Workers’ Cooperatives as an alternative to capitalism – 1

Posted on December 14, 2014 by irishmarxism

In October I was invited to speak at a meeting organised by the Glasgow South branch of Left Unity on the subject of workers’ cooperatives. The post below is the first part of the text on which the speech delivered was based. I would like to thank the comrades for the invitation and for the couple of pints in the pub afterwards.

The first thing I want to do is look at two problems to which I think workers’ cooperatives can play an important role in providing an answer.

In 2008 the Irish banking system was on the verge of complete collapse. It had lent exorbitant amounts of money to commercial property development and for the construction of houses. Not only finance but employment and state revenue became overly dependent on construction. When the price of houses rose beyond a certain point, and when the commercial property market became saturated, the over-extension of property developers became evident in bad loans that bankrupted the banks.

This was an international problem because much of the financing of Irish banks came from Britain, the US and Germany for example. The bankruptcy of the Irish banks would thus have had severe repercussions for investors in these and other countries, including the financial institutions in these countries.

To save the Irish banking system, to bail out the native bankers and foreign investors, the Irish Government launched a bailout of the banks through a state guarantee of all their liabilities, worth around €440 billion in an economy nominally producing €154 billion a year. It was declared ‘the cheapest (bailout) in the world’ by the Irish Finance Minister. This could not possibly be afforded and has so far cost an estimated €64 billion, although the exact figure is still a matter for development.

This bill and the huge budget deficit caused by the collapse of construction resulted in a series of attacks on working class living standards involving seven austerity budgets consisting of a variety of tax increases, cuts in public services and investment, the robbery of workers’ pension funds, massive unemployment, emigration and lots of praise from around the world at how well the Irish swallowed the austerity medicine. From poster boy for the boom the Irish have become poster child for austerity.

In the following election the ruling Fianna Fail party was badly mauled and a coalition of Fine Gael and Labour Party was elected on the promise of a ‘democratic revolution’ and by Labour the promise it would reign in Fine Gael. The vote was a choice between ‘Labour’s way or Frankfurt’s way.’

In truth however no one could really be surprised that this coalition continued and intensified the policies of austerity began by Fianna Fail. That anyone thought differently demonstrated only a very low political awareness.

On the ‘left’ 5 United Left Alliance candidates were also elected and 14 Sinn Fein TDs out of a total of 166, although Sinn Fein had also voted for the bail-out.

In 2012 the Irish State was compelled to hold a referendum on the new EU Fiscal Compact that limited state deficits and debt. It basically required signing up to continued austerity which is why it was called the ‘austerity treaty’. Despite the unpopularity of austerity it was approved by 60% to 40%. In my view a crucial reason for this was the complete lack of a convincing alternative.

What was the alternative proposed?

This consisted of a number of elements – repudiating the debt, opposing austerity, taxing the rich, and increasing public expenditure in order to improve public services, boost employment and further economic growth.

There are two points to note about this alternative – first it doesn’t change the nature of the economic system, it is what is called Keynesianism. This does not mean that socialists should not support some of these measures, or point out the hypocrisy in their not being implemented. But the question is, if the problem is capitalism and this alternative doesn’t threaten the system then quite obviously it cannot be a solution.

The second flows from this, because if it isn’t a solution would it actually work? I’ll just take two examples from this programme – why on earth would the rich allow their wealth and income to be taken off them? And how then could the state increase public sector investment when it was heading towards budget deficits of over 13%?

This illustrates a deeper problem with looking to the state as a solution. This is because the burden placed on Irish workers was not simply, or even mainly, carried out by the banks and property developers. It was the State that made their debts the debts of the Irish people and it has been the State that has increased taxes and cut services, making their own particular contribution to cutting wages and increasing unemployment.

Since the state is a capitalist state, funded and staffed at the highest levels by the propertied classes this can really be no surprise. The actions of the capitalist state are not therefore the answer. Not only does it not have any interest in providing a solution but it is incapable of being the solution. State ownership, bureaucratic ownership, is not democratic and is totally unsuited to running productive activities the civil servants that staff it have no knowledge of.

There is no point calling for the state to nationalise the banks – they did and that was precisely the problem!

At bottom this is the root of the failure of resistance to austerity and is why it has not only failed in Ireland but in every other country affected by the financial crash.

The second point is connected to all this. If the Keynesian alternative is not a road to socialism what is the road to it?

The alternative to the view that the capitalist state will reform society is that the state is actually the mechanism for enforcing oppression and exploitation and should therefore be smashed. In this scenario of revolution the oppression of capitalist society breeds resistance which develops into a revolutionary seizure of power by the working class that then proceeds to build a new socialist society. In this society the market is replaced by planning and capitalist economic crises become history.

But how are workers to become aware that their own ownership and control is the alternative? How does it not only come to consciousness of this but is actually trained, ready and able to play this role? How in the middle of crisis is a workers’ economy supposed to rise from the ashes more or less fully formed and present itself as a qualitative advance on what has went before?

Of course in some ways capitalism itself anticipates this planning through the growth of big business with advanced forms of planning within it, increased cooperation between companies that ostensibly are in competition and increased interdependency of different firms and different countries, encapsulated in the term globalisation. This has all been demonstrated negatively through the simultaneous near collapse of the financial system, world trade and economic growth through the credit crunch plus the increased role of the state despite privatisation.

There is however one thing missing from this anticipation of the new society in the existing one and one thing missing from the scenario of revolutionary overthrow.

The missing factor is what the new society, the harbinger of socialism, actually is – the rule of the working class and its allies; the rule of the majority of society in place of the capitalist class and its managers, bureaucrats and politicians who all currently administer its rule.

Where in the anticipation of socialism within existing capitalist society is the growth of workers participation in running the economy, in preparation for taking over complete control? Where are the grounds for workers to build a new society before, during and after revolution? Where is the alternative that would avoid a new version of Stalinism where the State rules society rather than a society ruled by workers subordinating the state? Where even arises the motivation for workers to see that their own rule is the only valid unfolding of their resistance to the exploitation, oppression and iniquity of current society?

How are workers to come to see that it is they that not only can but must take control of society and its productive powers if they do not first take initial steps now through workers’ cooperatives? Are we to believe they will suddenly come to realise through a revolution – an episode of at most a few years – that they must take over the economy? How will they come to seek this as their solution unless many of them have already tried to do it and become committed to it?

The Politics of the Anti-Water Charges Campaign – Part 3

Posted on November 24, 2014 by irishmarxism

An old military maxim is that no battle plan survives engagement with the enemy. And so it proved when the Government thought it could impose water charges on a population ground down by austerity. Unfortunately for them a sizeable section of the Irish working class decided it had had enough and that this was one bite of austerity that wouldn’t be taken.

As I said in a previous post, it began to appear in the last few months that this was a battle the Government was losing. The announcement of further drastic changes to the Government’s plans this past week suggests that this is even truer now.

The charge that was provisionally priced at €176 in July is now €60 and is €160 for households with two or more adults – if the charge is paid and an absurdly name conservation rebate of €100 is claimed. The cap on charges will be in place until the end of 2018 with the promise of continuing caps thereafter. The introduction of charges is postponed for three months to January 2015; late/non payment penalties will be €30 for a single adult and €60 for other households. PPS numbers will not be required and trickle water restrictions will not be imposed, with promises that court action will not be taken against non-payment. Privatisation of Irish Water is off the agenda with other promises that legislation will be introduced to require a plebiscite before such action could be taken in future.

The Right2Water campaign noted “that the level of charges has been significantly reduced” and the Socialist Party TD Ruth Coppinger, interviewed on RTE Six One News, noted that they were low. The Socialist Party has claimed that the non-payment charges will kick in at the time of the next general election and will become the major issue within the election campaign but then make the argument that the Government won’t be able to impose them.

The argument of the campaign is that the water charges need to be scrapped, that promises of future low levels of charging are worthless, that Irish Water should either be scraped as well or else it should be retained in ‘public’ ownership, and that promises not to privatise it are also worth nothing.

The argument can also be put that for many working people €160 is €160 they already can’t afford and for others it will tip them significantly into financial hardship. The amount is not a lot but its impact is so much more painful the less it can be afforded.

None of this however may be enough; for now it is the campaign that is faced with its battle plan’s survival after further engagement with the enemy. A campaign that has highlighted the cost of water charges and the tactic of non-payment now has to answer when the cost has been significantly reduced and a credible promise is made that it will not be increased quickly. Can the campaign be maintained and can it grow and develop?

The current weakness of enforcement measures means that non-payment may not immediately have the intimidatory effect that they might have had, but the flip side of this is that the cost of paying for many is no longer prohibitive. As I noticed in the previous post, given European Commission clearance the amount of money involved for the State is not unmanageable. It can afford to retreat on this.

So as things stand the victory is not complete, but then no success is ever permanent until the final victory. One small part of austerity has been rolled back but the decisive question is how the success that has been achieved can be copper fastened and advanced.

There is no silver bullet as an answer to this question or even a combination of answers such as sunlight, garlic and a wooden stake through the heart of the vampire.

But we do know that the answer lies with those who have been mobilised in the Right2Water campaign and the militant and active campaigns that have been organised at a local level.

The immediate requirement is to make the campaign a real coherent movement with democratic functioning so that all those involved can contribute to deciding what their collective attitude is to the Government’s concessions and what they are going to do next. No one is going to decide for them. If they have the power to put the Government into disarray they should and must have the power to make their own decisions. See the initiative launched here.

It is likely the case that the issue of water charging is still the struggle that will unite active opposition to austerity and that other issues might accrete to the campaign at a local level but cannot do so as part of an overall policy unless and until the democratic organisation into a State-wide campaign has been achieved.

Time now gained can be used to campaign among the trade unions and workers to boycott and black charging and create a real campaign against water charging within the union movement.

Despite the reduction in charges there is no reason that non-payment should not be a part of the campaign. It should not however be allowed to become a means of dividing those opposed to the charges and should not be made into a loyalty test of opposition.

This does not exclude putting it up to political parties to state their policy. It is not the views of individual TDs or councillors that is the issue. It is a political question, a question of tactics not a moral obligation that failure to live up to will mean eternal damnation.

Some on the left appear to want membership cards, justifying it by reference to the Labour Party having subscription charges. I think this is misplaced and the necessity of having an organisation to belong to i.e. a real democratic state-wide organisation comes before the levying of membership charges. Membership of what and what are my rights of membership in this organisation would be the first questions if a membership card was put in front of me

The comparison with Labour raises the question whether the campaign can be treated as a political party or at least a political vehicle that stands in elections. This is a question particularly exercised by the Left whose reformist politics leaves no conception of an alternative to electoral intervention, tailor made as it is to sectarian competition.

The failure of the Left to unite despite minimal political differences disqualifies them as adequate vehicles for the workers involved in the campaign to join as a means for electoral intervention.

In relation to the water charges electoralism only has meaning if it has the potential to see those opposed to charges become a majority in the Dail. But even this is not enough since it has become obvious that the charges could be abolished with little respite from the rest of the austerity agenda. Standing in an election requires an alternative to this and as I have posted before, the Left doesn’t have this alternative.

In this respect the weakness that is exposed by elections – that an anti-austerity majority will not be elected – means that a full political programme is not required for electoral intervention. We won’t be the Government so we don’t need to pretend we will.

But this means understanding the limits of the intervention and not seeking to provide comprehensive answers that are thereby comprehensively wrong. A more limited programme would make clear that the elections are subordinated to the campaign rather than the Left which has a shameful history of subordinating the campaign to electoral intervention.

This is therefore the first reason why the elections are important (although they should not form the basis of a timetable for activity now). They allow an opportunity for the campaign to grow and develop; for the election to produce a bigger campaign at the end of it and not for the campaign to produce a bigger number of TDs.

The second aspect of this is that when the elections arrive they will be the biggest task facing the opposition to austerity and they therefore need an intervention by those opposed to it. The scale and political programme that this challenge to austerity will pose will be determined by the political development of the campaign between now and the election. This is another reason why a functioning campaign must be created as quickly as possible.

The Politics of the Anti-Water Charges Campaign – Part 2

Posted on November 8, 2014 by irishmarxism

The demonstrations against the water charges last Saturday showed that the Right2Water campaign is supported by local groups in towns and cities right across the State. This grass-roots organisation is a reflection of the strength of feeling among the working class and is its greatest political strength. It is not the creation or front of one or other, or even the whole collection, of political groups although they are deeply involved.

It is united in total opposition to the charges and to the tactic of non-payment and it should expect to be challenged by the State on both. Concessions by the Government will be offered in the next days and afterwards stronger tactics will be employed against those who remain in opposition, if they can be sufficiently isolated. This is always the way it works. Every carrot is followed by a stick.

The various organisations involved in the campaign have put forward their own perspectives for the way forward. By looking at the leaflets given out at the demonstration last Saturday I want to review what they are proposing.

Sinn Fein put out a leaflet ‘Stop the Water Charges’ which promises to reverse water charges when in Government, which rather admits it will be in some form of coalition with one of the capitalist parties after the election. Otherwise it has little to offer those who want to see the charges scrapped. Simply waiting for a new Government on the other hand is something that would paralyse and then kill the campaign.

Sinn Fein claims in the leaflet that it blocked the introduction of water charges in the North. As Eamonn McCann noted in his article in ‘The Irish Times’ I referred to in the previous post – all four main parties in the North have claimed the credit for not introducing water charges.

Eamonn McCann claims “that it was a mass non-payment campaign that prevented the introduction of water charges by Stormont in 2007.” As someone who went round doors helping to organise meetings and speaking at them I know this is, unfortunately, not true. There were numerous campaigns but none of them had a mass character and lots of signatures on a pledge of non-payment doesn’t make a mass campaign. Meetings were usually small and when candidates from the Left stood on anti-water charges tickets they generally got the same derisory vote they always got.

The parties in the new Stormont regime did indeed refuse to introduce water charges because it was very unpopular with their own supporters, and it was something that they could manage without – so they did mange without.

The Socialist Party leaflet doesn’t mention it’s a Socialist Party leaflet but hides itself, as usual, behind some party front; this time it’s the ‘We won’t pay Campaign.’ Since it already dominates the Anti-Austerity Alliance, this method of organisation it appears wedded to wouldn’t seem to be useful even to the SP.

The leaflet is however very good at putting the case for non-payment and explaining the position of the State and the legal implications of the tactic. It looks back to the successful water charges campaign in the mid-1990s but provides no indication that the lessons of more recent failures such as the anti-bin tax campaign have been assimilated.

The Workers Solidarity Movement leaflet also argues strongly for non-payment and advises on the real situation that non-payers will face. It is also honest enough to explain the counter-measures that the State could adopt to thwart the non-payment tactic, but then also points out the problems this would give to the State.

So the State could deduct the charge from wages or benefits but this would require a change in the law and would make it impossible to privatise Irish Water, which they say is the primary reason for imposing water charges. On this I am unconvinced. Charging is necessary in order to raise revenue to reduce the budget deficit, meet demands from the Troika and get the debts of the company and its future debts off the Government’s balance sheet so its debt ratio looks better. Direct State intervention to make deductions from salaries and benefits go against this project whether privatisation is hoped for in the future or not.

That the amounts might today be relatively small does not invalidate this view but does raise the point that retreat on the issue by the Government would not involve an enormous monetary cost.

In any case we should not lose sight of the fact that it is under public ownership that this attack on workers is taking place and it is under public ownership that the water service has been a disgrace with flooding, poor water quality and leakage at atrocious levels for years.

Public ownership is a euphemism for State ownership and is misleading because the public don’t actually own it and don’t, as we can see, have any say over how it is managed or run. There is no need to bum up the benefits of such ownership when it’s not the socialist alternative.

With this in mind, calls for a referendum to prevent privatisation might allow some to avoid taking a strong position on opposing the charges. It is not that surprising that Jack O’Connor appears on the television supporting the call for a referendum while SIPTU fails to back the Right2Water campaign. SIPTU members should challenge its leadership on this failure and anti-water charges campaigners should stand outside Liberty House demanding the union’s support.

The Socialist Workers Party issued a leaflet from its own political front – People before Profit, practicing the politics of feeble reformism that it condemns in its other publications. It has its own euphemisms that it uses to straddle the contradiction. So it calls for ‘people power’ instead of teaching Irish workers that the people are divided into classes and that the power and interests of the working class are different from those of the people who belong to the capitalist class.

This way of approaching politics allows the issue of class to be side-lined and, for example, the class nature of the state ignored, so that the State can be called upon to provide solutions; such as their leaflet calling for taking ‘Ireland’s natural resources into public ownership’. Like Irish Water?

The leaflet also appears to call fort a general strike on 10^th December but doesn’t have the courage of its convictions to say so. On the usefulness of this demand see a previous post. It calls for a ‘revolt’ but it’s not clear if this means revolution or is something short of it and what this might be.

The fear of using socialist terms to define socialist concepts and therefore a socialist programme and strategy sits in opposition to what appears as a hyping of the existing struggle. So the leaflet says that ‘the battle against water charges is part of a wider revolt.’

If only it were.

Its importance however is not that it is part of a wider revolt, but that it is the exception to the rule of general working class passivity and acceptance of austerity. Its wider political significance is actually that it might herald the start of a wider resistance. But then the question is how do we achieve this, or can we? Not that it already exists.

The article in ‘The Irish Times’ noted that one reason behind the anti-water charges campaign was that the people cannot “give any more” and “the people have been pushed too far.” The Workers Solidarity Movement leaflet notes that ‘hundreds of thousands of people are now saying ‘No More’”. In other words many workers have decided that they won’t pay this bill. They have not decided to stop paying the price of austerity they are already paying or perhaps new ones that will heaped on them in the future should the new boom prove temporary.

If the strength of the campaign is its local organisation then an effective national campaign structure would help to leverage that strength to support activity in weaker areas or where no campaign currently exist. Above all such a structure should provide for democratic accountability to the members of those speaking for the national campaign. It would provide the means by which a collective view can be determined and publicised on such things as the response to whatever partial concessions the Government dreams up to stifle opposition.

At this stage it would not appear to advance the overall struggle against austerity to demand that the campaign take on wider objectives. It is clearer however that at some stage it should. The best grounds on which to do so would be success in defeating the water charges. Such a step however needs preparation now for an extension of the objectives of the campaign down the line.

Fighting tax increases, cuts to public services and cuts to wages and welfare will not be easy and the tactic of sitting tight involved in ‘we won’t pay’ is obviously not an answer to these. A debate on what we are for and how we might build it is also just as necessary, if not more so.

A second tactic is to stand in elections and electoral intervention is now the favoured method of moving forward by Sinn Fein and most of the Left groups. The latter confidently argue that the former will betray the hopes of their supporters, and Sinn Fein’s support for austerity budgets in the North is all the confirmation one needs for this argument.

Unfortunately the Left’s own claims are hardly consistent either. They regularly denounce the capitalist state but their programme fully relies on it doing what they want. On this blog I have posted numerous times on how their support for capitalist state ownership and taxation of the rich are not socialist and won’t work. In other words they would effectively end up betraying their supporters were they in office just as effectively as Sinn Fein. Sincere intentions don’t enter into it.

At the more immediate level the Left does not provide an example to follow. The anti-water charges campaign relies on unity and agreement on total opposition to the charges in any form. Any sense by its supporters that it did not respond to their feelings and demands would see it lose support.

Unfortunately the Left has a culture of manipulation and a lack of critical and free debate within its ranks. It regularly calls for workers’ unity while being utterly incapable of unity within its own ranks. In fact in this respect it has gone backwards, with the demise of what limited unity there was in the United Left Alliance. It is simply incapable of containing within its present organisation and politics any mass radicalisation of workers.

A potential for radicalisation arises from the sudden upsurge against water charges, posing the need for increased organisation and politicisation of the campaign. A victory is possible, giving rise to the possibility of further advances and the need to debate now how these could be achieved.

The Politics of the Anti-Water Charges Campaign – Part 1

Posted on November 3, 2014 by irishmarxism

I was sitting in a small café at 12 o’clock having a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich, with customers at only two other tables. A group of four elderly people were talking at one while three middle aged men were talking at the other. Both were discussing the water charges, their opposition to them and the march they were going to join in one hour’s time.

I joined a feeder march at Pearse Street that went up Dame Street, up to York Street, where it collected some more supporters, and then went round to St Stephen’s Green to stop a few minutes outside the Dail to tell the Government that they “could stick their water meters up their arse”. Even the Guards on duty outside had a smirk. The thousand or so then took off to join the main rally outside the GPO in O’Connell Street where a number of other marches converged.

The demonstration was not as large as that of a few weeks before, which was estimated as 100,000, but this time there were dozens of other marches being held right across the State in cities and towns big and small. Estimates are that in total the numbers were greater – 150,000.

On 11 October the apparently sudden scale of the opposition to water charges was reinforced by the victory in the Dublin by-election of the Anti-Austerity Alliance candidate, who defeated the firm favourite from Sinn Fein because that party had done a little too much talking out of both sides of its mouth and was seen as insufficiently opposed to the charges.

Sinn Fein posters were in evidence on the march on Saturday and it was noticeable that flags and banners from other republican groups were also in evidence. The left groups were more peripheral than is usual in such marches and I didn’t see one trade union banner, although I could easily have missed it.

The demonstration was overwhelmingly working class, composed of what many on the left call ‘ordinary people’, although I’ve never considered myself extraordinary for example. The other noticeable thing was the folk songs sung from the stage, the references to James Connolly and 1916 and the general referencing to Ireland’s rebel history. It is as if, at least sections of the Irish working class go to sleep for a few years and that when they periodically wake up they look back to their greatest struggles and leaders, when their intervention into Irish history appeared to promise a new future. That hasn’t really been the case for a long time, at least in the South. A Northern banner in solidarity might have highlighted the unfinished business.

While I was in the café I was reading ‘The Irish Times’ and in particular an article by Eamonn McCann entitled ‘Public finally take to streets as water proves a tax too far’. I’m sure he didn’t write the headline so it is no criticism of him to point out that demonstrations in Dublin of 100,000 against austerity have already taken place over the last five years or so. They were organised by the trade union movement and the demonstrators were betrayed by the leaders of that same movement, as McCann alluded to in his article.

So what makes this movement different, if it is? Firstly there is a view that it could succeed, in fact an argument can be made that it is already succeeding. The Government parties have already responded by concessions in the budget to lessen the impact of the charges and did so in such a hurry they messed it up. The newspapers, radio and television news are full of reports of the panicked reaction by Government politicians, especially with an election around the corner; hundreds of thousands of registration forms sent by the new Irish Water company have not been returned and the deadline for returning them has been extended to the end of the month.

Opinion polls confirm the unpopularity of the charge and the effect of this on the popularity of the Governing parties. Labour is already a dead duck and Fine Gael support has fallen while support for Sinn Fein and ‘independents’ has grown. The new company is particularly disliked because of the millions of Euros being spent on consultants for a service the state has been providing for years (the same thing happened in the North when Northern Ireland Water was created). Bonuses are also to be paid to Irish Water staff with those at the top getting much larger amounts than those at the bottom, with the added insult from the company that they continue to peddle the line that they aren’t really bonuses.

Irish workers facing these costs believe that they are already paying for water so in effect they are being asked to pay twice and for huge management consultant bills and bonuses on top.

But previous, more outrageous decisions have failed to generate resistance that actually looks like it might win. The decision to bail out the banks, costing over €64 billion, dwarfs the water charges in scale, with bankers hardly more popular than the Executives of Irish Water – and bankers’ bonuses have certainly been larger. So what has changed?

Going back to Eamonn McCann’s article in ‘The Irish Times’: he says that paying for a substance so natural sparks a particular anger. But this isn’t really the case – in the café one guy was saying that he would be prepared to pay for water, but not twice and not for the consultants and bonuses. This, I think, is the widespread view. People are aware that they have to pay for water and sewerage services and they know this because it is obvious.

The headline over the article by Eamonn McCann in ‘The Irish Times’ said ‘Public finally take to streets as water proves a tax too far’; and that is the main reason for the resistance – it is one step too far. As one of the leaflets given out at the demonstration put it -“No more.”

The whole austerity offensive, austerity budget after austerity budget, the state effectively bankrupt, posed the question of how to resist – what to do? And resistance had to have some idea of an overall alternative. The Irish working class didn’t know what such an alternative would be and didn’t buy the one sold by most of the Left. I have examined this alternative in a series of earlier posts, for example here, here and here.

On the other hand workers are now being told that economic growth is not only on the way but has actually arrived. Unemployment has fallen and tax cuts are promised while cuts in services will end. Things look like they may have bottomed out. They don’t think that they need to pay this unfair bill and what’s more they think that there is something very practical that they can do to stop it.

They won’t get their water turned off if they don’t pay. As a commercial semi-state company the money can’t be taken off them through deductions to their salaries and wages. Sure there is the possibility of court cases but cases against hundreds of thousands? Even reduction of water pressure to the home is not so easily achieved and possible to prevent with direct, mass action. In other words it is beatable and the disarray of the Government has demonstrated to many that it can be beaten.

To be continued

Why have the Irish not revolted? Part IV

Posted on December 1, 2013 by irishmarxism

In much of Europe the workers movement developed in the latter half of the 19th century and first half of the 20^th through industrialisation, the growth of trade unions and socialist parties and the radicalisation caused by two world wars, in particular by the first. The socialist movement often led the struggle for democratic rights and freedoms and gained support as a result.

The Irish experience has been different, leading to a working class with a lower level of class consciousness. While Ireland started to industrialise early it was thrown back by the development of superior industrial development in Britain. What industrialisation did occur was small and mainly concentrated in the north east of the country. Defeat and brutal repression of Ireland’s bourgeois revolution in 1798 led to a bitterly divided working class with the most extreme reactionary ideology dominating the most advanced industrial area.

The land question was denuded of its radical potential by this counter revolution and by the effects of the catastrophic famine in the middle of the19th century when, in a population of over 8 million, around a million died and a million emigrated and the population began a decline that did not reverse until the 1970s. The number of agricultural labourers fell by 700,000 from 1845 to the early twentieth century, the number of small farmers was halved and the cottier class almost wiped out. All this could only but weaken the potential base for a radicalised land movement.

The result of all this was that when the national movement erupted in the first decades of the twentieth century in a battle for an independent state it was dominated by middle class revolutionaries who subordinated workers’ interests with the demand that ‘labour must wait’, which has been pretty much the policy of Irish republicanism since.

The new truncated statelet these most conservative of revolutionaries created was dominated by the same economic subordination as that which preceded nominal independence, resulting in economic growth after foundation of the new state at very much the same rate as before its creation; and a polity not much different than before except for the role of the new Irish bourgeoisie that often proclaimed its Catholicism more than its nationality.

The working class in its majority never broke from this political class and the socialist movement has been small and peripheral. The Second World War passed the Irish State by and during the 1950s emigration was higher relatively than it had been almost 100 years earlier, sapping all social classes of vitality and energy.

The Irish State caught the tail end of the world-wide post war economic boom and the workforce in industry increased from 259,000 in 1961 to 363,000 in 1981. Overall however there was little increase as the numbers employed as agriculture continued to decline. This growth in the working class led to some limited revival in socialism reflected in the Labour Party claiming ‘the 70s will be socialist’ before that decade came and went and republicanism being genuinely influenced by socialist ideas, although of a Stalinist-type that did not offer any real alternative.

This period saw a large growth in the number of strikes so that at one point the Irish State had the highest number in Europe (see below).

It also witnessed huge demonstrations against the high taxes imposed by the State on the working class, which amounted to 87 per cent of all income taxes in 1978. In 1979 over 150,000 workers demonstrated in Dublin with many thousands in thirty other towns including 40,000 in Cork.

At this point the Irish State’s model of economic development began to collapse. World-wide economic crisis, a weakening of foreign investment and bankruptcy of indigenous industry led to massive unemployment, renewed emigration and a ballooning State debt. That the Irish working class and small socialist movement were unable to offer an alternative to the resulting capitalist restructuring and political offensive should not surprise. There was no successful resistance and alternative created anywhere else.

The defeat of the tax struggles in the late seventies and early eighties and the inability to take advantage of ruling class political disarray, evidenced by repeated general elections in the first few years of the decade, plus the mass unemployment and emigration during the decade, weakened the working class both materially and politically. The graph of strike activity above clearly shows a steep decline from the 1970s from which there has been no recovery. It was in these circumstances that social partnership was imposed in the late 1980s.

Partnership signalled the move away from bargaining with the employers and State through militant action and acceptance that when the solvency of the State was in question this took priority. Beginning in 1987 a series of deals were negotiated that meant accepting major cuts in pay and state services in order to reduce the massive State debt. The parallels with today are obvious.

There was resistance to social partnership but it came in its most militant form from outside the trade unions and the trade union leaders were decisive in its relatively smooth introduction. This defeat of militant workers action and acceptance of the prerogatives of capitalism was, as we have said, not at all unique to Ireland.

Across the world the ability and willingness of the working class to fight back in defence of its interests was set back. Strike statistics are only the most graphic measure of this development. Taking 42 countries and looking at the period between 1981-85 and 1996-2000 the number of countries in which strikes increased was 8 while there were 34 countries in which they declined. In the group of countries in which strikes had risen the increase was only 5,183 while the reduction in strike numbers was 63,657 in the group of countries in which there was a decline.

In the Irish State the annual number of days lost in strikes fell from over 580,000 in the 1970s to 26,650 in 2005. In the latter year there were only 15 strikes and only 10 in 2006, in which only 7,352 working days were lost, the lowest since records began in 1923. In 2007, the last year of the boom, there were only 6.

As a percentage of the employed workforce trade union membership fell from 56.2% in 1987 to 42% in 1998. Separate figures record a reduction from 46% in 1994 to 35% in 2004 while the Irish Congress of Trade Unions has admitted that density continued to fall, being lowest among young workers. Where unions did exist member participation dropped and some of the features of bureaucratisation long normal at higher levels of trade unions infected union representatives further down the ranks.

All this occurred during an unprecedented boom in the economy, the period of the Celtic Tiger, when GDP growth ranged between 7.8% and 11.5% from 1995 to 2000 and between 4.4% and 6.5% from 2001 to 2007. From 1990 to 2007 total employment grew from 1.160m to 2.112m, an increase of over 80%. While incomes fell during the 1980s they grew rapidly during the Celtic Tiger. The historical working class was recreated in many ways as a result of rapid economic growth both quantitatively as a result of falling unemployment, immigration and increased labour force participation rates and qualitatively as a result of the increased employment of women (whose number grew by over 125% from 1990 to 2007) and an influx of foreign workers.

The Irish working class was recreated as a result of a boom fuelled primarily by foreign investment, which excluded unions from its workplaces, increasing corporatism and bureaucratisation of the unions that did exist. This within a world in which the historic goals of the working class movement – from progressive reform of the capitalist system to the view that it could be replaced – was increasingly discredited through the fall of Stalinism and defeat and retreat of workers struggles and the claims of social democracy.

The boom saw no political strengthening of the workers’ movement even as unemployment fell and the class objectively, at least in numbers, grew enormously. As we said at the end of Part 3 capitalism is a revolutionary mode of production that recreates the working class. In the Irish State it did so in a way and in circumstances that did nothing to overcome the historic political weaknesses of the class. Indeed the trade unions became weaker as they bought into social partnership and the view that the interests of workers, State and bosses were best aligned. Even the historic nationalist politics that has been hegemonic became encapsulated in the need to have a low corporation tax for US multinationals.

Lack of a strategic alternative, among other things, brought about defeat of the large struggles of the 1970s. Unemployment, emigration and prolonged economic crisis brought an assault by the State on working class living standards and did so in such a way that it survived, even prospered, when the economy recovered and entered into a boom. Social partnership sold the working class into sacrifices to bail out the State from bankruptcy and made the workers subordinate even when the boom gave them the conditions in which they could have recovered their strength and learnt to advance their own interests. Instead, in so far as social partnership was later abandoned it was abandoned by the State.

The nationalist politics of the working class, the partnership with the state and the agreement of workers to sacrifice themselves on its alter came together in the reluctant acceptance of workers that they must bail out the banks and accept austerity when the economic crisis finally broke. This dependence on the State can be seen in two other ways.

In Part 2 we noted that the left wing economist Michael Taft has claimed that the ‘squeezed middle’, the 4th to 8th deciles of income earners, suffered declines in direct income in the five years leading up to the crash, gaining only as a result of social transfers. Social partnership involved a deal between the trade union leaders and the State/bosses in which workers refrained from industrial action and accepted lower than potential pay rises in favour of tax cuts. This was not just the case in the final years of the boom but was the line pushed almost from the start – a policy that became more and more explicit as the partnership deals were negotiated.

Thus not only did the workers movement become denuded of any militant initiative but it became more and more dependent on the state, and this was true not only of public sector workers but of workers in the private sector as well. Gross average industrial earnings grew by 25% in real terms in the 15 years between 1987 and 2000 but take home pay rose by 60% for a single person and 58% for married because taxation was cut.

Mainstream economists, in 2000, also reckoned that these tax cuts were regressive because they were largely achieved through reductions in tax rates, which favoured those on higher incomes. It is well known that the State became excessively reliant on revenues from a credit boom but what this shows is that social partnership, and the whole strategy of the trade union leaders, was just as reliant. But really, how could it be otherwise?

The second way this dependence increased can be seen in the simple growth of the state itself, true in all countries and not just of Ireland. ‘The Economist’ reported that the average size of the state had grown from 12.7% of GDP in 1913 to 47.7% in 2009. Even in the UK after decades of Thatcher and New Labour the size of the state remained around 44% from 1980 to 2005. This translates into widespread and increasing dependence of the population on the state, which has become the supposed solution to every and all sorts of problems.

Such massive growth could not fail to have deep impacts on society at the ideological level and the ruling ideas that infect the working class. Neoliberalism hasn’t done away with the State and neither has it weakened illusions in it. The Irish State now presides over the world’s biggest property company (NAMA) after private capital made a mess of it. The State is now the means by which the debts created by this private capital are made good by the working and middle class.

One business journalist has quantified some of the ways in which this dependency is transmitted:

“Irish Budget 2014: Half of Ireland’s population is on welfare and when recipients of child benefit, farmers dependent on public subsidies which are effectively welfare, accounting for 81% of average farm income in 2012; legal services costing the state about a half billion euros annually; public payments to doctors; a raft of corporate welfare schemes and the public service itself, at least while Karl Marx is likely to be disappointed that a few remnants of the failed communism experiment only remain, in Ireland there is a shining example of the halfway house known as socialism or to put it in non-ideological terms, dependency on the State.”

As we can see, he paints the growth of the capitalist state as somehow a practical example the ideas of Marx, and who can blame him? It’s the view of most of the Left as well, who constantly call not on the working class to solve its own oppression but for the state to do it for them.

The journalist gives a host of facts that demonstrate the growth of dependency on the state -from the growth of social welfare expenditure from €9.5m in 2002 to €15.5m in 2007 when the crash came and to €20.7m in 2012. The number of social welfare beneficiaries rose from 1.5m in 2002 to 1.6m in 2007 and 2.3m in 2012. Of these 486,000 were on the Live Register.

He notes the increased number holding medical cards; the direct subsidies to private industry and agriculture – mostly to the biggest operators; the tax breaks for business and the direct procurement of goods and services from private capital.

However the bottom line with the austerity offensive is that the Irish State became bankrupt and could not afford to continue this, so introducing harsh cuts and tax increases. The question we have sought to address is why Irish workers have not resisted, or resisted so little and to so little effect.

We have seen numerous reasons for this – from the historic weakness of the class; the recreation of such weakness in the defeats of the last few decades; international developments that have demonstrated the hardly unique character of the experience of Irish workers in this respect, and the particular role of trade union and political leaders, which again is far from unique to Ireland. Only a few weeks ago I listened on the radio while a professor of economics in Madrid noted that commentators in Spain were wondering why Spanish workers were not reacting more angrily to austerity compared to their Portuguese neighbours.

The experience of Irish workers reflects the weakness of indigenous capitalism which the growth of foreign direct investment has not significantly altered. The latter has only reinforced the weakness of Irish workers – they have hardly even attempted to unionise in the multinational sector and appear to have bought into the view that they must live through nine circles of hell before the proud Irish race will ever succumb to a headline corporation tax rate higher than 12.5 per cent.

Finally we have seen the very direct dependency of so many on the State that has just bankrupted itself bailing out the banks. Unable to stop them doing so, in fact not even being asked if they agreed, and fed crap about the ‘cheapest bailout in history’, the working class was left with a choice – bail out the state it depended on for jobs and welfare or default when the only people in place who could carry out this policy was the same State that was demanding they pay up. Without a mechanism to enforce default, even if that is what they wanted, and without an economic and political power base outside of dependency on the State, the choice was pretty clear, even if there could have been struggles that could have made it messy.

Put simply – how could workers tell the State to get stuffed when it relied on it so much? The Left has peddled nonsense that the State can be made a means to redistribute wealth such that only the rich pay for capitalist crises but the workers haven’t bought this and some of the Left that calls itself Marxist is not actually supposed to believe it either.

The defeat inflicted on workers in the last five years should cause a rethink. Renewed declarations of faith will not do.

Why have the Irish not Revolted? Part III

Posted on October 27, 2013 by irishmarxism

The weakness of Irish workers resistance to austerity cannot be explained as a supposed result of this austerity having less effect than in other countries. We have just witnessed the eighth austerity budget, the previous seven having cumulatively accounted for 17 per cent of current Gross Domestic Product.

The budget deficit in 2013 is higher than that of Spain, Portugal or Greece; there is at least another austerity budget pencilled in and the State debt is continuing to rise. Next to nothing of the debt taken on in order to bail out the banks has been paid back and these banks are still saddled with mortgage customers who can’t pay their loans back. Were the much trumpeted rebound of the property market to be anything substantial the banks would be repossessing and selling the vacated properties. They’re not.

In other words the crisis isn’t over and neither is austerity, although faint hope that it is coming to an end plays one part in explaining latterly the weakness of protest and resistance.

The answer to the problem lies in the weakness of the Irish working class itself. For Marx capitalism, in creating the working class, created its grave digger. The nature of a particular capitalism goes a long way to explaining the nature of a particular working class and the weakness of the Irish working class is a reflection of the weakness of Irish capitalism.

An objection might be made to this that the Russian working class was the most ideologically advanced working class a century ago while Russian capitalism was weak. On the other hand capitalism in the United States has been the most advanced for a century or more but its working class is a byword for exceptional weakness.

The uneven and combined development of both societies has gone a long way to explaining this apparent anomaly and it is beyond the scope of this post to compare and contrast the development of the US and Russian socialist movements. Over 100 years ago Karl Kautsky wrote on this question in ‘The American Worker’, relatively recently republished as part of a symposium in the journal ‘Historical Materialism’.

What we can say here in respect of Ireland is that its uneven historical development both inside the country, and as a region within the wider British economy, mainly as a reserve of agricultural production and labour power, has accounted for its historical weakness.

I was reminded of this nearly a year ago when I received a United Left Alliance (ULA) email newsletter what presented a series of proposed meetings to be organised by the ULA against austerity. These meetings were to deal with different aspects of the issue such as the economy, health services etc. In Russia a noteworthy feature of political and intellectual life a hundred years ago was the strength, vibrancy and hegemony of Marxism such that it dominated even the thinking of Russian liberals.

How different a situation from Ireland! The speakers proposed for the ULA list of meetings demonstrated the reverse – the domination of Irish socialism by liberalism. We can see this in everything from the Left’s opportunist search for unity with organisations that are far from working class in political character, from the Greens to Sinn Fein and populist independents, to their Keynesian economic alternative that relies on the goodness of the liberal capitalist state –taxing the rich and nationalising industry.

This of course feeds into the mis-education of workers who, while they may not reject the ULA’s state-reformism from a revolutionary perspective, have a healthy distrust of the really existing bureaucratic state they know. And they have a healthy scepticism that this state will create a new economy and tax the rich when the most widespread view of politics and government is that the politicians and the state mandarins are only in it for themselves.

Acquaintance with the occupational training by FÁS and the decades-long state attitude to tax dodging by the elite has convinced workers that the state is rotten; a source of corruption, incompetence and of patronage which moves according to who you know or who you can lobby or to whom you can provide supplication. Meanwhile Irish liberals bemoan the population’s lack of civic virtue and the Left feeds it nonsense about the capitalist state as the solution to austerity and poverty.

Lack of a response to austerity is in small part a result of this but more significantly a long result of Irish economic development and the working class and its movement, which it has produced. The weakness of the working class movement is therefore of long vintage in Ireland. The outstanding figure of Connolly, who remains a giant of working class history, and the courage of the 1913 lock-out, are today appropriated by the bureaucrats of ICTU and the Labour Party wielders of the austerity knife. Where is the movement that can legitimately claim this heritage?

Connolly and 1913 shine so brightly because the working class movement has for most of Irish history been subordinated to other forces. While capitalist relations developed early in Ireland and industrialisation grew beside that in Britain it was much reduced by its greater development in the latter so that by and large it became limited to the north-east of the country. There a relatively compact and developed working class developed but the fatal disease affecting it has long been known. It could therefore play no wider progressive leadership role for the rest of the country

There the creation of a reserve of agricultural production for Britain created the conditions for the famine in the middle of the 19^th century that devastated the country and led to reactionary social and political consequences everywhere.

First were the direct effects of death and emigration which robbed the country of a growing domestic market on which capitalist production could grow.

Then there was its effect on the land question that provided the social basis of Irish nationalism but which, because of the famine and its effects, including emigration, could be solved without a wider popular alliance of forces that included the working class. The Irish nationalist movement was thus alternately dominated by reactionary bourgeois forces heavily influenced by the Catholic Church or a republican tradition that had its most democratic leadership in the United Irishmen ripped from it at the end of the 18^th century through severe repression and sectarianism. Republicanism became a petty bourgeois movement largely indifferent if not hostile to working class politics when at its strongest.

It did develop a wing which looked at the working class as ‘the men of no property’ but only so that they would help win national freedom. This grew into a socialist republican tradition but this has also looked to the working class as the force for national freedom. Where in other countries the socialist movement has grown through leading a fight for democracy, in Ireland this has never happened. The left wing of the democratic movement has on the other hand appropriated radicalism that might in different circumstances have flowed into the working class movement.

Instead of a socialist movement that has taken on board the tasks highlighted by republicanism we have had a republican movement with left wing views tagged on but which has more often than not simply not understood what a socialist programme is, although sadly they are not alone in this. Thus left wing opinions have abounded in this part of the republican movement but opinions have substituted for programme. Marxism, genuine Marxism, and not its bastard imitation Stalinism, has been almost non-existent. So many of the most radical spirits in Ireland have left the country or been absorbed in the dead end of republican politics.

The famine also resulted in the growth of the enormous power of the Catholic Church. It is commonplace to at least partly account for the weakness of the working class movement in Ireland by pointing to the sectarian division of the class. This division was hardened and strengthened tremendously by partition, creating an additional divide between workers in the North and those in the South, on top of the religious divide.

What is more and more apparent however is not simply the effects of the division itself, in preventing unity across state jurisdictions or in spite of sectarian identification, but the paralysing influence of the resulting political forces within the separate parts of the working class.

Sectarian division allowed the Catholic Church to engage in social repression involving sexual abuse, censorship and imposition of a reactionary ideological environment that was consciously and vehemently anti-socialist. The more that is learned about this repression the more its class aspects become apparent.

The extreme reactionary monarchist ideology is perhaps less important in the North among some Protestant workers than the sheer ideology of division itself, i.e. sectarianism.

The strength of both Catholic and Orange movements have in no small part been due to the creation of the two states issuing from the division of the country. Again and again even today we see the state protect the most reactionary elements in society both North and South – the Northern state facilitate loyalist paramilitaries and the Southern State finance the organisations found guilty of systematic child abuse.

National oppression has prevented the Irish working class from being an organic part of the growth of the British working class movement which means it has never availed of its strengths while it has on the other hand imported and copied all its weaknesses, including economism and trade union type politics.

Upon this weakness of the working class has been built its political subordination; its domination in the South until recently by the bourgeois Fianna Fail and its saturation by sectarian politics in the North. Without a strong socialist tradition the periodic shifts away from the traditional parties can go in almost any direction.

In the last election the Left captured the vote of a small bit of this but the apolitical and clientelistic character of Irish politics affects the Left. This and the state-centred nature of its politics is the basis for the chronic sectarianism that has shattered the alliance the Left had formed.

As Marx said the growth of sectarianism is in inverse proportion to the development of the class as a whole and the weakness of the class is the fertile ground on which the narrow and blinkered outlook of much of the Left has been established.

So what we have had is an historically weak working class. During the key episode of political struggle around and after the First World War it was subordinated and subordinated itself to bourgeois nationalist or sectarian forces. The victory of the most reactionary of these forces combined with retarded economic development prevented the growth of a strong working class movement thereafter. The Irish state did not participate in the Second World War so its working class missed out in the radicalisation that accompanied it in many countries.

Marx however called capitalism a revolutionary mode of production that continually creates and recreates the working class. While this historic political weakness weighs on today’s generations the system throws up new industries, new work relations, new circumstances enabling economic growth and new forms of working class development. The historical development of the Irish working class during the 19^th and much of the twentieth centuries cannot explain the current lack of combativity of the Irish working class because this combativity is capable of being changed and transformed.

The Irish working class continued to develop after the Second World War but this subsequent development did not create a break from its historic political weakness and to the extent it has not done so the weight of history continues to oppress.

Why have the Irish not revolted? Part II

Posted on October 6, 2013 by irishmarxism

In my first post I qualified the view that there was something particularly weak in the resistance of Irish workers to austerity but argued that nevertheless an explanation is needed. To develop this further we need to ask what this austerity has involved.

Some commentators would have a ready explanation. In terms of the share of taxation in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), in terms of the share of Government spending in GDP and overall deficit as a percentage of annual value added there has not been ‘savage austerity’ so there has been nothing to rebel against.

Here unfortunately we have no choice but to enter the world of economic statistics where only the naive can expect clear objectivity and accuracy.

A post on the Irish Economy blog records that (adjusting the statistics for the well-known effect of foreign multinationals in the Irish State significantly overstating economic performance) living standards measured in GDP per person (in Purchasing Power Parity values) declined by 14 per cent from 2007 to 2011. This is a bigger decline in living standards than in Portugal where the fall was only 1.6 per cent, in Spain where it was 4.9 per cent and Greece where it was 8 per cent. In terms of national income (another measure) the drop was bigger – 20 per cent – and it will have fallen further since then. It would appear that the relative quiescence of Irish workers needs additional explaining.

But does it?

Any Irish statistic that uses GDP is immediately suspect for the reason above but not only because of this. GDP is a measure of value added which means the 2007 figure will include property produced at vastly over-inflated values. Houses and offices built and priced at one value will have been shown subsequently to have been worth 50, 60 or 70 per cent less, or sometimes to be completely worthless. A moment’s thought reveals that this is not a characteristic simply of Irish statistics but of measures of capitalist production everywhere.

When we think of the effects of the banking industry on measures of economic growth we again see that this measure is seriously distorting, not only because of the difficulties of capturing accurately what is happening, but because of the nature of capitalist production. This takes place through the production of commodities whose real value is only realised after production. The value of these commodities is elaborated through the workings of the market which reveals the socially necessary value of output in a cyclical fashion.

For economists wedded to capitalism recessions are always the result of exogenous shocks outside the system or of purely irrational behaviour within it, which amount to the same thing. For Marxists the cycle of boom and bust is how the values of commodities are established and then re-established in a constant process. By nature therefore there can be no precise measure of value produced at any one point in time or over any one period.

In figures for GDP the distinction between use value and exchange value is absent never mind any accounting for how really ‘socially useful’ the use values produced are – ghost estates and weapons compared to commodities actually consumed by workers. This is to be considered on top of the well-known criticisms of measuring living standards by GDP.

There are alternative measures we can review but before we leave behind this discussion we should appreciate that what we have been looking at is not simple mismeasurement of economic activity but one form of the appearance of real contradictions within the system.

From the point of view of our particular investigation we can make two points. That a critical review of some of the figures means the boom was not as boomier (to quote Bertie Ahern) as some statistics might appear to show and the recession not as sudden and complete a reversal as might first appear. The expectation of more or less immediate revolt might therefore be less justified? Other evidence however might suggest that such a view should be considered a relatively minor factor.

Secondly, the constant reporting of such economic statistics plays an ideological role such that workers must accept real changes to their lives on the basis of these statistics. Workers are subject to such pressures not just in the recession but also in the boom – encouraged to get into unsustainable debt for example. To the extent that they do the latter they are then under ideological assault to accept that they, along with everyone else, ‘partied’ and went on a ‘mad borrowing’ frenzy, as Taoiseach Enda Kenny has put it.

Some commentators might argue that a recognition of ‘guilt’ has played a role in short-circuiting resistance but the existence of such undoubted views is as much a result of demoralisation as a cause of the lack of resistance.

There are other statistics we can look at to see if there are material reasons for the lack of opposition apart from this particular ideological one.

What appears a more relevant statistic is called Actual Individual Consumption which encompasses goods and services consumed by households including government services such as education and health provision. This would appear to show that between 2008 and 2011 living standards in the Irish State fell more than in Spain and in Portugal but less than in Greece or Iceland.

Actual Individual Consumption

State	2008 index	2011 index	Percentage fall
Ireland	109	100	8.3
Spain	99	94	5.1
Greece	104	94	9.6
Portugal	84	82	2.4
UK	123	118	4.1
Iceland	122	107	12.3

This measure is made up of a component of GDP so is subject to some of the criticism above. We have already seen that three different measurements of living standards result in reductions in living standards of 20 per cent, 14 per cent and over 8 per cent, depending on dates and the measurement adopted.

What we can say with certainty is that living standards fell abruptly and significantly due to the crisis and it is not obvious that the severity of the fall in any country determined the relative extent of opposition to austerity. It is necessary before drawing any conclusions to look at what might be at least some of the components of the fall in living standards, not by any means only a result of the effects of Government austerity policies.

By one measure unemployment in the Irish State increased from 3.4 per cent in 2007 to 10.4 per cent in 2012, a tripling of the rate in only five years. The economically inactive, which must contain many who have given up hope of getting a job, increased from 27.5 per cent of the population aged 15 to 64 to 30.8 per cent.

Using a different measurement unemployment in the Irish state was 13.5 per cent in January 2013 compared to 17.8 per cent in Portugal, 26.8 per cent in Spain and 27 per cent in Greece. Clearly the crisis has hit the latter countries much harder than Ireland. It is by no means clear that higher unemployment breeds resistance since its function under capitalism is to facilitate increased exploitation of the working class. The mobilisation of the unemployed is not always for progressive reasons, which is one reason we have noted before that economic crises often breed reactionary movements.

Once unemployed some workers face the prospect of hardship and one measure of this defined as deprivation, or being without two or more basic items, has increased from 11.8 per cent of the population to 24.5 per cent in 2012. The possibility of this is affected by the level of welfare an unemployed personmight rely upon and this is measured by the net replacement rate, or the payments due to the unemployed as a percentage of previous net income. This obviously depends on whether the person has children or is married etc.

Net Replacement rates 2011

	No children			2 children
Country	Single person	One earner Married couple	Two-earner Married couple	Lone Parent	One-earner married couple	Two-earner married couple
Republic of Ireland	50	81	75	64	75	81
Greece	49	54	75	58	63	80
Spain	79	76	90	77	75	89
Portugal	75	75	92	77	76	91

The table shows that Greece has significantly lower replacement rates than the other selected countries for most categories but that the Irish state’s is generally lower than Spain’s and Portugal’s. It would not appear that the prospect of a more significant loss of income as a result of unemployment has spurred opposition in Ireland relative to that in Spain or Portugal.

The other obvious way workers cope with periods of unemployment is falling back on any savings that they have accumulated. The following table shows the movement in net financial assets per person (€) in the various countries:

Country	2007	2011
Republic of Ireland	23,634	26,279
Spain	21,698	16,328
Portugal	19,950	19,750
Greece	19,681	10,105
Euro area (17 countries)	37,289	36,201

The table shows the Irish State to have the highest level of financial assets (though much below the Euro area average) and that this even increased between 2007 and 2011! Since these figures say nothing about the unequal distribution of wealth and we know that many have suffered unemployment, cuts in wages or tax increases, it is clear that certain sections of Irish society are bearing up quite well. In the other countries financial wealth fell and in Spain, but particularly in Greece, fell quite dramatically.

Such average figures hide as much as they reveal. Average household disposable income in the Irish state fell from €49,043 in 2008 to €41,819 in 2011 but this was still significantly higher than in 2004 when it was €38,631. Right wing commentators have often made the observation that incomes have often just gone back to such and such a date and we are all much better off than before the boom kicked off in the first half of the 1990s. This is undoubtedly true for many but doesn’t provide an answer why as a class Irish workers have resisted austerity so weakly, unless the argument is that expectations have very quickly reduced. Is this however another result of defeat or a contributing factor to it, or both?

Averages can obscure because it is precisely the unequal incidence of the effects of capitalist crisis that can have decisive political effects.

Unemployment has increased dramatically but its incidence is not uniform. Employment in construction has collapsed, from 258,000 at the start of 2008 to 102,000 at the end of 2012, a fall of over 60 per cent. Over the same period employment in the state sector fell from 417,000 to 381,000, a fall of 8.6 per cent. The pitting of private sector workers against those in the public sector was a clear strategy of the Government, the employers and the media and it was quite successful.

But this has not been the only divisive effect of the crisis. Rates of unemployment among young people in Ireland, just like other countries, have been much higher than the general rate. In the Irish state the rate of unemployment among those less than 25 years old was 26.6 per cent in April this year while it was 42.5 per cent in Portugal, 56.4 per cent in Spain and 62.5 per cent in Greece. These are truly staggering figures. The rate of long term unemployment has increased from 29.2 per cent of total unemployment at the start of 2007 to 45.5 per cent at the end of 2012. What this should remind us, is that unemployment is a divisive imposition of the effects of capitalist crisis that impacts not only on those without a job but also those in employment. Emigration has returned and is continuing to increase, up from 87,100 in the year to April 2012 to 89,000 in the year to April 2013.

None of these figures illustrates the hardship caused by tax increases and public expenditure cuts that can affect the most vulnerable the most. They do not include the effects on people’s experience of negative equity, the full effects of which have yet to hit home. Here again it is younger people who are more likely to be in negative equity and to be in arrears in their mortgage payments. And of course the figures do not tell us that the results of the crisis and austerity are to be here for a long time.

Over 32 people were unemployed for each job vacancy in 2012, while the figures for Spain and Portugal were 72.6 and 90.4 respectively. The General Government Debt as a percentage of GDP was 117.6 per cent in 2012 while the 2012 EU Fiscal Compact stipulates that where this is above 60 per cent it must reduce by 1/20^th per year. In 2012 the in-year Government deficit was 7.5 per cent which means the debt was not getting smaller but getting bigger. Normally optimistic forecasters are predicting that unemployment, as measured by the International Labour Organisation methodology, was only to reduce from 14.7 per cent in 2012 to 13.9 per cent in 2014.

So what are we to make of all these figures?

The fall in living standards has been significant even if not so sudden or large for some sectors of society as others and not on the same scale as some other countries such as Greece. Certainly the disproportionate effects on young people and rise in emigration have blunted resistance but these factors exist on the same or greater scale in some other countries in Southern Europe where resistance has been greater.

It is not therefore the effects of the crisis themselves that explain the response even if these act to weaken certain social and political reactions. The left wing economist Michael Taft has claimed that the ‘squeezed middle’, the 4^th to 8^th deciles of income earners, suffered declines in direct income in the five years leading up to the crash, gaining only as a result of social transfers.

During the boom the level of trade union organisation fell relatively as union density dropped from 46 per cent of the workforce in 1994 to less than a third in 2007, and only 16 per cent in the private sector.

Thus even during the most favourable circumstances, when workers are best placed to protect and advance their living standards, they were unable to do so with their own strength. During recession such weakness is exposed.

Now they are subject to the vicious laws of the capitalist market and, as we said in the first post, short of overturning the system there is a limited amount workers can do about this without challenging the system itself.

During this post I have said that workers have not resisted austerity but in truth the great mass of unemployment, insecurity caused by mortgage arrears and negative equity, and the drop in personal consumption are not so much the result of the austerity policies of the Government, which of course have made things worse, but of the capitalist crisis. This crisis can in certain circumstances be postponed or ameliorated by the State but it cannot be suppressed and certainly not by a State in bankruptcy.

When even during the boom large number of workers dependency on this state increased rather reduced and rather than their developing their own independent power, it can be little surprise that when the state turns round and kicks them in the teeth they are unprepared.

Some socialists argued again and again during the boom that social partnership, the vehicle by which the Irish trade unions hitched themselves to the State, was to be opposed not mainly because it prevented workers making gains in their living standards that they should but because it rotted away their independent organisation. This has not just organisational consequences but political and ideological ones and it is to these that I need to look at next.

Why have the Irish not revolted?

Posted on September 24, 2013 by irishmarxism

The defeat of the opposition to the property tax and the ability of the Government to impose a second Croke Park austerity deal might lead many to conclude that resistance to austerity has been defeated. Even before this many have commented that while Greece has witnessed violent protests and numerous general strikes the absence of such events from Ireland is notable and remarkable. General strikes have also taken place in Spain and Portugal but not in the Irish State.

The relative electoral success of the United Left Alliance appeared to blind some to this but the collapse of the ULA has simply confirmed what is more generally understood to be the case. More and more it is acknowledged on the Left that we have to face the reality as opposed to perennial false claims that an upsurge is taking place or is just around the corner.

Realistic assessments of the state of workers’ action have often been drowned out by childish claims that this shows one is insufficiently revolutionary, underestimates the workers , their ability to change their ideas quickly or that such views will not encourage workers to take action. Not in front of the children appears to be the motto. Workers are always ‘angry’ and all it needs is the right campaign, so long as it is active enough, to stir them into action.

Reality is imposing itself and no sound bites along the lines of ‘the darkest hour is just before dawn’ can hide the fact that the economic crisis has resulted in the imposition of austerity on workers without effective resistance. Why is this?

First we must qualify the judgement that Irish workers are peculiarly useless. Commentators have remarked in similar terms about the countries in southern Europe. We have noted before that more or less spontaneous social explosions have not resulted in great advances by the working class. Greek workers have been by far the most combative in terms of general strike action but in hardly anywhere has living standards plummeted so much. I have also noted in one of my first posts that economic crises spurs growth in extreme reactionary forces and we have seen this is in Greece with the rise of the Golden Dawn movement. So Greece is no model to seek to copy.

Secondly Irish workers have fought back albeit within very strict limits. I can still remember the very large demonstration in November 2009 in Dublin, which had many working class people from outside the ranks of the trade unions taking part. The following year public sector trade unions organised a successful strike. At a local level in certain places and at certain times strong campaigns have developed against tax increases or hospital closures. All this and more was reflected in the vote for ULA.

There is however an over-estimation about what workers can achieve within the limits of the capitalist system – a general misconception that workers’ struggles can overturn the laws of capitalism. For example, if a company goes bust and attempts to close down, making all its workers redundant, it is pretty obvious that strike action will not achieve very much.

At this point many on the left propose that the capitalist state protect workers even though these same people have a part of their brain that tells them that the state is a weapon of the capitalist class that cannot be reformed and must be smashed. They also believe that the emancipation of the working class must be achieved by workers themselves but usually object to the idea that, instead of the state, the workers should take over and own and run these workplaces as workers cooperatives.

It is a similar situation at the level of society as a whole and at an international level. The Irish state was and still is bankrupt. It needed a massive injection of money to save the banks and put itself in a position to start reducing its mushrooming debt. Austerity is a means of doing this. Again the Left argues that the state can adopt policies of taxing the rich and spending money on investment that will restore the capitalist economy to economic growth, which will then deal with the problem of the debt.

This is not however the view of socialists. The socialist view, confirmed once again by recent events, is that capitalism inescapably produces economic crises which are dealt with and resolved by the laws by which the system works, including through unemployment and destruction of unsuccessful capital whose markets and sometimes businesses are picked up on the cheap by those remaining. It is not possible for the capitalist system to prevent such crises by adopting policies of more investment, as for example argued by left followers of Keynes.

It is not therefore possible for workers no matter how well organised to prevent the laws of capitalism from working. This at least was the view of Marx and the evidence of history would again confirm this. So workers resistance against austerity may be able to ameliorate austerity but, in so far as they are necessary to lay the foundations of a new upturn, it is not possible for workers to prevent unemployment or wage cuts or tax increases in their entirety or even to a significant degree. In other words it is not possible within the system to prevent capitalism periodically disrupting workers’ lives. That’s why we oppose the system and why we propose a different one called socialism. If we thought capitalism could work better without its nasty effects we wouldn’t be socialists would we?

Yet the left presents austerity as simply one policy option of the Government which it could choose to reject and replace with their own proposals. But even the Keynesian alternative requires ‘counter cyclical’ state action. In other words the austerity measures are simply postponed. All the left’s proposals involve actions by the capitalist state in one way or another – tax changes, public investment, nationalisation etc.

The point in terms of the current argument is not that the Left is misleading workers into accepting reformist solutions that won’t work and this is a reason why resistance to austerity has been such a failure in Ireland. These ideas are more widespread in southern Europe than they are here. No, the issue is that, absent a socialist alternative being created, as long as capitalism exists the laws of capitalism will continue to work and impose themselves. Resistance to austerity will therefore fail and this failure is bound in turn to lead to weakening of the resistance.

We must be careful however not to qualify the problem out of existence when it contains more than a grain of truth. When Greek workers chanted “we are not Irish” on their May Day demonstration in Athens in 2010 they weren’t imagining the relative weakness of resistance in Ireland.

Nor can the question be dismissed by saying Irish workers did fight back – they did, but nowhere near to the extent required for success.

Nor is it credible to blame the poor politics or organisation of the Irish Left.

It is also not adequate to simply say that capitalism wins unless we create socialism. This is obviously true, although its logical implications for reformist strategies and policies are often ignored. But it doesn’t come near explaining why the reformist strategies for resistance have elicited such weak workers’ action. It’s hardly that Irish workers can see through such strategies and are ready for something more radical.

Socialism is not an event or a situation but a movement. Workers will only become capable of building a socialist movement and carrying out revolutionary change if they are also capable of mounting strong resistance to the ravages of capitalism. In Ireland this hasn’t happened and there has been a retrogression of the small socialist movement, although this in itself is not particularly new.

So in Ireland the state has been able to pursue austerity policies that increase unemployment and wage restraint in order to restore its solvency in very much the same way capitalist crises work to restore profitability in the private sector. It has been able to do so without much of the resistance shown in other countries in a very similar situation. This remains to be explained.

To be continued.

A new Left electoral campaign in Limerick

Posted on July 27, 2013 by irishmarxism

The Revolutionary Programme web site altered me recently to the latest electoral initiative of the Left – here. The programme of this initiative is the following:

No to the Property, Water & Septic Tank Taxes – No to Deduction at Source.
No to all Austerity – ordinary people have paid enough.
For a united movement of ordinary people affected by home taxes and austerity – no to divisions based on race or nationality.
Tax the Wealthy as the alternative to austerity: For progressive taxation on the wealthy and corporate sector.
End the bailouts of banks and bondholders, instead use the money to create real jobs through a programme of necessary public works.
Our candidates if elected would:
Fight against plans for Water Metering, Water Taxes and Water Privatisation.
Oppose all cuts in council services or erosion of workers conditions.
Make no deals on the Council with the austerity Parties (FF, FG, LP).
Oppose the gravy train – no participation in junkets. Demand local planning for the community, not for developers or vested interests.

What attitude should Marxists take to this electoral initiative?

Just like every other party standing in an election it must surely be judged by what it says – by its professed programme or set of policies, providing of course these are also what it truly represents.

Can and should it be supported?

The electoral slate is clearly not a party and was organised by the Campaign Against Property Tax and Austerity but the logic of standing in an election is to act like a party and even more so if elected. The failure of the Unite Left Alliance to do so has led to its demise.

The policies above are no way different from that of the ULA, except more limited. The Left has argued over the last number of years that elections and those elected are there to advance ‘real’ struggles outside of parliament and council chambers. The last few years have demonstrated conclusively however that it is the other way round – struggles in communities and estates have been means to advance electoral ambitions. Electoralism is a dirty word on the Left but nothing would appear to describe the method of organising so accurately.

This initiative, the promised first of many, must be judged firstly on its own terms.

The short summary of its aims says it is against austerity and the various taxes that have made up a large part of this agenda. The anti-property tax has failed so it will have to be explained how standing in elections will bring success. Otherwise voters are being asked to vote for good intentions. Councils can clearly not change the policy of central government so how will the taxes and austerity more generally be blocked and reversed? No concrete and practical way forward is put forward. Maybe it will be, but if it isn’t then it is purely propaganda.

If the reason for standing is to build the campaign this should be the main point of the programme but even here it should be explained how the campaign will achieve its aims. Is, or rather was, a mass boycott a road forward given deduction at source? If not what is the alternative – a mass political campaign aimed at persuading tax workers to refuse implementation of the tax?

What role is there for councils? Are enough candidates standing to win a majority? If so what would they do with such a majority? Can they unite with other similarly minded councils to campaign against the tax? What powers do councils have to frustrate or prevent this tax or austerity? Will the new council promote workers control or ownership of council services? What other steps will it take to promote the democratisation of local government?

If there is no possibility of winning a majority then what role would those elected take? Will they release all information currently withheld on council activities? How will they frustrate the local implementation of austerity?

If these questions aren’t put to the fore then, as I’ve said, what we are seeing is purely propaganda. This does not mean that this aspect should be underestimated. Even in periods of limited struggle, in fact particularly in such periods, the task of socialists is to try to educate as many workers as possible through propaganda. Given the very small size of the socialist movement in Ireland this is by far and away its biggest task. If it doesn’t get this right then the majority of what it is capable of doing is wasted if not positively harmful.

The thrust of the programme appears to be anti-austerity with the alternative being taxation of the wealthy – “for progressive taxation on the wealthy and corporate sector.” It is also proposed to “End the bailouts of banks and bondholders, instead use the money to create real jobs through a programme of necessary public works.”

I have shown what is wrong with the idea you can tax the wealthy here and here so I won’t repeat my arguments again in this post. The main problem is that it is not the wealth or high incomes of the rich that are the cause of austerity so even if it were possible to tax both effectively the cause of austerity would persist. This cause is the economic crisis. Because the economic system is a capitalist one the elementary task of a manifesto would be to state this and explain it. Explain exactly how the way the capitalist system works has given rise to this crisis and will create more in future. This would be necessary in order to argue that the alternative to austerity from a working class point of view is socialism. Explaining what this is would involve is an obvious next step – expropriation of capitalist ownership and workers ownership in its place and a workers’ state in place of the existing state.

Complaining that the programme does not mention socialism is not the problem since the programme is not a socialist one. If this is the way it is then it is better that it does not claim to be socialist.

The programme proposes ending the bailouts of banks but does not explain how this might be done, the consequences or the alternatives. Some of these issues are touched upon here, here and here. How is the debt to be repudiated? What debt is to be repudiated? How would credit be provided if the banks were allowed to fail?

Anyone who begins to think seriously about what “ending the bailouts” means will have these questions in their head and without an answer they will be open to accepting right wing claims that such proposals are not thought through , cannot be implemented or would be even more disastrous than what we already have. Dealing with such claims is the important task of propaganda and at this point in time elections are useful means of getting across the message.

In the absence of all this the message put across is a radical Keynesian one, that is a capitalist one. One that is temporarily more beneficial to working people but one, if followed,that would lead to inflation, wage cuts, unemployment, and calls for reducing budget deficits and tax increases later on. That’s if it worked in the meantime!

From a political point of view therefore the programme does not assert separate working class politics but, in so far as it puts forward an alternative, puts forward the benign actions of the capitalist state as the solution. It therefore doesn’t even get to first base in terms of a socialist alternative. It may therefore be reformist but it isn’t working class reformism because it seems to rely solely on pressurising the state.

In terms of the reformist/revolutionary dichotomy it isn’t even the former since it lacks the courage of its convictions and fails to propose a Left Government for the Dail that could tax the rich and the corporations; burn the bondholders and use the money to create jobs in the public (read – capitalist state) sector.

A socialist programme would explain that fighting austerity is required to defend our living conditions but that this will ultimately fail unless the system is replaced. Austerity can at best be ameliorated but such is the depth of the crisis it cannot be entirely halted and reversed under the present economic system.

Some will deny this and claim that austerity can be ended without changing the system; that the rich can be made to pay for their crisis and that policies of growth will ensure that this can happen.

On the other side will be those who will claim that austerity is an inevitable result of an economic crisis, which is caused by the capitalist system in its attempts to produce and accumulate capital beyond the conditions that allow it reproduce itself harmoniously. The excessive expansion of credit is always a feature of capitalist crisis and the bigger the boom the bigger the bust, unless even more credit is injected into the economy in which case the bigger the boom . . . No amount of regulation or honest government can prevent this without seriously gumming up the capitalist system, in which case you simply have a different sort of crisis with very much the same symptoms of unemployment etc.

On the first side of this debate will be the liberal defenders of Keynes, including their economists and leaders of the trade unions. On the second, socialists, who can only consistently defend their ideas by understanding and presenting the arguments of Karl Marx, which is the reason Marx wrote ‘Capital’.

A recent post on the Michael Roberts blog has a couple of interesting points to make about these arguments.

He points to research showing that inequality of income reduced between 1910 and 1950 across the OECD (most advanced) countries, which calls into question the idea that capitalist crisis is a result of inequality that progressive taxation could cure. This period, after all, covers the great depression of the 1930s.

He points to other research that:

“Credit booms mostly lead to financial crises, but inequality does not necessarily lead to credit booms. “Our paper looks for empirical evidence for the recent Kumhof/Rancière hypothesis attributing the US subprime mortgage crisis to rising inequality, redistributive government housing policy and a credit boom. Using data from a panel of 14 countries for over 120 years, we find strong evidence linking credit booms to banking crises, but no evidence that rising income concentration was a significant determinant of credit booms. Narrative evidence on the US experience in the 1920s, and that of other countries, casts further doubt on the role of rising inequality.“

The problem with left solutions that highlight (sometimes more or less exclusively) inequality of income and wealth is that their solutions do nothing to tackle the origin and cause of this inequality. The Michael Roberts blog points out that “in 2011, capital income constituted 60% of the top earner’s income compared to just 32% in the 1980s.”

The origin and cause is capitalist ownership of the means of production, including its purchase of labour power, its ownership of capital and the money and power this involves. It is the relations of production in which workers have to sell their ability to work to a class of owners of the means of production that produces the gross inequalities in society. Redistributing what is already produced, even were it possible, would not overturn this power relationship or the exploitation and oppression involved because it does not get to the heart of the matter.

In a country where little or nothing of this is understood the elementary task of socialists is to explain this to as wide a number of workers as possible and elections should be taken as an opportunity to do so.

So we are back to our question – should this electoral initiative be supported?

To the extent it has been judged as a more or less adequate immediate guide to action or corresponds to the educational needs of the working class the verdict would appear to be no.

Perhaps unity could not be agreed between the participants on any other basis and what we see is a campaign standing in an election not a party. But was any other basis proposed or offered? Was any discussed or do the participants see no problem in the platform of a campaign being adequate to a programme for an election?

It might truthfully be said that the low level of the programme reflects the low level of Irish workers’ class consciousness but this is not a way out of objections to it, for there is nothing in it to advance Irish workers’ understanding of the cause of the austerity they face or the great changes that are required to defeat it and establish a new society.

The only conditions upon which it would be possible to support this initiative is if it went further in arguing the socialist case or if it raised the prospect of invigorating a section of workers into activity, in which case through this activity they may learn about the roots of their predicament and themselves go beyond the timidity of the anti-austerity campaign. To do the latter they may have to go beyond the existing Left groups who save what they think is socialism for potential recruits while the broader class of workers they address in electoral material, the purported agent of revolution, are fed re-heated capitalist reforms.

Workers say NO to Croke Park 2

Posted on April 29, 2013 by irishmarxism

Commentators across Europe, indeed the world, have marvelled at the ability of the Irish to suffer punishing austerity without strikes, riots and political convulsions. Local commentators have basked in their acclaim as the austerity poster-boy – in damning comparison to those Greeks and other southern Europeans. Instead the Irish voted for a European austerity Treaty and voted in a Fine Gael-led coalition with politics no different from the previous Fianna Fail led one. If opinion polls are to be believed, many have gone back to supporting the utterly discredited Fianna Fail. The recent Meath by-election saw the Fine Gael candidate handsomely returned and the particular local circumstances do not adequately explain it.

Irish workers accepted the tearing up of the existing social partnership deal and voted for a new one called Croke Park, which inflicted cuts in services and conditions, including yellow pack terms and conditions for younger workers, in return for no compulsory redundancies.

Unemployment however has soared, reaching over 14 per cent officially and, according to the IMF, over 23 per cent if the underemployed are included. This is despite emigration of tens of thousands of the younger generation to destinations across the world.

Yet still the ‘fighting Irish’ showed no signs of fighting.

Until now.

This is the significance of the vote on a new Croke Park deal. Irish workers have said NO.

If it has been a surprise to many on our side it has been a shock to the Government who thought their threats, bullying and intimidation would work. Above all they thought the rotten leadership of the Irish trade union movement, which supported the new deal, would pull it through.

Its mouthpieces in the media reacted with denial. The ‘Irish Times’ journalist said “it was so close”, “if 1,000 members of SIPTU had voted the other way, or if more of its members had been minded to come out and vote – there was an extraordinarily low turnout of 45 per cent – the deal would have sufficient support to be ratified.”

There is a grain of truth in this but we will come back to this. Let us first note that the press and media betray once again their class character by agonising about how the democratic wishes of the workers can be subverted by ‘tweaking’ the deal to get it through. You will search in vain for commentary deliberating over how the workers’ majority can assert and validate their democratic decision.

The deal has been rejected but the vote is a mere inconvenience. It doesn’t count. The workers can say anything they want and will be listened to, but only if they agree. Like European referendums voting is to allow worker s to approve the plans of the capitalist class and its state. Again and again Irish workers are taught this lesson – voting is not a choice, it’s a stamp made of rubber.

Instead we are fed rubbish that a vote that saw the deal decisively rejected by a majority of two to one, 115,000 to 55,000, could somehow have been passed “if 1,000 members of SIPTU had voted the other way, or if more of its members had been minded to come out and vote.” The votes of those who didn’t vote are ‘virtually’ counted to support austerity while in fact the vote against will have awakened the many workers who didn’t vote to the possibility of voting against the Government, the State, the mass media and their own rotten leaderships.

But even these propagandists of the system couldn’t help but recognise that many workers voted no, not because they were personally affected very badly by the deal, but because they didn’t think they should vote for other workers to take a pay cut.

The grain of truth – that the result could have been very different – is a reflection of the bureaucratic nature of the trade union movement, where a majority of 60,000 might be reversed by 1,000 voting differently in the biggest union. This is only one illustration of what is now the biggest question that is to be answered, which is not the one asked in the media – of what will the Government do? The real question is – what will, or can, the workers do about their leaders who recommended and argued for and censored the opposition to this rotten deal?

The problem is neatly encapsulated by a report on the Irish National Teachers Organisation Conference at which delegates wanted to put an emergency motion calling on the leadership to have a strategy in place if there was a No vote. This was ruled out of order but a weaker one was allowed. Only when delegates booted this out was a compromise motion passed that called “on the central executive committee to urgently liaise with the executives of other public service unions with a view to promoting and planning a public service solidarity alliance of trade unions across the public service.”

What this episode reveals all too obviously is the restrictions placed on workers by union bureaucracy and this bureaucracy’s intention of relying on the Government to ‘tweak’ the deal so it can be imposed on the membership. It shows the awareness of trade unionists that a strategy is required and one that seeks the maximum unity. The obvious weakness involves relying on the same union bureaucrats to provide this strategy and implement it.

Putting together a convincing strategy will not be easy but the vote itself is a massive step forward, as is the appreciation of the need for a strategy and for this to be based on unity within the union movement.

Very early on in the current crisis the then Government relatively easily divided workers through claiming those working in the public and private sectors had separate and opposing interests. The union leaders seemed only too happy to walk into this trap. Their willingness to sacrifice services for short-term and increasingly illusory benefits for public sector workers has failed even these workers as their pay has been slashed and the deal they signed up to was torn up with union consent. Meanwhile the workers who use these services have had some confirmation that the quality of these services may suffer to defend the conditions of those who deliver them.

The initial reaction against this disastrous approach was recourse to an even more divisive one, with the creation of a Frontline Alliance that saw narrow trade unionism prioritise the interests of some workers who are on the frontline of some services, implying a common interest not shared across all workers. However I’ve yet to meet a frontline service that could operate without the support of rearguard(?) workers.

Even this signalled not some reduced form of trade union unity but the plaintive cries of the ‘special case’. I remember listening to an interview some months back on ‘The Last Word’ on Today FM with a group of union leaders from this Alliance. What was most striking was that when they were interviewed one-by-one there was hardly the slightest hint of a common grievance. They seemed totally ignorant of how narrow their complaints seemed and how stupid a strategy is which is based on claiming special treatment when such an all-engulfing attack is being meted out.

There are other courses of action and what might seem like alternative courses for workers looking to fight back are in fact the same struggle.

The view that it is impossible to get the union movement to fight back without first kicking out its rotten leadership replaces a task on which workers have just voted – rejection of Croke Park 2 – with one they have not had placed clearly before them, debated and decided upon. There is limited traction in simply claiming ‘betrayal’ and saying these leaders must be replaced now before a real struggle to give effect to the No vote can be realised.

The entirely justified and valid view that the current union leaders must be replaced can be achieved by demonstrating to the majority of members the practical effects of these leaders supporting attacks on their interests while frustrating any resistance. In the course of mounting this resistance the task of replacing these leaders can be posed but not as a precondition or prior requirement for such resistance.

The related questions of whether workers should demand that their leaders hammer out a united strategy or should unite at rank and file level to achieve this themselves are also not opposed. While rank and file workers must unite across unions to create their own structures this can only be in addition to the established ones. In this way they might demand that their separate leaderships take action and also advance towards an end-point where, if they do not, workers are in a position to pose this task practically themselves.

In doing so workers might learn that replacing the current leaders is not enough and that what is really required is an entirely rejuvenated trade union movement. One that is open, democratic and not in thrall to either bureaucratic leaders or bureaucratic structures and rules. A big step forward has been taken with the No vote and the Government is faced with the threat of resistance.

As this post is finished it is reported that the Government does indeed intend to ‘tweak’ the deal in what is called a “carrot and stick approach”. Since it still intends to make the same amount of cuts what won’t change are the pain and divisiveness of the tweaked deal and the threats that will accompany it. Like donkeys workers are expected to look at a carrot paraded in front of them while what they feel is the stick.

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