Across the European Union, the bosses’ governments have been announcing cutbacks in government services:

• In Ireland, the government adopted two austerity plans in 2009, cutting benefits across the board by 7 billion euros (US$8.75 billion). Government workers’ wages have been cut 5 to 15%, depending on their department and pay category.

• In January, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble warned that public spending would be cut in 2011 and that “grave decisions lie ahead.”

• On January 29, Spanish Finance Minister Elena Salgado announced 50 billion euros (US$62.5 billion) in budget cuts over the next three years. The government plans to “reform” the labor market and raise the legal retirement age from 65 to 67.

• On April 29, Mervyn King, the Bank of England governor, said the austerity measures needed to tackle Britain’s budget deficit will be so unpopular that whoever wins the elections will not get back into government for a generation.

• On May 5, French Prime Minister François Fillon announced an austerity plan to freeze government expenses from 2011 to 2013. Taking inflation into account, this amounts to a 10% budget cut over three years. Bourgeois economist Jacques Attali put the cut at 50 billion euros (US$62.5 billion).

• The Portuguese government has frozen government workers’ wages (around 12% of the working population). It’s planning layoffs, privatizations and a two-year increase in the retirement age.

Racist Cutbacks

In every case, these measures and cutbacks are racist because they hit the poorest workers hardest, and in every European country the poorest workers include a disproportionate number of workers belonging to a “racial,” “ethnic” or “national” minority.

In each of these countries, the ruling class is carefully watching how much the Greek bosses will manage to take away from the workers. If the Greek government imposes its austerity package of 30 billion euros (US$37.5 billion) in budget cuts over the next three years, bosses across Europe will order their governments to ratchet down workers’ incomes accordingly.

Indeed, government services like health care, pensions, education, etc., are a part of workers’ income, i.e. payment for their labor power. The only difference is that these services are financed and distributed indirectly, through taxes and the government, whereas wages are paid directly by the boss.

As Karl Marx explains in chapter VI of “Capital,” the value of a worker’s labor power has two components: First, the satisfaction of “natural wants, such as food, clothing, fuel, and housing, [which] vary according to the climatic and other physical conditions of his country.” Secondly, “the number and extent of his so-called necessary wants” depend to a great extent “on the habits and degree of comfort in which the class of free laborers has been formed.” Obviously, the “degree of comfort” that we expect as “normal” results from the class struggles of past generations of workers.

This means that, under capitalism, workers’ standard of living depends on the level of class struggle. The more workers fight, the more crumbs they may get, either directly from the boss or indirectly through the government. However, the bosses constantly attack to maintain or increase their profits by pushing back workers’ living standards. Whatever gains workers may win are usually reversed when the ruling class, using its control of state power, decides it can no longer allow these gains to limit their profits. Only with communist revolution can workers collectively distribute the full value they produce to our class, according to need.

The budget deficits that the bosses’ media are wailing about can be reduced in two ways: through budget cuts (taking income from the workers) or by taking income from the bosses (through taxes). The class struggle decides who will pay and how much.

In France, for example, a recent Senate finance committee report states that company exemptions on social security contributions cost the government 42 billion euros in 2009; while a National Assembly finance committee report states that tax breaks for the rich cost 73 billion euros. By eliminating tax breaks to the rich and their companies, the French government could take in 345 billion euros over three years, instead of cutting 50 billion euros in services to the working class over the same period!

Now is the time for workers across Europe to demonstrate concrete solidarity with workers in Greece. Defeating the austerity plan in Greece could help defeat similar plans being prepared in every country in Europe. And the international solidarity forged in fighting these austerity plans can — with communist leadership — become the sort of school for communism that will get our class out of the reformist traffic circle and onto the revolutionary highway to ending capitalism once and for all. 

PHOENIX, May 2 — On May 1, hundreds of thousands of workers marched in many cities nation-wide — including thousands of students who walked out and marched in Arizona itself — to protest Arizona’s new racist anti-immigrant law and to demand a better life for themselves and their class brothers and sisters.

This law is among the most openly racist ones passed in recent years. It requires Arizona cops to demand immigration papers from anyone they “suspect” to be undocumented. This is an explicit call for cops to arrest anyone who “looks” Latino or has a Spanish accent or any other racist stereotype they might use.

This open police state law — part of the growing fascist trend in the U.S. — seems to “upset” even the biggest ruling-class tools, up to and including the president. Obama claims to oppose it as “misguided,” saying Congress needs to pass “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” (CIR) to combat such laws. But he is using it to pose as a “lesser evil” to win those who oppose such laws so he can advance his own racist scheme.

U.S. rulers need these 12 million undocumented workers as a source of low-wage labor to maximize profits. As a representative of the ruling class, Obama is using the threat of an Arizona-type law to create a more subtle and exploitative form of indentured slavery and misery for undocumented immigrants than the petty racists of Arizona could ever imagine.

Obama’s CIR would require immigrants to register with ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement), work for a decade or more without causing “trouble” for their boss, and to pay taxes and fines. This slavery will result in immediate deportation for any worker’s opposition to injustice or exploitation.

This maneuver aims to intimidate workers from fighting back, including native-born workers who might be won to think that oppressing the immigrant workers would solve their own problems of mass unemployment and wage cuts.

Moreover, Obama and many liberal political groups want to enact the so-called DREAM Act. These misleaders and hacks claim it will allow immigrants who grew up in the U.S. to attend college. But this is a lie.

The DREAM Act requires qualifying students to attend college for at least two years straight with no time off. This prevents them from holding the kind of job that could help pay college tuition, placing this education beyond their reach, especially since most undocumented students do not qualify for financial aid. Thus, they would have to “choose” the Act’s other provision — military service.

Obama and his ruling-class bosses are not trying to help immigrants whatsoever. Actually, they’re focused on future world wars with China, Russia and/or Europe. This immigration “reform” is their attempt to win immigrants to willingly rebuild war industries with cheap labor and expand the military by enlisting to receive citizenship. It is inter-imperialist rivalry that drives the ruling class.

Capitalism creates borders via military adventures and then uses them to foster divisions within the working class, pitting immigrant against native-born workers. The bosses spread the lie that one group of workers is “taking another group’s jobs.” But it’s the bosses who do all hiring and firing. It’s the bosses and their profit system that causes mass racist unemployment, with double the rates for black and Latino workers, thereby increasing super-exploitation.

And meanwhile these same bosses are ever ready to cross these borders themselves in their unending drive for maximum profits, and will use wars to protect these profits.

To answer this we workers ourselves need to cross these capitalist borders and unite in international solidarity to destroy this bloodthirsty system that oppresses us all.

SEATTLE, May 3 — At 8:00 AM today, up to 250 campus workers and students conducted mass picket lines throughout the day to protest budget cuts and show our strength in the face of current contract negotiations for graduate students and the upcoming contract expiration for the custodians at our university here. The UAW union leadership unilaterally chose to extend the grad students contract rather than strike, as many rank-and-filers demanded.

Earlier, at 4:30 AM outside clock-in stations for campus workers, we asked them to join our picket lines. Many took our flyer and did join throughout the day, despite intimidation from management who told them joining students could cost them their jobs.

This student strike was organized as a continuation of the nation-wide March 4 events. These angry students and workers want to fight the budget cuts that mean higher tuition, lower pay and layoffs for all campus workers, especially targeting black and Latino and low-income students.

A coalition of workers and students (who see themselves as part of the working class) organized the strike. Many understand the class politics that places the university as a “center of production,” seeing student-worker unity as having the power to stop that production.

The series of picket lines was designed to give students and workers pause on entering the campus and think about what it meant to cross the lines. We marched in the crosswalks and blocked traffic and, despite police threats of ticketing and arrests, many students and workers refused to leave the streets for the sidewalks.

While the turnout was less than the 1,000 workers and students who demonstrated on March 4, there was a qualitative leap forward over March 4. Then that student strike became a march led by the cops and moved off campus, losing its intended focus. Today we picketed
despite the cops’ threats and harassment, not with their “guidance.” Students and workers who joined us united as one, defying the bosses and their henchmen.

The picket lines eventually spontaneously marched onto the campus (not part of our original plan), to win more students to participate. A few did join, although we also lost some workers and students who had planned to meet us at the picket lines. Now we must begin to judge these actions not only by quantity but also by quality.

The quality of our action was a step forward in our struggle, one which more and more workers and students are understanding is long-term. On the picket lines we discussed what a “fair contract” for grad student workers would mean, particularly for other workers. We explained the nature of reforms, where they come from and how the bosses often simply take from one group to throw crumbs to another.

With the upcoming custodians’ contract expiration, we stressed the importance to be there for them as they stood by us. We’re beginning to see these reforms as merely temporary fixes (if that) for systemic problems in the university and in capitalism generally.

This important battle signified the potential power of worker-student unity. Now we must better understand how to use that power and the long struggle ahead, as well as the nature of capitalism and the history of workers’ struggles. We must steel ourselves for a grueling fight, not only on the campus but as part of the larger struggle of the international working class, a fight which means destroying a system that puts these cuts on the backs of workers and working-class students.