What good would it be if the general strike ends up being a bluff
Esta es la traducción al inglés del artículo sobre la huelga general y la social-democracia del pasado jueves 29.
This article was written on September 29, when a general strike was called by the two main trade unions in Spain. Its purpose was to to be the response to the labour and pension reform that have recently been passed by Spain’s Congress. It was also intentionally called for on the same day European trade unions’ were demonstrating against budget cuts and austerity measures, seen as attacks on welfare systems in different EU countries.
I lack the synthesizing and explanatory skills needed to summarize what my understanding is of the historical evolution of society and social-democracy in the present context. I will only state that it goes along the same lines so nicely drawn by Francisco Fernández Ordóñez in his short book on what social-democracy consists of, written back in the late seventies, and those noted by César Roa in his essay on the Weimar Republic (handbook for the dismantling of democracy), published this year.
I am not perseverant enough to try and develop a brief and easily read essay, like the two Spanish ones I cited. So I will instead start from the end: no premises, but go right to those conclusions, out of my social-political understanding, that I am able to derive from the latest events.
When the crisis hit in August 2007, the lefties dreamt of killing neo-liberal and wild-capitalist theories (AKA neocon). Then we would witness a strong rebound of social-democratic policies in the first world countries.
The degree of regulation would have boosted in financial markets all over the world, in a coordinated fashion. It would be a whole new framework applied to our global flea-market (what else would a global village have) we now call the world. Those highly speculative transactions that we were used to would have been strangled. The power of private financial agents, e.g. rating agencies, would have been curtailed.
Moreover, the need for a moderate, never an exponential, economic growth would be commonly accepted, as it would give way to sustainability and to prevent future crises. And lastly, the keynesian policies that the governments were broadly applying in 2008 would have resisted the markets pressures. They would evolve from their original effort in the bail-out of those banks and entities too big to fail (is now called, systemic risk), and their present focus would be the progressive recovery of the real economic activity. In this regard, we would see a strong presence of the public sector in the economic scene; so the West would have been living a re-birth of the welfare states.
I will repeat a little detail which will come in handy later in this post: in the first world, in the West.
None of these events took place, despite it being a standard speech two years ago.
So what happened? Where did this model fail?
Easy enough: the first premise was a utopia, since it is based on an immediate reaction capability, being able to make use of the social momentum of the bubble burst and to make it politically profitable. And all this was to be done in a coordinated fashion, with a global perspective, beyond cultural differences and therefore, beyond conflicting interpretations of the social-economic juncture.
Let’s be honest, there is still such a long way to go for the global village. Meanwhile, in the speeding and ambitious new economic engines of the world (BRIC, Asian tigers), workerism is hardly a mutter, whereas in old Europe we still feed a decrepit unionism of the XIX century fashion. There is so much to say about the unions’ patronage, but I don’t feel like going into it today.
Besides, we need to understand that there is still a huge gap regarding the “standard of living” (albeit we in Western countries focus now on “quality of life”). These are more than enough causes to make it impossible for the new and old empires to work in synchronicity. Not to mention the individualism strongly rooted in the Anglo-Saxon cultures. They have been spreading all around, muttering the old continental-Europe cultures, of a collectivist nature and, as far as politics are concerned, oriented by the common good and the concept of responsible freedom and solidarity, one of their main sources being our Catholic origins.
But we too, the European States, proved ourselves unable to speak with one voice. We have a political establishment so short-termed, blind, that only pursues local interests looking for the approval in the next opinion polls of their electors.
Result: there is no single direction in Europe, neither a common one for Europe and the USA, not to mention an agreement among the main political and economical actors of the world, of course. There is no voice capable of pushing the international community in the direction proposed by the (social-democrat) economists.
With that lack of coordination weighing on the international financial regulation (so badly needed in the global flea-market), time has gone by, while anemic agreements were slowly reached. Where one suggested 100 everyone signed 5, and going down. The political establishment on stage again, that of the whole world actually, since all of them are financially fed by those who, basically, are the first ones to be blamed for this last crisis. Those that in the end constitute a huge lobby, a true power in the shadow.
And the sad thing is that this lobby (as well as those that I before referred to as neocons) are neither going to gain that much by maintaining (or worsening) the former situation. Not in the long run, at least, to my understanding. Yet they may maintain their wealth on the short-term. Because they are also short-termed and blind. But that is another story, to be told another time (I hint at it below, anyway).
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Whatever. This post is already becoming too long. So by losing the first momentum, watering the revolutionary expectations and wasting the rage of the masses, drowned in surrealist and unsustainable unemployment rates, we get to the present juncture. |
The public expenditure policies continue and the investors (speculators in particular) start to take advantage of it. Rating agencies and other private agents use the power that no-one has yet taken away from them to threaten countries to twist their arm to return to the capitalist discipline and, while they are at it, to make them prefer to be friends with them rather than remembering all those planned restrictions that they had in store over their activities.
It is time to forget social protection and to remember to cut the expenditure and liberalize labour markets. Yes, sure, the first will foster budgetary balance and the second will allow us to gain competitiveness, by increasing companies’ flexibility and correcting mistakes (and obsolete conditions) regarding labour rights. But that isn’t being done the way it should be either.
We should ban the upper limit of social security contributions (correct the regressive character it still has). We are talking about lengthening the age of retirement; making it compulsorily go beyond 65. Well, this is not a life expectancy issue. Again, this is about health and “quality of life”, at least in Europe.
We should be thinking of a single modality of contract, able to finish the dual labour market problem. We are talking about making up new exceptions and differences between the seniors and the youngsters – from dual we will end up with a truly fragmented labour market. Nobody dares suggest the abolition of those privileges based on seniority within a company, or the disproportionate costs of dismissal derived from a paternalistic and objectivist concept. Nobody is willing to table again that old single contract idea, which should suppress any type of short-term contract if it were properly developed and implemented.
We should be trying to level out everybody’s rights and, specially, duties. We keep on proposing new subsidies and new exemptions that widen the gaps, warp the global playing field and damage the community as a whole. Patronage is not exclusive to unions, employers also play that game.
And whereas old capitalists ask for new exemptions from their duties and new subsidies, as they curtail labour rights, in order to be able to compete with those societies less polluted with human rights, these are not ready to free their peoples and social / workers’ movements yet. They cannot even think of giving up their present economic growth advantage.
Sorry, it does not work that way. If all the economies in the world could grow at 10% simultaneously, most likely we would be having a crack of the ‘29 every month and would exhaust our planet’s oxygen and suitable water in less than one year.
I will not support the idea that the global economy is a zero-sum game. I am not so primitive – I acknowledge the value of progress and private greed. But let me insist that it is so short-termed to such an extent. And this finally takes me to my conclusions (I know, this is already way too long for a post in a blog).
In the long run, maybe it’s good news that wild-capitalism is back to business as usual. Perhaps the same can also be said of the fact that we are going backwards regarding social-democracy and workers’ former conquers in the old Europe. Not only it is cathartic and corrects obsolete models, but also it could be necessary to go on putting pressure on the masses until the social juncture looks alike in both the old and the new economic engines.
At some point on that way, we will be able to make a proper use of the global village expression. And may it be that by then we will suffer a new bubble burst (crisis), as tremendous as that of three years ago (already!) at least. May it be that the gap between managers and the managed masses (or capitalists and workers, to use the language of the XIX Century) in terms of wealth and welfare is deep enough as to give way to a worldwide economic revolution.
Don’t get me wrong. As one of the middle class, the progressive disappearance of this concept itself hurts me as much as it may hurt anyone else. As a stakeholder, I do not want to be charged with the consequences of such development. And I neither believe in great revolutions, Marxist style, with all that blood and proletarian dictatorship, neither any other totalitarian-utopist concept along those lines.
But since social-democracy and welfare state exist as concepts, we have been able to learn that transitions may be non violent; interregna may be fairly short. I do think that sometimes we have to be roughly pushed out of comfort zone, so as to instill the will to rebuild the whole building from its base in the community.
I do believe that social-democratic capitalism is the only sustainable model in the long term. And I also believe (and this belief has been growing in me) that until people are ready to surpass and destroy the parish-pump concept of nation and to see the world as a single society, selflessly, true progress towards sustainability is impossible.
Despite that the latter requires that our little politicians overcome their own little power greed, that is so inherent to human nature, and that is obviously still utopian.
