ALGIERS, December 5 — Workers and students are blocking buildings and striking for better conditions on the job and at the university against the socialist fig-leaf being used to hide a capitalist economy and the wealth of the bosses. Although a national liberation struggle gained independence from France in 1962, capitalism has remained in the name of socialism.

Large sectors of the economy were nationalized. Today, 90% of the banks are public, the hydrocarbon company is state-owned, and government spending represents two-thirds of non-hydrocarbon Gross Domestic Product. Yet almost one-fourth of the population lives in poverty. Twenty percent of the youth 15-24 are jobless. So the workers and students are fighting back.

Today, municipal workers in Zeribet El Oued struck, blockading the municipal popular assembly building demanding back pay, having gone unpaid for two to six months. The strike united temporary and permanent workers. “Whole families have been paralyzed by accounting and administrative malfunctions, which deprive us of our monthly income for months at a time,” said a public records worker.

Also today, forestry workers in Tlemcen walked out, demanding permanent hiring of temporary workers — in particular safety and security personnel — as well as for promotions that have been delayed, in particular for older workers.

There have been repeated student strikes in Boumerdè condemning the university bureaucracy, which has disorganized teaching and the functioning of different university departments. As of today, the commercial and economic sciences department and the school of hydrocarbons — Algeria is rich in oil and gas — have been blocked for over a week by strikers protesting disciplinary sanctions taken against 15 student strikers.

What is needed is a communist ideology to link all these struggles and to understand the need to fight for communism, not socialism’s state capitalism.

FLORANGE, FRANCE, December 6 — Five thousand steelworkers here are fighting the closure of the ArcelorMittal steel plant, but at every turn they run up against the law of capitalism which seeks maximum profits over the workers’ dead bodies.

Workers at ArcelorMittal’s plant in Fos-sur-Mer on the Mediterranean blocked deliveries today in solidarity with steelworkers here. Some shifts struck and prevented rolls of steel from leaving the plant. Steelworkers at the company’s Basse-Indre plant on the west coast are set to strike on December 10 against plans to transfer sixty jobs to the Florange packaging plant.

Meanwhile, the union has been putting up its usual militant front while appealing to the government to force the company to keep the plant open, demanding it renegotiate its deal with ArcelorMittal. The local union leader, Edouard Martin, and a dozen union officials briefly occupied the plant, threatening to stage a sit-down inside. They then left when the bosses promised not to turn off the gas valves which keep the blast furnaces on standby.

While Martin condemned the French government’s “betrayal” of the workers, adding that “those who were supposed to help us are killing us.” Who’s kidding whom? It is these union misleaders who are betraying the workers. They repeatedly steer the workers into depending on a supposedly neutral government to protect them against the capitalist class. But the capitalist government was never supposed to help the workers in the first place.

Martin said, “We’re solemnly calling on you, President François Hollande, to take the matter in hand.” But in reality Hollande’s Socialist government serves the capitalist class. Workers can only depend on their own unity and organization in their fight against the bosses.

Last year ArcelorMittal idled both blast furnaces here because of over-capacity. The anarchy of capitalism leads the bosses to expand production wildly in boom periods and then shut plants in the bust that inevitably follows. Meanwhile, the packaging plant, which makes cans for the food industry, continues to operate because it is profitable.

During the recent French presidential election campaign, Socialist Hollande promised the thousands of steelworkers that if he was elected, he would pass a law forcing “a big company [which] no longer wants a production unit…to sell it” so that the plant will not be “dismantled.” Then, after Hollande was elected in May, a series of promises and “militant” statements by Socialist leaders were ignored by the company (which employs 260,000 workers worldwide), claiming the plant was no longer profitable. On October 1, ArcelorMittal put the Florange blast furnaces on permanent standby, leaving the Hollande government 60 days to find a buyer for the site.

Meanwhile, on November 6, the Socialist government announced a “competitiveness pact,” a “massive and unprecedented” 20-billion-euro gift ($26 billion) to the capitalists aimed at lowering the cost of labor and increasing the competitiveness of French companies against their imperialist rivals.

The measure exonerates the bosses from paying 20 billion euros in social security contributions on their lowest-paid workers. It will be financed by slashing 10 billion euros ($13 billion) from the government budget in 2014 and 2015 — including many social welfare programs — and by a 10-billion-euro increase (another $13 billion) in the value-added tax. That will mainly be paid by the working class.

Pretending to get tough with ArcelorMittal, on November 22 the government minister for industrial renewal announced possible temporary nationalization of the site, to give more time to find a buyer. But this was never more than a hollow threat, given that Socialist Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault admitted that nationalizing Florange would have cost the French government over a billion euros.

His “compromise” deal says, (1) there is no “white knight” buyer; (2) the blast furnaces will be moth-balled; (3) the 629 blast furnace workers will be offered early retirement or jobs at other sites; and (4) the workers at the packaging plant must submit to more exploitation to increase its competitiveness.

The union misleaders had little choice but to condemn such a deal that falls so far short of worker expectations. But the government said there would be no renegotiating the rescue plan.

Capitalism is truly the source of these machinations which dump these steelworkers on the garbage heap. Based on the planlessness of the system, the bosses overproduce at this plant the amount of steel they can sell at a profit. To maintain their overall profit in their fierce competition with rival steel bosses, they are driven to get rid of this particular plant and its workers who they have exploited for decades. Then the union misleaders and their Socialist government play with workers’ lives with phony militancy combined with defending the profit system. Their stance absolutely precludes the real solution: communist revolution to eliminate the bosses and their oppressive, exploitative system.

Workers must be won to understand that capitalism can’t be reformed, as the above class struggle reveals. It is driven by the pursuit of maximum profits, in direct contradiction to the well-being of the working class. Only the workers themselves, led by the communist Progressive Labor Party, can make a revolution that will put the steel mills and all of society in the hands of our class, which produces everything of value.

[Late bulletin: On December 7, ArcelorMittal agreed to mothball the two blast furnaces for six years.

Recently at work we learned that one of our maintenance workers was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. His doctor gave him only six months to live. Those closest to him began to take up a collection to send him on one last trip to fulfill a dream of his, watching a NASCAR race in Daytona, FL. Our machine shop pays the lowest wages in the area, with most workers making between $10 and $15 per hour in one of the most expensive areas in the country to live. But the workers in the shop stepped up, donating what they could. They raised the needed funds in less than two weeks.

Even though this was a modest dream and this maintenance worker had given more than five years of his life to this company the bosses could not find it in themselves to donate a single penny for this man’s last vacation. After initially claiming that they would allow workers to donate through paycheck deductions (something that would help people who live paycheck to paycheck) the company went back on that, claiming that it simply wouldn’t be possible.

Meanwhile you can buy merchandise from the company store and hockey tickets via paycheck deductions, but the cost of having the payroll department process these donations would just be too taxing for the bosses. The most they could find themselves moved to give was to simply allow the collection to be taken up during all shifts.  

This is, of course, nothing new. When the current depression hit in 2008, food banks emptied and charitable organizations that aid the poor and homeless were hit hard as donations declined. The decline revealed a startling truth, that despite overly publicized charitable donations from the capitalist class, it is in fact the working class who make the overwhelming amount of donations to organizations that aid the poor.

A recent study in August by the Chronicle of Philanthropy confirmed that the vast majority of aid to the poor is collected from working-class neighborhoods. The capitalist media tries to portray the wealthy as our benevolent caretakers, but as recent events at my shop have demonstrated, the capitalists are only interested in bleeding the working class dry.

As a final indignity for this maintenance worker he gets to spend his final months not with his friends and family, but at work. Without going to work he loses the meager health care that our job offers, something that would surely bankrupt his family as they tried to pay for his care. Besides, the company would not want to set any bad precedents by keeping him on payroll while he stayed home. This is not a world fit for the working class to live in.

Red Beard

Much has been made by the capitalist media and their politicians of the looming “fiscal cliff.” This is occurring amid intensifying imperialist rivalry causing the bosses to impose more fascist austerity measures to force workers to pay for unending wars.

In a political move described as “kicking the can down the road,” the fiscal cliff date was arbitrarily set by lawmakers two years ago as a time bomb to guarantee creation of a new crisis if draconian cuts were not made. On that date the Bush tax cuts would expire, amid sweeping spending cuts threatening to cause a massive retraction of the economy. We’re told that without massive cuts to Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance and other benefits, an economic doomsday is inevitable.

The rulers’ solution for the crisis, with its fiscal cliff, is economic blackmail designed to force through wildly unpopular austerity measures. The U.S. ruling class has for decades fought to roll back gains won by U.S. workers in the first half of the 20th century. These gains made it more difficult for U.S. corporations to compete with many countries with cheaper labor as well as those that had built up more modern and efficient industries. All this time U.S. bosses were spending trillions on a huge military at the expense of upgrading their industries.

But the bosses have to deal with U.S. workers’ massive opposition to austerity policies. In election-night polling by Hart Research Associates, people rejected using cuts in Social Security, Medicare and federal unemployment insurance to bring down the deficit by varying rates of from 70 to 84 percent; 68 percent opposed raising the Medicare eligibility age. Meanwhile, 64 percent supported addressing the deficit by increasing taxes on the rich. (Findings confirmed by a recent Washington Post poll, The Nation.)  

‘Fix the Debt’?

So despite workers decisively rejecting these austerity measures, they are still the preferred ruling-class club to beat the working class into submission. As such it is a top priority of both Republicans and Democrats.

A recent New York Magazine article (11/30) reveals this ruling-class effort to force austerity measures down workers’ throats. The article describes a coalition called Fix the Debt, comprising leading U.S. capitalists, organized around neo-liberal economist Peter Peterson, Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles who headed Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, and the heads of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Citigroup among others.

Fix the Debt pushes the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan: massive cuts to social programs to pay for a deficit created by imperialist wars and bank bailouts.

The borrowing of $16 trillion for decades of wars — to pay for over 1,100 military bases in 130 countries — has been robbing the U.S. of resources and destroying the living standards of U.S. workers. The latter face a future of austerity and one of fighting and dying in these wars.

The Fix the Debt group has launched an all-out media offensive featured on all the major news networks and newspapers. They’ve also created “CEO tools” that help employers pitch their platform to their workforce, including sample letters to give to workers and power-point presentations.

Fix the Debt is the latest front group in a 70-year ideological struggle by U.S. rulers to replace working-class consciousness with a pro-business consciousness, centered on shifting the tax burden from the bosses to the workers: deregulation, union-busting and destruction of any social safety net.

Austerity is Class War

Austerity measures will not help the economy as Fix the Debt claims. Rather they lead to reduced growth and greater debt according to the research of many noted economists including Paul Krugman and Ha-Joon Chang (see “The Return of Depression Economics” and “Bad Samaritans”). Austerity attacks “dangerous” political ideas, like the one that the capitalist state should make even the smallest effort to alleviate the worst effects of capitalism. The bosses don’t want to be obligated to give the slightest consideration to workplace safety, pollution or the deteriorating condition of their exploited workforce.

A major reason capitalists push austerity is to try to prevent an economic depression. But all the austerity and infrastructure programs over the decade of the 1930s couldn’t get U.S. capitalism out of the Great Depression. It was only World War II and putting 14 million workers into the military that solved their economic and unemployment problems.

Austerity also is used to break the back of the working class. But U.S. workers have resisted these efforts. In Wisconsin tens of thousands marched on the state capital to oppose a union-busting law that was shoved through under the guise of “solving” the state budget crisis. Similar attacks in Indiana and Ohio were met with massive street protests.

It took a serious effort by the Democratic Party to either co-opt these working-class movements or destroy them, only to have another nation-wide movement pop up opposing austerity measures — Occupy Wall Street. It ultimately had to be put down by a series of coordinated police raids organized by a conference of big-city mayors and launched out of the Obama White House and a relentless media blitz slandering the movement. (“Truthout,” 3/20; “CounterPunch,” 5/14) To overcome this mass resistance to austerity measures, the ruling class is using the debt crisis as a cover to shove through these unpopular policies.

The battle over austerity measures proves that any reform won by workers under capitalism will face constant ruling-class attack until it is ultimately driven into the ground. This attack is relentless. The bosses will demand total domination, both physical and ideological, of the working class.

But it also demonstrates that despite the mass propaganda campaigns, workers are highly skeptical of capitalism’s trickle-down economics and its maxim of “All for capital and nothing for the working class.” Workers are willing to fight this class war. What is needed is a revolutionary communist party — PLP — to develop their politics and lead the struggle to smash capitalist exploitation forever.

Additional Sources: Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, and Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Fones-Wolf’s Selling Free Enterprise, Carey’s Taking the Risk Out of Democracy.