Workers Solidarity Movement

Sometimes you can walk around this city and feel like you are the last sane person left on the island.  On the front page of every single newspaper the spin doctors have gone into their highest setting possible with the great news that we’ve buried the rotten corpse of Anglo Irish bank which had been stinking up the whole economy for years now.   We’d cut ourselves away from this horrible thing, we no longer had to pay out this awful promissory note for a staggering amount of €3.1 billion every year.  We were now going to just liquidate the rottenest bank of all time, transfer it over to the men in black (NAMA) and the plan then was to pay interest only on this astronomical debt (€40 Billion) until 2038.
 

The euro zone crisis, and the mainstream opinion formers’ response to it, raises the question of nationalistic understandings of the way the world works, and how these understandings frame our perception of where our interests lie.

As the scale of the debts loaded onto the Irish people became clear, the calls for defaulting became louder. The moral argument for default is certainly strong: why should Irish workers pay for the poor decisions of Irish and European capitalists? But justified though it may be, would defaulting cause more pain than gain?

On Tuesday the 7th of December, the Irish government were barricaded inside the parliament in Dublin. They were there to vote on a Budget implementing the cutbacks and austerity measures demanded of them by the IMF and ECB. The budget comes in a year of ever deepening crisis, as the debt of what was once Europe's fastest growing economy, spiralled out of control. The obvious question one is faced with is “What went wrong? What happened to this economic miracle?

If we accept that this deal was never meant to provide justice to the people of Ireland, then we have to judge its success or failure on other grounds, the ones it was designed to fulfill.  From that perspective the willingness of the rulers of the French, Germans, British and others to drive countries like Ireland and Greece and Portugal, each of us less than 2% of the Eurozone economy, into ruination is understandable, albeit unforgiveable. Just as there is no honour amongst theives, so there is no solidarity amongst capitalists.

Tens of thousands will take part in today's ICTU demonstration in Dublin but the demonstration is seen by ICTU’s leaders as yet another one-off protest, another ‘letting-off-steam’ exercise, a trek around town from A to B to listen to speeches from the same people that have misled us to this position and then go home and get ready to vote for Labour in the forthcoming election.  Far from ‘standing idly by’ they are actively working to demobilise opposition to the government.   Against this we need to use today's protest as the starting point for the conversation about what we’re going to replace the current rotten mess with and as the first block in building for the general strike that we need to bring that about.

The so called rescue loan being negotiated by the ECB is really a jacking up of the interest rate Ireland is paying on its debt from the ECB base rate of 1% to a more profitable rate of 5% or more. If we submit to this deflationary programme of structural adjustment being pushed by the IMF our shrinking economy will never generate enough to pay off these debts. The only way out is to push for a default.

Today the government announced the details of the four year plan required as part of the ECB / IMF ‘bailout’ of the banks. There will be five billion worth of new taxes and 10 billion worth of cuts under this so called ‘National Recovery’ which in reality will take 10% out of GDP. As we show below almost all these costs are being dumped on workers, particularly low paid workers, the very sector that gained little or nothing during the boom years. the richest 1% are left with most of their legal tax dodges in particular the ability to avoid paying tax at all if they spend 6 months on holidays out of the country.

Even the Irish Times has now editorialized against the IMF intervention but, like most of the emerging mainstream concerns, the Times is not concerned about the cuts in jobs, wages and welfare that the IMF will be used to impose. No, their concern is for the loss of 'sovereignty' as IMF intervention results in a rise in populist cross-class nationalism, a tide which ironically the ruling party, which is bringing in the IMF to make the cuts it would like to, will be best placed to ride.