The Dialectic Ripens

The processes whose working-out your humble blogger has tried to study seem at times to move at a glacial pace. It was important to identify the responses of the working-class to the proposed austerity measures early on and tie them to an awakening of long dormant class consciousness. Otherwise this admittedly vision-impaired old head might have been whacked with the usual crack that hindsight is always 20-20.  Similarly, it was important to refute early on the silly argument that austerity measures (“cuts”) would create jobs and prosperity--although, even now, capitalist economists seem bewildered at falling GDP in, for example, the UK. Protests have continued across Europe, with one of the largest in the UK, involving 700,000 people. But, overall, social processes gather force slowly, and especially in this case, when most austerity measures await implementation.

Perhaps, then, your blogger’s long bout with congestive heart failure was well-timed, pulling him away from the blogspot for a good three months and more with a considerable part of that time in the Massachusetts General Hospital. This blogless interval saw revolts across Northern Africa and the Middle East, the outcome of which will depend on whether working-class-based forces can find ideas and structures after decades of repression and with them take power. Europe still has the advantage of  remembered struggles  and some organization. This blog had located the austerity programs in the USA at the state- and municipal-level because programs like the Ryan budget had not yet been unveiled. And, for now, resistance to austerity measures in the USA--austerity measures which were to be accomplished in part by an attack on union rights--is most felt at the state level and produced the massive fight back in Wisconsin.

In their effort to enforce the cuts, the capitalist class is dropping its pretense of support for democracy. In Michigan, the new Republican governor has asserted the right of his party-in-power to take over towns not able to balance their budgets, pushing out the elected officials. It is a process also being seen in the EU, where fines and other punishments will be imposed on member states not in compliance with austerity measures. EU officials now regret that some member states have the right to vote on bailouts.

Next week, Finland will be under enormous pressure to support the latest bailout, this one for Portugal. They have no doubt been offered financial incentives to vote as required, but the threat represented by a new party in Finland that opposes bailouts has already been dealt with through a deal between the conservative coalition in Finland and the social democrats. The new political party that forced this so-called "left-right" alliance is the Perussuomalaiset, whose name is awkwardly translated as the “True Finns.”  The True Finns, who have reached 19.1% in the latest Parliamentary election, are a centre-left formation, supporting the welfare state and sharply progressive taxation, and opposed to EU bailouts of banks and governments. (Unfortunately, they are also anti-immigration, and some of their representatives sound racist.)  In class terms, the True Finns come largely from former rural and peasant parties, and as owners of farms are petite-bourgeois.

But, if EU plans to solve the economic crisis were threatened in Brussels, at least until the social democrats in Finland showed the limits to their "socialist" principles by getting in bed with the conservatives, they are again more seriously threatened in the streets.  Greece is today closed by a general strike. That really is why I decided to resume the blog today. The latest news is that electrical power will soon be cut off by the utility workers. The airports are again closed. Will general strikes, in time, be coordinated to occur simultaneously across Europe? Why have the French been relatively silent of late? The British are already in the streets in record numbers, and not just to watch the Royal Wedding.

And so the Dialectic ripens. Broad-based working-class formations--parties-- are lacking. But it is class struggle that we are seeing. And all history is the history of class struggle.