While Macron and the capitalists are trying to impose the breakage of the social
system in the name of a necessary "sobriety", it is becoming urgent to organizeagainst what is already shaping up to be a transition led by competition betweencapitals. ---- The climate is changing. Prices increase. The cost of energy isskyrocketing. The supply problems of the global chains are accentuated, theshortage of raw materials is accelerating. Meanwhile, in the main media, somescientists and political representatives are reproducing the hegemonic thoughtthat Emmanuel Macron summed up as follows: "it's the end of abundance". Since the1980s, the working class and part of the European middle class have experiencedprogressive impoverishment following decades of neoliberalism and financialderegulation. Falling incomes of the many to support the obscene advantages ofthe capitalists.Poverty inflationThe summer of 2022 confirmed a series of long-standing forecasts: sustainedinflation at the 10% threshold, a drop in all indicators relating to economicgrowth and the resulting unemployment. The latter complicates the desire formobilization aimed at correcting inflation through wage increases. The 10% priceincrease will be unilateral and assumed by force by the population. Capitalistdegrowth is a recession. Macron takes advantage of the shock strategy. He and theothers, speaking of "the end of plenty" or a "great upheaval" are insidiouslypreparing the ground for the counter-reforms which will call on the workers togreater efforts and to the sacrifices of a working class already at the end.While the dividends, the part of the work stolen by the shareholders, arebreaking records, the government, under the pretext of sobriety, continues thebreakage of our social system.The liberal and reactionary political line is to attack, once again, unemploymentbenefits to deal with the "urgency" of the labor shortage. Similarly, pensionreform, again at the top of government priorities, aims to make us work more as asolution to these crises. Food, rents, gasoline, heating, electricity... If thestruggles and mobilizations do not increase in the weeks to come, the increasewill be absorbed entirely by the drop in purchasing power of the vast majority ofproletarians. , salaried or not. Inflation is one of the mechanisms by which thecapitalist class reduces the share of wealth we have left.One of the major structural weaknesses of the globalized production system is itslogistical complexity. It depends on the continuous movement of a large number ofcomponents that are manufactured in very specific geographical areas. Thisinflexible system assumes a gigantic volume of traffic managed by anindeterminate number of companies, but which shows a strong tendency towardsconcentration.Tense world trade situationSince the fall of 2021, images of dozens of huge cargo ships waiting to dock inthe ports of Los Angeles, Rotterdam or Shenzhen have become commonplace. Supplychains, depressed for 18 months, have barely been able to keep up with surges indemand. Partial closures of factories and ports in China, where a real estatebubble has also burst, have worsened the already tense situation in world trade.Beyond the war in Ukraine, the truth is that price tension was looming at leastsince the start of the pandemic, in the spring of 2020. From the outset, thecapitalist system was colonial. The exploitation of the Global South and thecompetition of proletarians across the planet has been compensated in the West bythe society of mass consumption and a feeling of prosperity. Despite risinginequality and the attack on wages and social protections, capitalists are tryingto push the pill through access to technology, fashion and cheaply produced foodthrough increased exploitation. from the "other half" of the world. If werecognize like Paul Crutzen 1 that human production activities have reached thedimensions of a geological force, the uncontrollable consequences of whichchallenge our way of life; we know that capitalism and those who derive powerfrom it are responsible for it. Based on predation and unpaid resources; whatMoore 2 calls the appropriation, historical and current, of the "Four Cheaps":land-minerals, energy, food and labor; capitalism comes up against its ownlimits. We are witnessing the failure of the neoliberal solutions brought to themultiple crises of capitalism since the 1970s. From this point of view, the GreatRecession that From this point of view, the Great Recession that began in 2008 isbased on the degradation of the capitalist ecology" due to "a progressiveincrease in the cost of the Four Cheaps".Class EcologyVulnerable and dispossessed bodies, endangered species, raw materials underpressure and monopolized energies are one and the same unit of exploitation.Capitalism and ecological crisis are intimately linked. But the problem is notsimply that capitalism destroys nature or that a hundred oligopolies generate 60%of emissions. More radically than this economic system is based on thenon-payment by capital of its negative externalities. Nature is not an externalresource that capital abuses, but rather is internalized in the circulation andaccumulation of capital. The current difficulty for the capitalist elite and theexploiters of human and non-human resources is that the extraction of surplusvalue and wanton plunder have entered into a spiral of rising prices. The globalwarming that threatens life on Earth is also a threat to capitalist accumulationitself. Capital comes up against an enormous contradiction: it exhausts anddestroys its sources of wealth. This crisis poses the need for a new politicalsubject that reacts to the plunder of working time, essential resources and allbiophysical ecosystems. To propose a desirable ecological society is, for themoment, to organize against what is already announced as a transition led bycompetition between capitals. It will not be easy and we will have to face allsorts of contradictions, but we can now save ourselves some mistakes: thispolitical subject cannot be based on the ideological dualism "society and nature"by opposing trade union struggles on the one hand or access to housing and, onthe other, environmental struggles or those of reproductive work. In the face ofinflation and exploitation, we urgently need ecological and popular struggles,that is to say decolonial and class struggles. Gines and Mélissa (Ecology Commission)1. Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995, having introduced the concept of theAnthropocene. 2. Author of the book Capitalism in the web of life, contrastingthe term capitalocene with that of anthropocene.https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?La-fin-de-l-abondance_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten