Paolo Bassi

January 19, 2012

We are nearly all members of the Precariat now

There is nothing new in the capitalist practice of maximizing private profit and spreading losses to workers and governments. The 2008 bailout of the banks was a blatant demonstration of the corporate state at work --- the masters and their puppet politicians working hand in hand to subvert state power in the interest of the invisible few.

The crisis was sold to the public as a unique aberration caused by the greed and irresponsibility of a few bad apples and not by any fundamental flaw in financial capitalism. The predictable “panic” presented western capitalist governments with the opportunity to rearrange resources in a way they would never have dared to a decade earlier. No crisis, real or concocted, is ever wasted by the ruling classes when it comes to grasping greater power – money is the means but the objective is always more power.

Just as corporations use recession to drive down wages and demand greater efficiency, so states have used the current “not since the Great Depression” debt crisis to beat down living standards and expectations.

The Conservatives and their Liberal allies have begun their assault on the living standards of working people. Services that sustain a basic living standard and some semblance of hope for working people are being hacked with a savagery that would surprise even Thatcher’s governments. Cutting services always hurts women and children disproportionately. According to Shelter, about 70,000 British children are sleeping in temporary accommodation every night.

The current deficits can be overcome by abolishing loopholes that allow corporations to avoid taxation by using off-shore accounts. The wealthy could be forced to pay a wealth tax and financial transactions could be taxed. This will never happen of course in a state with an almost fully-merged political and corporate class. The immunity of the super-wealthy during the current crisis has laid bare the myth of the state as guardian of citizenship and the “objective” enforcer of the social contract. The real masters have emerged from the shadows of “democracy”.

The people should make no mistake. The current cuts to public services are not part of a normal budget balancing act but rather an irreversible rupture of the social contract that began after World War II. The economic and political gains of working people in the last 65 years will no longer be tolerated by the elites. As state sovereignty and responsibility to its citizens diminish with increasing globalization, corporate power no longer feels compelled to bargain.

Since the commitment to full employment and a forward-looking industrial policy no longer exists, then vast numbers of people will be seen as a surplus that will need to be contained – in every way.

The British population, along with others in Europe and the United States, is hurtling back to an age of social apartheid in which affordable housing, meaningful education, access to politics, social mobility and health will become restricted privileges. Our rulers are reversing history – our history – in from of our eyes and stampeding us into mass insecurity. Just as in the 1930s, when the enemy was clearer, a fight is coming, a fight that belongs above all to the working class but also to anyone who opposes the indecency of the not-so-distant past.