Swiss Voters Just Raised Pensions, Not the Pension Age
Switzerland’s labor unions have won a national referendum on raising pensions, while blocking a rival proposal to increase the retirement age. The vote showed a clear class divide, as lower-paid and lower-educated voters defied business leaders’ warnings.....
..7 min video.
Whose streets? Pickets and police at York University
3000 graduate assistants, teaching assistants and contract faculty at York University have been on strike since February 26, 2024. A police intervention at the picket line on March 4 has ignited concerns about labour rights and safety. Desmond Cole reports for 'Yes Everything!'
..posting only a sampling of an example rich article.
Building revolutionary communities
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The Sudanese Women’s Union, one largest gender-based unions in Africa, was an infallible force in 2019. Initially created in 1952 to fight back against British colonial oppression, the group has since fought against gendered oppression in Sudan, playing an integral role in mobilizing women workers around resistance activities and setting the agenda at the negotiation tables for what a new Sudan that centres women’s rights and needs looks like. During digital blackouts, women street vendors were integral to spreading information about resistance actions and safety routes to avoid the military. It was even an image of a woman (Alaa Salah) by a woman (Lana Haroun) that made the protests go viral the first time!
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Lessons for organizers in so-called canada
Ola Often when I bring up communism with activists in Canada, they assume I’m discussing a European understanding of communism, completely disregarding the centuries of communal organization in African and other Indigenous communities. In the West, we don’t take the time to get to know our neighbours or understand their needs and how we can serve each other. Caring for our neighbours is the first step toward creating a shared understanding of community and building the foundation of our movements.
We learn from mass movements happening around the world through our social media, or the news if we are lucky and the media decides to cover them. Sudanese and other African activists here are doing an excellent job of responding to calls for solidarity from their communities, and leftist communities everywhere have a lot to learn from them about building an international base of revolutionary solidarity that de-centres western paradigms of societal organization.
Though these movements are geographically far away, our freedom is intertwined. Just as the fight for Indigenous sovereignty stretches from so-called Canada to occupied Palestine, the fight for Black lives against police brutality spans from the streets of Toronto to those of Sudan. Oppression anywhere strengthens oppression everywhere and if we are going to win this fight for our lives, our resistance to oppression in our neighbourhoods must be as strong as that to oppression on the other side of the world.....
Secret RCMP report warns Canadians may revolt once they realize how broke they are
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“The coming period of recession will … accelerate the decline in living standards that the younger generations have already witnessed compared to earlier generations,” reads the report, entitled Whole-of-Government Five-Year Trends for Canada.
“For example, many Canadians under 35 are unlikely ever to be able to buy a place to live,” it adds.
The report, labelled secret, is intended as a piece of “special operational information” to be distributed only within the RCMP and among “decision-makers” in the federal government.
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“Economic forecasts for the next five years and beyond are bleak,” reads the RCMP’s assessment of the rest of the decade, even adding a quote from French President Emmanuel Macron that “the end of abundance” is nigh....
Shrinking the boundaries of our democratic rights
Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, recently advanced the ominous sounding concept of ‘ordered liberty.’ This strange term, as a recent article in The Tyee showed, represents a clumsy attempt to reconcile the authoritarian and libertarian sides of conservative ideology.
Sean Speer, who was an aide to former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, recently defended ‘ordered liberty’ in an article in The Hub, a decidedly right-wing publication. In it, he proposed ‘a synthesis between liberal ideals of individual autonomy and freedom and traditional understandings of social norms and values.’ It is not difficult to see that this is a dangerous idea being put forward in an even more dangerous context.
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‘Extremism’
Poilievre’s counterpart in the UK, Rishi Sunak, struck a similar chord in his Downing Street statement delivered shortly after George Galloway won the by-election in Rochdale. As Lindsey German explained, Sunak ‘took this opportunity to denounce extremism and terrorism, to attack the protests over Gaza and to once again raise his fears over attacks on “democracy”.’
A ‘very chilling edge to Sunak’s speech’ lay in his call ‘for more police repression against the pro-Gaza demonstrations. This followed his meeting with police chiefs… when he said that there was a threat to democracy through mob rule – by which he meant protests and demonstrations.’....
..more.
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It is hardly surprising that opposition to the present genocide unfolding in Gaza has increased the level of interest in restricting protest and dissent within ruling circles. Western support for the reckless brutality of the Israeli assault on Gaza has unleashed a mobilisation of Palestine solidarity at a scale and durability that has shaken political establishments across the world.
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The placing of such limits on permissible forms of opposition takes us in a toxic direction towards a new era of McCarthyism, in which freedom is severely constrained and unapproved dissent is met with accusation and repression.
The right to protest, organise and act collectively to advance demands for change were not given as gifts from on high but were won in struggle. They matter to us, not as a means of saying what is acceptable to those in power, but in order to challenge ruling ideas and governing institutions. Attempts to redefine these boundaries pose a serious threat to our democratic freedoms and must be challenged and defeated.
Central bank independence as class war strategy
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Agile class war
It is highly significant that the IMF’s Managing Director weighs in on the question of central bank independence at this juncture. It is part of the Fund’s focus on ‘refining and adapting the institution’s core activities to support member countries as they face challenges posed by ongoing transitions in the global economy.’
Georgieva and her colleagues are well aware that global capitalism is far less stable than it was in the period before the financial crisis of 2008. In this situation, the IMF plays a leading role in developing a class-war strategy based on ‘agility, integration, and member focus.’ This would allow for a major effort to suppress wages, impose austerity and boost profitability, while keeping a close eye on economic danger signals so as make abrupt turns towards temporary or localised stimulatory measures in order to avert uncontrolled crises.
In this regard, the independent central bank, as a key achievement of the neoliberal decades, is an indispensable tool. Significantly walled off from political pressure and linked closely to financial capital, the central bank has a particularly important and ruthless role to play.
Working-class people across the world, however, are unlikely to be convinced by the IMF’s insistence that this harsh medicine is being forced upon them in the common interest. Georgieva’s goals of stability and growth will mean reduced living standards and intensified exploitation. However, this may in turn reveal that the independent central banks are simply not insulated enough to escape the anger and resistance that their measures unleash.....
Engels was onto something. It really is a CAPITALIST state.
“Debt Is to Capitalism What Hell Is to Christianity”
Debt is to capitalism what hell is to Christianity: unpleasant, and essential.” Speaking in his new documentary series In the Eye of the Storm, Yanis Varoufakis explains how elites have used capitalism’s own structural conditions to terrorize populations into submission and advance their counterrevolution. For the former Greek finance minister, austerity was not a necessary response to crisis but an instrument of “class war,” used to redesign economies in Europe and beyond.
Varoufakis’s new series recounts the resistance against this process — and the ways in which the European institutions’ dogmas set the EU on its current right-wing course. In an interview for the new print issue of Jacobin’s German-language magazine, David Broder spoke to Varoufakis about his time as finance minister, the reasons why recent crises have mostly benefited the far right, and the decline of Western hegemony globally.
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YANIS VAROUFAKIS
Full disclosure: we were among the big losers of last year’s elections. Why was that? Why did we all lose, both those of us in the then Syriza government who did not surrender to the troika and those who did?
The best explanation was given to me by a taxi driver. He was taking me home from the airport and told me, “You know what? I agree with all that you’re saying. And I like you, but I didn’t vote for you, or for Syriza. I won’t forgive you for giving me hope. I didn’t use to vote. I only went to the polling stations twice. Once in January 2015 to vote for you. And then again in July 2015, in the referendum to say “no” to the creditors. And what happened? You all folded, and we’re back in the same quagmire as before. I don’t care whether you were one of the good guys. Then you came to me in the election last year with a whole program that you can never implement because you’re struggling at 5 percent. So, I’m not voting again.”
DAVID BRODER
But was the taxi driver right to think that the initial hope was misplaced? Your series tells us that a small country saying “no” inspired many internationally. But the troika also wanted to demonstrate that you couldn’t say “no,” and then crushed you to prove the point. If this could have been a “David and Goliath” tale, what “catapult” did you have?
YANIS VAROUFAKIS
We knew they’d try to crush us. In April 2013, while living in Texas, I warned Syriza’s leaders that the Cypriot government and the ECB was a dress rehearsal for what they were going to do to a future Syriza or Podemos government. They were flexing their muscles with little Cyprus to rehearse shutting down the banks to force a capitulation. [Alexis] Tsipras understood and asked me: “OK, so what do we do?”
I sat down for six months and devised an action plan. I presented it to the team and they approved it. Then, just before the January 2015 election, Tsipras offered me the finance ministry to implement it. Alas, that action plan can’t be judged, because they didn’t let me implement it. I’m convinced that had we followed it the troika wouldn’t have been able to crush us.
In the ministry which I inherited, I had €50 billion worth of bonds in Greek law, which I could restructure with one signature. I didn’t even need to go through Parliament. And it was in Greek law. They couldn’t take me to New York like they used to take Argentina and so on. That was our nuclear weapon — because had I proceeded to haircut those bonds, the ECB would not be allowed (by Germany’s constitutional court) to save the Italian state by buying its bonds. Mario Draghi was very worried about this weapon of ours, as he told me during our first meeting. But right after that, my own government signaled to him behind my back: “Don’t worry. We won’t let Varoufakis do it.” It was like sending David against Goliath without the catapult.....
What should happen when a country goes heavily into debt?
