A week of demonstrations, of teach-ins, and of marches is currently underway in the city of Pittsburgh ahead of the G-20 summit set to take place beginning on September 24. In just a few days, some of the most influential people in the world – finance ministers made up from the world’s leading economies, the governor of the European Central Bank, representatives from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and others – will wrangle with each other over how to effectively “handle” the fallout caused by the capitalist crisis. Despite how the G-20 seeks to portray itself, it is – like every other convention of the ruling elite – quite literally a battleground where rival capitalist powers engage one another to see if they can weaken their foreign competitors and, thus, strengthen their own class of capitalists through a variety of protectionist trade measures, interest rate cuts, and deficit spending.
The United States, for example, cut interest rates to an abysmally low level in order to give American manufacturers a boost on international markets. This makes it more difficult for the leading manufactures of the European Union – France and Germany – to compete. Thus, they themselves must try to cheapen the cost of their currency to make their products more competitive on the market regardless of whether this leads to inflation or a reduction in consumer sales due to the fall in value of money. Even China, which holds millions of dollars worth of U.S. Treasury Bonds, is vexed over the current policy of the Federal Reserve in which it repeatedly slashed interest rates. Every drop in the value of the U.S. dollar means bad news for Chinese investors who are stuck holding such an asset; hence, they are pushing for an arrangement whereby the International Monetary Fund could establish its own currency, one who’s value will not be subject to volatile fluctuations resulting from national financial policies. Thus, the G-20 is by no means a harmonious convention contrived to “iron out” the deficiencies and shortcomings associated with the world market in order to make it function more smoothly. In reality, as we can observe above, it is the realm of economic warfare.
While the great capitalist powers and their respective trading-bloc nations debate and fight over market share for their respective financial institutions and multi-national manufactures and exporters, there is one aspect, however, in which they can all agree: the international working class must pay the price of the crisis.
Since the crisis began in earnest, millions of working-class people across both the United States and the world witnessed massive job losses across both the financial and “real” sectors of global economy. People who were only yesterday working a full-time job, which included a pension and health benefits, now find themselves struggling to make ends meet working simultaneous, low-paying part-time jobs – if they can even find them.
All these developments had a crushing impact on young workers and new graduates looking for a fresh start after years of preparation and study. Some statistical collections site evidence suggesting 78% of teenagers aged 16-19 in the United States are unemployed. Since record keeping began, never has there been a time – possibly even greater than during the Great Depression – when there were fewer young people employed.
Meanwhile, the “pillars” of American finance capital, i.e., Citigroup, American International Group (AIG), Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and others, got bailed out to the tune of $12.6 trillion (!) dollars in loans, handouts, and guarantees. If one were to take the total sum of $12.6 trillion and divide it by the number of individuals currently living within the United States, we get a staggering figure of $ 42,105 for every adult and child in this country.
How much has the Obama administration promised us (workers and unemployed youth) under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009? A mere $8.2 billion, one-thousandth of the sum provided to the banks, the insurance giants, and the stock brokerages.
Across the United States, 30 million people are currently out of work, or they are working involuntary part-time jobs. Wall St. even admits that relatively higher levels of unemployment will be the norm in the coming months and years, even though the labor market had an influx of some 12 million individuals since 2001. Nevertheless, job losses, pension freezes, slashed health benefits, longer working hours, short-time work, and money devaluation, are not the only way the capitalists seek to make us pick up the tab for their crisis.
The vast sums of money the Obama administration pumped into the economy must eventually come from somewhere. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that by 2019, the U.S. will run a fiscal deficit of some $9 Trillion dollars. Where is the money going to come from to pay off those State debts? One hint, it will not be the multi-nationals or banks. Undoubtedly, working-class people who will end up flipping the bill through a combination of higher taxes and a reduction in funds directed towards public services. This is all something the cabal of G-20 representative will try to hammer out during their conference in Pittsburgh.
The fight back to ensure we do not end up paying the price of their crisis begins with a committed defense of all jobs and the preservation of public services. The occupation of all workplaces declaring layoffs, cuts in pay, pension freezes, soliciting un-paid work, etc, is necessary in the coming period. The working class must fight for the nationalization of all banking institutions under workers’ control without a cent given to the former capitalist owners or investors. The merging of all banks into one State Bank will allow the working class to direct investment to meet the needs of the millions, not the greed of the finance parasites.
When the bosses try to claim they lack money to pay their workers, the workers must seize the account books for themselves to see where all the money went; this will allow them to witness firsthand the incompetency of a capitalist-run enterprise.
To put people back to work providing meaningful social labor, we fight for a massive Public Works program building new bridges, highways, schools, hospitals, all under control of workers’ organization and financed by taxing those responsible for putting people out of work – the rich, the capitalists.
Most importantly, the unions simply must do more to unite the resistance against the relentless attacks by the bosses. The union leaders must drop any pretense of collaboration with a capitalist class and take the road of militant struggle against the capitalists. Rank-and-file union members must pressure their leaders to take up such a fight. If they refuse, then they should take up the struggle on their own by electing strike committees made up of proven class fighters, who come from and answer directly to, the rank and file. The battles that lie ahead will inevitably involve intense situations that warrant the creation of workers’ defense organizations to protect strikes, pickets, and from the introduction by the bosses of scab labor.
The resistance to the capitalist crisis on the part of the international working class does not end following the G-20 summit starting this week; in fact, it is only the beginning of such a resistance. If we continually raise these slogans out in the struggle, we can stop the bosses dead in their tracks, and, in so doing, lay the foundations for a higher level of working-class struggle immediately down the road.