian. “I hope it stays that way!”  Although she did give out about the whistles used by the protesters – a bit like those vuvuzela thingies at the last World Cup. A good-humoured, silent protest is what she wants.

No doubt Marian was mindful of smaller protests outside Leinster House earlier in the week, which were a good deal less good humoured. Tut tut. In fact, people were very angry and there was a bit of pushing and shoving with the boys in blue. We can’t be having any of that, can we?

You see, it’s really important that when the government robs the people blind on behalf of the banks and destroy the livelihoods of so many , that we maintain our sense of humour. There is no place at all for grumpiness or anger and let’s face it, the Labour Party’s Pat Rabitte really let himself down last week on RTE Primetime (Thursday, 18 November). Imagine shouting live on TV at hapless government minister, Pat Carey!

Anyway, the idea that the people should go out and protest on the streets and make their voice heard appears to bring out the reactionary instincts of the mainstream media better than no other issue.  People power and popular protest is grand when’s it’s in Burma or Thailand but not the thing to be doing in a democracy. Although, fair play to Fintan O’Toole of the Irish Times, who is giving the key-note address to the demo today – “a strange thing for a newspaper columnist to be doing” according to RTE’s man on the spot who rather sarcastically labelled him “Saint Fintan”.

And this is the thing. It seems that the media establishment in Ireland reserve the right to speak for the people in these dark days and offer us “reasonable” interpretations of events. They police the debate and determine what’s sayable and what’s not sayable, what’s doable and not doable, what’s credible and not credible. The remarkable thing, however, is that these “reasonable” interpretations are sourced to the establishment and the bond marketeers who wrecked the country in the first place. Counter it with an alternative explanation and the newscaster interjects with that Irish media cliché de jour, “Ah now, we are where we are. Let’s focus on where we go from here!”  But as Roisin Shorthall (Irish Labour Party) pointed out on radio today, “We need to understand how we got here to know why we are where we are” (RTE Radio 1, Lunchtime News, 27 November). Needless to say, she was cut short due to time constraints.

So, there’s the media lesson for the ICTU protest.  In the midst of this national crisis, the people must put on the green jersey and pull together. They must be good-humoured and reasonable, especially if they take to the streets in protest. It makes it easier to ignore or minimize. The revolution will not be televised.

See my post on what happened to Argentina at the hands of IMF in 2002. It has eerie echoes of what’s happening to Ireland right now.

Also see Rab’s take on media coverage of the student protests in England.

The War on Jobs 5: The Spending Review – “Carefully crafted brutality”

So there we have it.  After months of speculation, CamClegg Inc has revealed the details of the Comprehensive Spending Review and would you believe it? The proposed cuts will hit the poorest and the public sector hardest, with half a million workers likely to lose their jobs in the next four years.  It was what BBC journalist John Pienaar described as a piece of “carefully crafted brutality” (BBC Radio Five Live, 20 October). Interestingly, though, the BBC’s special spending review website doesn’t even headline the full extent of likely job losses; I had to dig a bit deeper for it until finding it on Nick Robinson’s blog.

This may be down to how well the government has spun the Review, breaking the proposed cuts down into small, digestible chunks.  Initially, Osborne preferred to outline annual rather than cumulative figures for job losses. But then along came the Chief Secretary of the Treasury, Danny Alexander (Lib Dem) to “accidentally” reveal (leak) the four-year figure of 490,000 as estimated by the Office of Budget Responsibility.

The government could surely round it up to the half million mark without a sweat but they won’t because it’s psychological – like the pricing we see in shops: £19.99 rather than £20.  You have to wonder, though what’s going on behind the scenes at the Treasury? Was Alexander’s leak an act of subversion, a refusal to whitewash the true extent of these cuts? Or is it an Alexander-Osborne good cop-bad cop act? There are no clues yet of turmoil behind closed doors so I suspect it’s the latter.

I will leave in-depth analysis of the Review to the experts but surely it is not the solution to the national debt crisis? In fact, it may trigger the dreaded double-dip recession we’ve been warned about over and over. As pointed out on Irish television, the pound has declined, not bounced, on the currency markets since the review was announced (Primetime, RTE1, 21 October). If that turns into a long-term trend, the market speculators may craft some brutality of their own.

The truth is that, when it comes to cuts, this divide between public and private sectors is totally bogus. They are mutually dependent and that very dependence is crucial to economic growth. No growth, no confidence means no spending, no revenue.

So what is the government’s real agenda? Justifying the projected £80 billion cuts, the Secretary of Transport, Philip Hammond, repeated on television the propaganda line that there is “no alternative” because Britain has the highest national debt to GDP ratio among the G20 nations. He’s either lying to us or he doesn’t know his facts because Britain is actually mid-league table with Germany (about 65%), a good deal less indebted than Japan (over 200%) and the US (94%). In any case, comparisons like this are difficult to sustain and sometimes meaningless because debt levels have to be offset against a whole range of economic variables, nationally and globally. They certainly shouldn’t be used as an excuse to lay waste to the Welfare state. No, as Polly Toynbee argues, what we’re witnessing is nothing less than an ideological project to shrink the welfare state for its own sake (Question Time, BBC1, 21 October) while presenting it as being in the national interest.

So against the backdrop of public protests, strikes and riots across Europe, we wait with bated breath to see how the stoic Brits will react to the review. And that’s where the idea of “carefully crafted brutality” comes into play because the true pain and damage they will eventually wreak on the economy and society will not be felt all at once or across all classes of society. Cam-Clegg Inc has been very careful to spin the cuts in advance to neutralise opposition from within and manipulate public expectations. Now it will calibrate the cuts so that they roll out bit by bit over a four year period in the hope that it will offset any possibility of concerted protest and class solidarity in the run up to the next election. If that happens, we’ll only see the wreckage when it’s far too late to put it right.

 

 

 

 

The War on Jobs 4:The Philo Tax

Greg Philo, director of the Glasgow Media Group, was interviewed on the Jeremy Vine Show, BBC Radio 2, recently (14 September) to propose an alternative to the current war on jobs and the poor in Britain. His proposal sounds very reasonable: to impose a one-off tax on the top 20% of the British population that owns 62% of the country’s wealth. This, he argues, would more than repay Britain’s £927bn of national debt.  Read all about it here at the Media Group’s website, which includes a specially commissioned YouGov opinion poll and hard figures from the National Statistics office.

It’s a good idea and one I strongly support but it has largely been ignored. I challenge you to find it reported on the BBC’s dedicated website on the impending Spending Review. But what interests me here, though, is the reaction in the media the few times it is considered on air. Philo’s public opinion research suggests widespread approval among the general population: 44% of the sample strongly supported the proposals, while another 30% expressed a tendency to support them. Yet one would think to listen to the pundits that it was an exercise in lunacy that no rational person could consider. 

Opposing Philo on the programme was Vanetia Thompson, an ex-City of London trader and author of Gross Misconduct: My Year of Excess in the City. Outraged, she was! And the fact that Philo took it all in good humour and calmly stated his case just seemed to make it worse for her. This was “the tyranny of the many over the few!” she complained. (Heaven forbid we should have majority rule in a democracy, Venetia! ) “It’s extorting the rich on an ad hoc basis”, she went on, “which is not only unprincipled but grossly unfair!”  Ah bless. But as Greg Philo pointed out, the wealthy have been extorting the less well off for decades to the point where a large section of British society is now in negative wealth, or what’s commonly termed the ‘poverty trap’. 

Venetia was also mindful of the practical problems of putting the plan into effect. Philo’s idea is that the assets of the top 10% or 20% would be valued and taxed by, say, 20%. Venetia wondered how a diamond or a painting could be valued and then taken away from some poor unfortunate in Highgrove or somewhere. Valuers and big lorries, Venetia! The rich use valuers all the time when they need to liquidise some assets for ready cash. And when they put that big Carravagio up on the wall, they do it in such a way that it can be easily taken down again to dust off or sell on. It’s not complicated.

The valuers arrive for a look at Venetia's assets

 

The thing is, though, Philo is not proposing anything objectively unfair and he’s certainly not advocating evictions or repossession. It’s not revolution yet the argument is always that increasing tax on the wealthiest people damages wealth creation, not that the wealthiest 10%  have a moral responsibility to share wealth more equally via a fair and humane taxation regime. After all, they benefit from the labour of working people and from the perks of wealth in British society including universal welfare benefits. But our Vanetia was having none of it. “You can’t be going round taxing the wealthy for the sake of it!” she protested. Honestly! The next thing, she said, Philo will be wanting to turn Britain into North Korea or  Cuba!

Artist's impression of Venetia after the Philo Tax

 

And this is the thing. Isn’t it remarkable how a perfectly rational alternative to the impending cuts is regarded by vested interests as irrational, unthinkable and a threat to the national wealth while the current plans to tax the poor and shrink the public sector is accepted without question as the only way?  It’s a classic insight into the very neo-liberal ideology that brought us to the current crisis in the first place and which underpins Cameron’s Big Society.

The Sun Gets Tough on Scroungers

I see that the Sun newspaper has launched a new campaign: “Help Us Stop £1.5bn benefits scroungers”.  It is appealing to readers to call its special hotline about those awful people next door who are earning “hundreds of thousands of pounds a week” on falsely claimed benefits at the expense of decent-hardworking-taxpayers. The paper promises to name and shame them with photos and details of how much they’re cheating the system. And it says it will pass the information on to the Dept of Work and Pensions.  Looking at the coverage so far, though, it seems odd, that these “benefit scroungers” are so happy to help the paper name and shame them, which makes one wonder what they’re being told when the Sun comes calling for their details and photos.

Anyway, the paper wheeled out its managing editor, Graham Dudman, to explain its campaign on BBC Newsnight (12 August), along with Anne McElvoy of the London Standard for critical balance no doubt. Dudman claimed to speak for the “silent majority” among its readers who are outraged that, in the middle of difficult economic times, there are people claiming benefits to have widescreen TVs, computer games and nice clothes! “That’s not what the benefits system is about”, he says, implying two things here. First, that perhaps benefit claimants should have the decency to look a lot worse off, live in a hostel or out of plastic bags; or maybe walk the streets in rags and without a shower for days; second, and more importantly I suspect,  that the system should be so draconian and miserly that it forces people to go looking for work. But as McElvoy points out, the system actually disadvantages claimants who do want to work, leaving them to make a very rational, understandable choice between being better off on benefits than dirt poor in a job. Would the Sun maybe start a campaign to change things for the better? Of course not!  For as Dudman quite happily admits, the campaign makes for “great stories and people are outraged by them. […] We like to get people angry and shock and amaze on every page!”  Indeed.

But the thing about these populist campaigns is that they appeal to the mob mentality, to the petty and the vindictive who seethe and fester as they see their neighbours do better than they and have more stuff. It is likely that most will have no hard evidence to shop their neighbour for cheating, that it’s prejudice or venegeance that really drives them. And precedent should tell us that it is very likely they will inform on perfectly innocent people. In the past ten years, there’s been a series of newspaper campaigns to name and shame your local paedophile, some of which led to libellous mistakes and even mob law on the streets. In 2003, the Sun named and shamed a convicted paedophile only to identify him with the photo of a totally innocent man. In an incident in Wales,  in 2007, a crowd sprayed graffiti on the house of a woman they “knew” to be a paedophile; she was actually a paediatrician. But, like all rabble rousers, papers like the Sun will deny responsibility for the consequences of their incitement. 

Now it’s true that there are people who cheat the benefits system and the Sun’s estimate of the total bill to the state – £1.5bn – is correct. However, it doesn’t tell us that another £3.1bn is lost through administrative error, where claimants are paid too much; nor does it set that against the millions that go unclaimed by people who don’t realise they’re entitled to it. The paper could also have put the problem into perspective by pointing out that the exchequer loses £15bn every year through tax evasion. Yes, it’s shocking! There are decent-hardworking-taxpayers out there who are not paying their taxes, though I somehow doubt the Sun will be launching a campaign against them anytime soon.  Watch this space, though. The hour of judgment is nigh.

The Big (Selfish) Society: “Thinking the unthinkable”

BBC Newsnight last night (9 August) ended with a fascinating, albeit depressing insight into what the Daily Mail reading lower middle classes in Britain are thinking about the impending cuts to welfare and the public sector.  Recently, the consultancy wing of Price Waterhouse Coopers carried out  what the reporter called “an act of corporate citizenship” to find out just how far people think proposed cuts should go. So off they went to Coventry and put together a small focus group – what they labelled a “citizens’ jury” – for a four-day gruel fest of briefings, discussion, feedback sessions and hotel coffee. PWC has done a lot of this kind of stuff for Labour and the Tories in recent years, all closely followed and taken seriously by BBC Newsnight. I’ll comment on the methodology later but first the results.

The focus group  first concluded that unemployment and housing benefits should be slashed to such an extent that recipients would have no choice but to get out of the house and get a job. Why, asked one young woman, should “decent hard-working tax-payers” subsidise these people? (Google this phrase for a tickle and get stuff like this). 

Child benefits should also be cut. People shouldn’t be paid to raise a family – and if they can’t afford it, they shouldn’t have children! Indeed, said the reporter, the group dared to “think the unthinkable” and suggest that child benefit should no longer be universal but means tested. Why should wealthy families be given child benefits as an automatic right? It’s just pocket money to most of them. And as for international development aid!! The “citizens jury” agreed that CamClegg Inc is wrong to protect aid from cuts. In these tough times for decent hard-working taxpayers, the poor of the world will just have to do without and maybe look after themselves for a change.

Now, if you have a left wing neuron in your brain at all, you’ll see what’s going on here. This little focus group was typical of the demographic that political parties have been tapping into for years now. It’s the conservative, working class and lower middle classes whose consent is crucial to the implementation of the neo-liberal project to downsize the state in the interests of the market; people who simmer with sullen resentment that they are being unfairly squeezed by the filthy rich from above and the lumpen proletariat from below. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t suggest cuts they thought might directly affect them. They were keen to insist that the government should ring fence spending on their education and their NHS.

We can’t of course take the results of this experiment in “corporate citizenship” as a snap shot of wider public opinion: it was neither scientific nor representative in its methodology and probably wasn’t intended to be. The focus group was selected from this narrow demographic and subjected to a series of presentations setting out the parameters of government thinking before convening to discuss them and respond.  It was hardly a surprise, then, that they all responded in one mind. In that light, I suspect it was a kite-flying exercise on behalf of CamClegg Inc – designed to test how their typical target voters might react to the impending cuts. Indeed, who should turn up for a summary feedback session at the end but Lib Dem, Danny Alexander, Treasury Chief Secretary and hatchet man.

So while we can’t draw any conclusions from the exercise about what the wider population is thinking and how they will respond, what strikes you about its results (and what the reporter seemed to miss) is the vision of Britain that it projects. Ultimately it’s a selfish society stripped of the welfare state, dominated by corporate interests and the free market, and dependent upon voluntarism and altruism from individuals tutored in selfishness by neo-liberal propaganda. Of course, it’s also an exclusive society. No worries about the very wealthy – they’ve always looked after themselves anyway. As for the poor on social welfare, they’ve been mollycoddled enough at the expense of the decent-hardworking- taxpayers of Britain. In short, then, it’s the Big Selfish Society for the lower middle class, Daily Mail reading, Tory/Lib Dem/New Labour voter. It’s Middle Britain by another name.

The War on Jobs 3: Echoes of Argentina

In The War on Jobs 2 (20 July), I wondered about how we should respond to the current economic crisis and if there are lessons we can learn from what happened in Argentina in 2002. But why Argentina eight long years ago? Why not an example nearer to home and more recently, such as Greece last May? After all, the Greeks protested in their hundreds of thousands against the savage cuts their government proposed to make under severe pressure from the IMF and those cuddly market speculators we all love. Well, there’s an important difference.

Greece says “Ochi!”

For all its troubles and its scandalous treatment at the hands of the international “community”, Greece still stands. Argentina in 2002 was on its knees. The circumstances that led to its collapse are eerily familiar when we look at what’s happening to Greece Portugal, Ireland and Spain – what the markets so charmingly call the “PIGS”.

But the response of the Argentinian people in 2002 was of a different order to the kind of brief explosions of anger we’ve seen in Europe these past few months. It was a mass popular uprising that crossed class lines and that was symptomatic of the shift in politics that was happening right across the continent – in Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil and Chile to name just a few countries – where people decided to fight back against the global capitalist order that was robbing them of their livelihoods and their dignity.

The IMF in Argentina: The Biggest Bank Robbery in History

The collapse of Argentina’s economy in 2002 was a long time coming but not inevitable. It came about after twenty years of IMF-imposed stringency measures aimed at repaying the country’s external debt. For a more detailed account of these measures, see this article by Joesph Halevi in the Nation magazine online, but essentially they amounted over time to a wholesale raid on the public purse that ravaged social services and put up to 18% of the population on the dole and another 18% into underemployment – that’s 14 million people in total and the equivalent of 22 million people in the UK. It also involved a partial freeze on the bank accounts of ordinary citizens (with a limit to withdrawals of US$250 per week), leaving them in financial hardship almost overnight. It was the culmination of a concerted heist that Halevi describes as follows:

In essence, during the last twenty years [up to 2002], the Argentine population has been subjected, in sequence, to the following mechanism. The state takes upon itself the burden of the private external debt. The private sector keeps running up additional debt, while the state sells out its public activities through privatization policies, thereby generating financial profits (rents) for the private corporations whether national or international. The state then unloads the burden of debt onto the whole economy, especially the working population, by compelling the population to deliver a financial surplus at the expense of wages, social services, and public investment”.

This sounds rather familiar when we think of what’s happening right across the world today. Compare it, too, with Henry Liu’s diagnoses as cited in my post, And Now the Markets 2 (12 July).

So how did the people of Buenos Aires and beyond respond to this raid on their livelihoods and financial security? Did they form orderly queues outside their banks and shout a bit or murmur mild irritation, as did the customers of the British bank, Northern Rock, when it collapsed in July 2008?  Did they write to their MP or take part in TV programmes like Question Time or the Jeremy Kyle Show? No. This is what they did…

Taking back control

Popular resistance to the economic destruction wrought by government policies had already taken root in the country before 2002.  The mid-1990s saw the emergence of roaming picketers or piqueteros, so-called for their practice of barricading streets, roads and highways in their locale and bringing transport to a halt. Most piqueteros were unemployed so this was their only avenue of protest against the economic policies that had impoverished them. As John Jordan and Jennifer Whitney point out in their excellent eyewitness account, Qe Se Vayan Todos: Argentina’s popular uprising, the remarkable thing about the piqueteroes was the extent of popular support for their seemingly destructive tactics. Essentially, they presaged the uprising to come.

Argentina says “Qe se vyan todos!”

By 2002, the increasingly savage cuts to the public sector had pushed thousands of people onto the streets to join the piqueteroes in saying no to the government, their economic advisers, the established political parties and the IMF. “Qe se vyan todos! “ became the rallying cry. “All of them must go!” And it was this widespread feeling that the political classes had failed them that led to the creation of autonomous local assemblies, leading the Pope to voice the alarm of the established order by declaring Argentina to be in a “pre-anarchic” situation. Anarchy for the Pope, the Argentinian government and the IMF was the collapse of social order, chaos and violence in which it is difficult to do business. Anarchy for the people, though they did not all label it as such, was about taking back control of their lives, establishing cooperative structures, bartering their skills and services, occupying and running their factories, and rediscovering the meaning of community and neighbourhood.  An elderly shopkeeper told Jordan and Whitney:

Never in my whole life did I give a shit for anyone else in my neighbourhood. I was not interested in politics. But this time I realized that I had enough and I needed to do something about it.”

Forget about mainstream media accounts of the uprising in Argentina which operate within the confines of the conventional wisdom that says people power of this kind is only legitimate when it challenges the evil regime on the other side of the world. Think, for example, of the difference between media coverage of people power in Eastern Europe in 1989 and people power the very next year in Britain against the poll tax. No. If you want to really understand what happened in Argentina, then Jordan and Whitney’s inspirational article is an essential primer for further reading.

Britain says “No thank you very much!”

 

So what shall we do?

“What shall I do with this new and coming hour, so unfamiliar to me?”

Federico García Lorca (1898-1936)

Of course, the uprising has had its critics within the fractious theoretical left, some of which are as afraid of this kind of people power as the established capitalist order. But the essential point they miss is this. What happened in Argentina in 2002 gave a lie to the fundamental principle of neo-liberalism: that there is no alternative. What the piqueteroes, the mass protests and the local assemblies showed was that there was an alternative; that, as Jordan and Whitney argue: 

A  choice does exist, despite the government’s blind adherence to the demands of the IMF…between sovereignty and occupation, between the local desire of people and the global demands of capital, between democracy and empire, between life and money, between hope and despair.”

Obviously, we can’t lift the specifics of the uprising and apply them wholesale to our present circumstances and possible fate in time to come but when the global financial capitalists broke down the door in Argentina and said to the people, “We are your masters now!”, the people said, “You think?”

And while we sit around thinking and debating about the destruction of democracy in our countries by the IMF and the market speculators they serve, the people of Argentina at least did something to try and take their country back. As Jordan and Whitney conclude, the lessons for us all are clear:

Perhaps the most realistic thing to imagine at the beginning of this already war-torn century, is a system free of capitalism, one without banks, without poverty, without despair, a system whose currency is creativity and hope, a system that rewards cooperation rather than competition, a system that values the will of the people over the rule of the market. One day we may look back at the absurdity of the present and remember how the people of Argentina inspired us to demand the impossible, and invited us to build new worlds which spread outwards from our own neighborhoods.”

So when we, like Frederico Lorca, ask what shall we do in this unfamiliar hour, as these cuts begin to bite and as we pay the price for the neo-liberal pillage of our public welfare, what will our answer be? Let’s hope our intellectual pessimism hasn’t quashed our optimism of will.