“Home care workers in Rotterdam who will lose their jobs in 2014 will be partly replaced by benefit recipients. The municipality will oblige those on benefits to do volunteer work”, De Volkskrant newspaper wrote towards the end of 2013. “This is substitution pure and simple”, according to Wim van der Hoorn, a union leader of the FNV labour union. “The municipality tries to patch up the holes in its budget by using the free labour of benefit claimants to get work done that previously was paid work. In this way employment is lost”. But the PvdA (Social Democratic party) elderman Marco Florijn tries to keep up appearances and “wishes to underline that the absolute precondition is that no regular jobs are lost”. His political associate Jan Hamming, mayor of Heusden and chairman of the advisory committee “Work and Income” of the association of Dutch municipalities VNG, is a lot more honest on this issue. He admits that the use of benefit claimants can threaten existing jobs. “There is a financial side to this story. We are confronted with substantial budget cuts. That also impacts on the work in municipalities: it does not get done. So it is only logical that we are also considering putting people who are on benefits to work.” Rotterdam is not a unique case for that matter: thousands, possibly tens of thousands and who knows in future hundreds of thousands of benefit claimants are being forced to do unpaid labour.

Sticky fingers

The question is who profits from forced labour and job substitution, and what the amounts are that we are talking about. It is difficult for us to get this information. The implementation is far from transparent. Many municipalities have already introduced forced labour but they all have their own approach, often through structures that differ only slightly. In some instances the benefit claimants have to do forced labour in municipal reintegration centres and sheltered workplaces, in other places they have to work in home care or with ‘volunteer’ organisations, and other municipalities put them to work in commercial reintegration agencies, temp agencies and commercial businesses.

Obviously any commercial business will only want to be involved in such projects if these are financially attractive. In principle forced labourers are cheaper than regular employees because they do not receive wages and have no entitlements regarding better (and thus more expensive) working conditions. But it is usually unclear how much money is involved, and where exactly it disappears into the deep pockets along the way in the outplacement chain. In most cases it will be financially attractive for the municipalities to force benefit claimants into compulsory unpaid labour. After all, their benefits are being paid by the national government, although in practice quite a few municipalities have already been obliged to pay a share of these costs. With or without municipal deficit: all extra income from forced labour is probably welcome. The downside is that an entire system of repression has to be set up to continuously monitor the forced labourers, and this is costly: the minimum that is necessary would be the monitoring infrastructure plus the wages for the guards and ‘coordinators’. But this in a way is employment and can probably be paid out of the so-called ‘employment budget’ which is part of the social benefits budget that the municipalities receive from the government. In addition there have to be employees who bring in customers and orders, and this should not be too difficult with the obviously low labour cost that can be guaranteed through forced labour. Companies and municipalities try to sell forced labour with all sorts of explanations about ‘social return’, ‘gaining experience’, and ‘giving people guidance and support’, as they do for low paid and unpaid internships and other types of worktraining programmes. Usually it is just empty words but not always: sometimes they really do invest some time into explaining the work to people and training them. And in some cases new workers do indeed produce less in the beginning than their experienced colleagues. In short there would have to be an in depth national research with full cooperation from civil servants, businesses, unions and economists to get to the bottom of who really benefits from forced labour and to what extent.

Substitution

The question is: how useful would such research be for the bottom-up activists, for the workers themselves? And what do we mean by ‘substitution’, how would we describe it? If we look at it from the bottom up it is really very simple: any form of labour that is paid less than the minimum wage or the collective labour agreement wage for adults, in whatever way and with whatever excuse possible, in fact means that regular paid jobs are being replaced. This applies to forced labour in the same way it applies to unpaid internships, worktraining programmes, youth minimum wage jobs, and so on. After all the existing work is turned into a lower paid or even unpaid job.

For alderman Florijn ‘substitution’ probably only applies when a regular paid job is replaced one-on-one by ‘voluntary work’. From the position of the forced labourer however it does not matter at all whether or not the work was a decently paid job earlier on. The issue is that work that is done by a forced labourer cannot be done by a regular paid worker any more. To put it bluntly: every forced labourer is made to substitute the paid job that he or she could have had without forced labour. And this also goes for work that has never, or not for years, been paid work. The fact is that this work obviously needs to be done, otherwise no one would be forced to do it, or be recruited for it, and no internships would be established to do it. The authorities and bosses would simply have to pay to get this work done if forced labour and all sorts of vague internship constructions had not been created. In that case the labourers would have had their wages and rights. Basically there is only one exception to this rule and this is the work that was simply made up to keep benefit claimants busy, to discipline them and bully them out of the benefits scheme. You know the type of work: one man digs a hole and the other one fills it up again. Or the type of forced labour where the benefit claimants just have to show up at the workplace but there is nothing to be done except hang around and wait. This is not substitution of course, but out of principle even in those cases people ought to be properly paid for this. Let alone the fact that benefit claimants are being humiliated by this, and that for that reason alone forced labour should be abolished immediately.

But there is more to substitution than this. Forced labour and obligatory ‘volunteer work’ are not only substituting regular paid jobs, but also important unpaid work such as for example first-line care by family or others, political activism, and also a lot of real volunteer work that the government does not approve of. This means that the existing volunteer economy is losing its autonomy and gets to be more and more controlled by municipalities. In this way forced labour harms community and volunteer work, and other activities outside of the capitalist logic that make life worthwhile for many people.

Profit and loss

When we start looking at the financial question from bottom-up things actually become quite simple. The extra revenues that this substitution generates for bosses and municipalities equals exactly the amount that all forced labourers, interns and work experience placements together lose compared to when they would receive a regular (collective labour agreement or adult) minimum wage. This is the amount that the working class as a whole is being deprived of, on top of the added value they produce and that is always appropriated by the capitalist class anyway. These calculations can also easily be made for individual cases: how much money does a benefit claimant who works, receive less compared to when he or she would be paid a regular wage. And if we would add these sums for the by now estimated tens of thousands of forced labourers we quickly end up with huge amounts. In Leiden the forced labourers officially have to work 26 hours a week, and as a result the minimum wage for the hours worked would be exactly the same as their benefits. This would be a financial-technical way to prevent substitution, but in practice most forced labourers work far more than 26 hours. In addition the forced labour placements continue to substitute regular jobs with regular labour rights.

If you look at it from the bottom up it is a false argument used by employers and municipalities, that forced labourers, interns and youth work placements have to learn the work and produce less so should get paid less. Not only is their production not always lower, in some cases it is even higher. The point is that this growing group of underpaid or not paid labourers have to pay for their housing, food, clothing and insurances just like anyone else. It is not about productivity as it is with old-fashioned piece rate, but about the time that workers give to their bosses. The workers can only make use of their time once, and this is a problem when due to these forms of underpayment more and more people working during all the working hours they have only receive an income that is not even a living wage. The issue should be a decent living wage for everyone.

Eric Krebbers

Source of Article: http://www.doorbraak.eu/job-substitution/

Source of Featured Image: http://simplepimple.com/2012/08/are-internships-a-form-of-modern-slavery/

 
1. EMPLOYER THREATENS TO LAY OFF A PREGNANT EMPLOYEE IF SHE DOESN’T HAVE AN ABORTION

The Trade Union of Salaried Engineers in Heraklion of Crete, Greece, invites you to declare your solidarity regarding the incredible threat launched by the PANTHEON AKTEE company on one of its female employees.

The female engineer, who is now pregnant, was employed on the basis of the general collective contract (by the General Confederation of Greek Workers – GSEE) as administration staff (€615 gross salary) although she performs engineering tasks with all the responsibility that comes with that. Despite the fact that she had signed an indefinite contract, she was placed within the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF). In this way, her salary is paid by Greek tax payers and the company receives a subsidy for her while it is only required to pay her national insurance fees. Nevertheless, the employee hasn’t received any salary since June. In addition, the company still owes her the Christmas, Easter and summer vacation pay, hasn’t compensated her for an industrial accident she suffered and hasn’t paid her for overtime and work on Saturdays.

But the company’s arbitrariness doesn’t stop there. The employee has been threatened that if she doesn’t interrupt her pregnancy she will be laid off. In addition, she has suffered verbal abuse and has been threatened to be beaten. She has also experienced discrimination due to her being pregnant and is now being blackmailed to resign in exchange of her overdue salaries. The company is trying to force the employee to resign before she gives birth to her child, as she will then be protected by law from being fired for 18 months. If the company lays her off after she becomes a mother, it will be obliged to pay her all the salaries for the 18-month protected period plus a penalty.

Due to the employer’s threats, the employee feels that she and her unborn child are in danger. We state that if any harm comes to our colleague, we will consider the company as the only responsible!

Delays in salary and benefit payments are the culmination of employers’ widespread tactic of systematically violating labour legislation and deteriorating working conditions. Their excuse is always the same: “We have no money, employees will get paid when the company gets paid.” But employees are neither company sponsors nor business partners. Did companies share profits with their employees when they were highly profitable? Why are employees now expected to share the losses by “contributing” their salaries for the companies’ “survival”?

But the specific incident goes beyond the financial sphere and poses a major threat on human decency. In addition, it constitutes one more proof of the sexist discriminations that female workers still suffer in the 21st century in the supposedly civilised European Union.

2. WORKER IN A CONSTRUCTION SITE WAS LAID OFF “BECAUSE HE WASN’T CHEERFUL”

The Trade Union of Salaried Engineers, Greece, invites you to declare your support regarding the layoff of a colleague who was fired on the grounds that “he wasn’t cheerful”.

Our colleague was employed by ELEMKA, a member of METKA Group – subsidiary of MYTILINEOS Group. When he asked to be informed about the terms of his employment he found out that his contract was for three months and he was expected to work overtime, although none of these terms had been initially agreed.

The company refused to pay his overtime when he asked and soon after fired him. When the employee refused to sign his layoff, it was announced to him by a court clerk.

“We laid him off because he wasn’t cheerful!”: This was the answer given by the company’s representatives to the Trade Union when asked the reason of the lay-off.

They know no respect! The construction project demands exhausting hours, a six-day working week, unpaid overtime. Contracts are for three months, while engineers are employed as freelancers and are named “subcontractors” or “cooperators”. It is obvious that the high profits of METKA and MYTILINEOS Group have been made through the unpaid overtime and the workers’ exploitation.

By laying off our colleague, the company wants to terrorize all the people working at the construction site. This incident is one more example of the employers’ fierce effort to get rid of the workers who oppose their exploitation. It is part of the overall attack they have launched on every working right in an attempt to impose working conditions reminiscent of slavery.

Source of the featured image:http://www.thepressproject.net/article/69407/Employer-to-pregnant-worker-Get-an-abortion-or-get-sacked

Orr’s plan is a culmination of a political conspiracy to appoint an unelected emergency manger, acting as the direct representative of the banks, to attack workers’ rights and restructure the city in the interests of the rich. The cuts in pensions are aimed at establishing a national precedent, using bankruptcy courts to override benefits that are explicitly protected by the state constitution. This process was sanctioned by Judge Stephen Rhodes in his December 3 ruling.

Most city workers will have their pensions cut by up to 34 percent, while police and firemen will face a 10 percent cut. In addition, cost of living increases for all pensioners will be eliminated for at least a decade, meaning that the real value of payouts will steadily decline.

Orr is also planning on paying out less than one third of what it owes in retiree health care liabilities in order to fund a union-controlled Voluntary Employee Benefits Association (VEBA). The unions, which have functioned as co-conspirators throughout the bankruptcy process, would be tasked with slashing benefits or eliminating coverage.

With most pensioners already at or near the poverty threshold (pensions range between $19,000 and $34,000 per year), the cuts will drive a substantial portion of the city’s 24,000 retirees into destitution. Tens of thousands of works who gave their lives to the city, and were legally promised money for a secure retirement, are being kicked to the curb.

Speaking on Friday, Orr said these cuts were “very fair.”

In addition to guaranteeing 100 percent of all secured bonds, unsecured bonds would be paid 20 cents on the dollar. Many of the institutional investors that possess these bonds have insurance to cover the amount that they are not being paid by the city.

The plan also includes hundreds of millions of dollars for “blight removal,” the process of tearing down large sections of the city, which is being overseen by billionaire Quicken Loans CEO Dan Gilbert.

The adjustment plan prepares the way for the lease of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to a regional authority, the Great Lakes Water and Sewer Authority, a major step towards privatization.

Also included in the proposal is a plan to transfer control of the Detroit Institute of Arts to corporate-backed private foundations in exchange for about $800 million through a combination of private funds and state aid. The DIA itself would be required to contribute an additional $100 million.

The adjustment plan includes provisions to reduce the size of cuts to pensions by a small amount given a “timely settlement” on the DIA and other matters. This is intended to push the unions and pension funds to accept the proposed terms of a “grand bargain” and end any legal challenges to the bankruptcy.

The city’s main union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 25, issued a statement criticizing the deal, however the unions have played a central role in the bankruptcy proceedings. After first agreeing to $180 million in concessions, AFSCME executives have been jockeying to defend their interests and their role in the exploitation of workers, including through their control of the new health care VEBA. AFSCME has aggressively advocated for the sale of city assets, including the art at the DIA.

The adjustment plan is one part in a process of backroom dealing between the various ruling class and upper middle class forces seeking to benefit from the bankruptcy. The plan released Friday serves as a benchmark for these negotiations taking place behind the scenes.

The destruction of pensions and health benefits and the theft of priceless city assets is justified by the lie that “there is no money.” Even as it makes this claim, the state has committed $265 million to a new stadium controlled by billionaire Mike Ilitch. The Big Three automakers, which have minted vast fortunes from the toil of Detroit’s working class, are reaping record profits.

The banks that have already swindled the city are set to receive another big check at Detroit’s expense. Orr said Friday that a new settlement for the interest rate swaps deal, through which UBS and Bank of America extracted hundreds of millions from city revenues, should be wrapped up in the next few days. The banks will be paid an as yet unknown sum lower than the $165 million previously proposed by the Jones Day law firm.

The Detroit bankruptcy is at the center of an international social counter-revolution aimed at redistributing wealth into the pockets of the corporate and financial elite. Trillions have been handed to the banks, while the rights and benefits won by workers through a century of struggle are being revoked. In the process, laws and constitutional protections are ignored and increasingly anti-democratic forms of rule imposed.

The Detroit bankruptcy has had bipartisan support from the beginning. The Obama administration repeatedly sent representatives to meet with Detroit’s political elite, and the Justice Department submitted a court brief aimed at quashing legal challenges by retiree groups. State Treasurer Andy Dillon, Orr, and former Detroit Mayor David Bing, all Democrats, have all colluded in the carrying out of a social crime, working closely with Republican Governor Rick Snyder.

In opposition to the bankruptcy, and to expose the bankers’ conspiracy, the Socialist Equality Party organized the February 15 Workers Inquiry into the Bankruptcy of Detroit and the Attack on the DIA & Pensions. The SEP unconditionally rejects the claim that cuts to pensions and benefits are necessary to fund core services for the city.

The SEP seeks to mobilize the strength of the working class in opposition to the bankruptcy process, the trade unions, the Democratic Party, and the entire political establishment. To secure its rights, the working class must build a revolutionary mass movement to take power into its own hands and implement socialist policies, reorganizing society along democratic and egalitarian lines.

Dear friends and fellow fighters, we the workers of VIO.ME will have been, in a few days from today, occupying the factory for one full year. Through practices of bottom up and direct democracy, we decided to realize what this motto stands for: Factories In Workers Hands.

Through the same practices, we have also decided that society should also take part in our project. That’s why we ask for your signature in order to broaden this scheme. We ask for your signature in order for you to be able to participate in these procedures and to share together the function of social enterprises.

We ask for your help, because the judicial authorities show an excessive zeal to lead VIO.ME to bankruptcy and set it in idleness like so many other social enterprises.

That’s why we say: “All united we turn the cog”.

More info at: biom-metal.blogspot.gr

Registrations at:protbiometal@gmail.com & viomesynergatiki@yahoo.gr

or / and by phone: +31 231303154

Source: http://biom-metal.blogspot.gr/

Therefore, the tasks of the working class in the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 will only be touched upon and I will concentrate instead on the Marxist theory of the state. Lenin and the Bolsheviks successfully applied this theory in their day and were able to overthrow the capitalist ruling class and its supporters in Russia and surrounding areas and to found the Soviet Union in 1922. How should we understand this theory today as we struggle to advance the interests of working people around the world in their effort to free themselves from capitalist exploitation and oppression (including the workers of the former socialist countries)?

I will begin with a few remarks about Lenin’s “Preface” to the first edition of SR. First, Lenin’s characterization of the state is as accurate today as it was when he wrote his preface: The “oppression of the working people by the state which is merging more and more with the all- powerful capitalist associations, is becoming increasingly monstrous.”

Capitalist states have by now practically completed the merge. In the US  the present economic depression initiated, among other reasons, by fraudulent lending practices and other illegal activities by banks and big corporations has seen the state bailing out the big capitalist firms while leaving the working people, the victims of the depression, to fend for themselves. The state has recently cut food stamps and unemployment  insurance benefits for the working people while giving subsidies to big agricultural and energy interests. There is no doubt whose interest the state serves.

In European countries the state is either imposing regimes of extreme austerity on the working population in order to extract wealth to be turned over to bond holders and banks or pushing through measures to revamp the labor laws and retirement plans of the workers to their disadvantage in order that the corporations may more easily fire people and will not have their taxes increased to support social programs.

In the Third World from Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Indonesia, to Mexico, Haiti and Africa, and points in between, we see the state allied with commercial interests and using its police and military to break up strikes and work stoppages in support of the owners of capital.

Lenin also pointed out that those who claim to be champions of the working class, especially so-called “socialist” leaders have sided with the capitalist class against the workers of their own countries, but also internationally. The French socialist government, for example, openly supports the most reactionary elements of the US ruling class in its international quest to dominate Third World countries. This is in line with Lenin’s observation that “the majority of the so-called Great Powers have long been exploiting and enslaving  a whole number of small and weak nations.” Is the world any different today?

One of the most effective ways the capitalist class keeps the workers in thrall and off balance is by appeals to patriotism (USA! USA!) and by pitting the workers of one country against those of another (“Buy made in America!”). The idea that the state is somehow class neutral or can be made to champion the workers against the financial and industrial interests is seen by Lenin as an obstacle to mobilizing the working people to struggle for THEIR interests rather than the interests of the exploiters. Lenin uses the term “opportunism” to describe working class leaders who work to achieve narrow short term and temporary gains at the expense of the long term interests of the working class. Opportunism is not the same as reformism which brings about substantive long term changes under capitalism which will strengthen working class consciousness (such as the struggle for civil and political rights.)

Struggles for reform increase class consciousness in the working class, while opportunism decreases it. This is why Lenin thinks understanding the nature of the state is of vital importance. “The struggle to free the working people from the influence of the bourgeoisie in general, and the imperialist bourgeoisie in particular, is impossible without a struggle against opportunistic prejudices concerning the ‘state’”.

Up to this point I think the ideas expressed by Lenin in his preface are still applicable today. However, there are three issues that I now turn to which have questionable merit today:

1. “The world proletarian revolution is clearly maturing.” This was an overly optimistic, if understandable, position in 1917. But subsequent events actually led to the derailment of the “world proletarian revolution” which shows no sign of getting back on tract anytime soon. However, events in North America and Europe, Cuba and South America, as well as Africa and the Middle East are indicative of a general malaise of the international capitalist order the outcome of which is not now predictable.

2. While there are many lessons to be learned from the Russian Revolution, Lenin was incorrect, I think, in seeing it as the first link in a chain of revolutions which would overthrow capitalism. Capitalism ultimately overthrew it, hopefully for the nonce.

3. The emphasis on refuting the ideas of Karl Kautsky, while essential in the era of WWI, are no longer as relevant as they were in light of the developments in Marxist theory attributable to Gramsci, Trotsky, Mao and others.

Finally, Lenin ends the preface with the following words regarding the understanding of the nature of the state and its relation to the struggle for socialism which he says “is a most urgent problem of the day, the problem of explaining to the masses what they will have to do before long to free themselves from capitalist tyranny.” Well, it’s a long time since Lenin’s “before long” but the problem is still urgent and the explanation must still be made.

Read the book here

Source: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Lenin-s-State-and-Revoluti-by-Thomas-Riggins-Capitalism_Class_Consciousness_Lenin-140112-871.html

This scheme calls for mandatory transfers that in fact disguise the truth – that the largest number of these people will eventually be fired. Of the two major universities, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (UoA) and the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), which are being worst hit, the former will lose 40% of its staff and the latter 45%: in short these institutions will be unable to function.

The “mobility” scheme for the universities which are, by law, self-governed institutions, was not discussed with their administration prior to the government’s attempt to enforce its decision. Therefore, it is a plan which is in direct conflict with the institutions’ internal evaluations carried out according to government guidelines. According to the institutions themselves they are in fact, understaffed. For example, in the UoA there are 1,316 employees for 65,682 students and 1,974 academic staff whereas the University claims that a minimum of administrative and technical staff required is 1,917. It is understaffed by 601 employees, the administrative-technical staff and student ratio being 1.66 to 100, when, for example, in British universities the average is 7.9 to 100 and in American universities an average of 9.5 to 100.

The Resistance Movement

For the past 6 weeks both the employees and the academic staff of UoA and NTUA have been on strike while at the same time the function of the two universities has been suspended. In Greece there has been a long history of a powerful university resistance movement against destructive governmental policies such as, for example, the implementation of the Bologna Process and the attempted “coup” to abolish the Article 16 of the Constitution that declares the free and public character of tertiary education. However this is the first time that the usual barriers between administrative staff and academics have been abolished within and by the same struggle on the basis of the common awareness that if the “mobility” measures of the neoliberal government pass this will be the end of the two universities. The mergers of whole schools and departments will ensue, something that will threaten the academic staff itself. It is obvious that the employees to be fired is the first link in the chain of academic redundancies, already and silently implemented by the firing of academic staff under contract. The struggle of the whole academic community is grounded on the development of solidarity and support first of the academic staff who will suffer a severe financial loss for being on strike but also of the administrative and technical staff of other universities, who are not presently hit, towards their colleagues.

This massive movement has been multifaceted and has taken original forms. I’ll focus on a specifically hegemonic appropriation of formal university ceremonies as well as the premises where they take place. The unions of the teaching staff of the UoA and of the NTUA in cooperation with the unions of the employees of the two universities organized the opening of the new academic year for their freshmen in two parallel events held on 9 October 2013. The idea was to offer an alternative welcome where the new students and their parents, misguided by the systematic propaganda of the powerful media against the mobilizations, would be informed by their own teachers on strike about the real reasons for the strike. These groundbreaking events turned out to be hugely successful since approx. 4,000 students and parents turned out in the UoA and approx. 1,500 in the NTUA. Speaking of the UoA, this unexpected massive attendance made the organizers open the meeting onto the area of Propylaia outside the large ceremony hall! During this exciting ceremony also attended by the Presidents of the School of Law and Theology the Rector congratulated the freshmen for their successful entry into an institution that is internationally ranked as belonging to the 1,26%  best universities of the world. He called for their understanding and support for the situation making emphatically clear that the personal cost for the loss of the Fall semester is less important than the condemnation of the new generations to downgraded and poor education and the sinking of Greece into ignorance. As he said, “the university has been open to social struggle for many decades. It is high time that it defended its own survival”, phrases that were applauded by the students. He closed his speech by challenging the Ministry that has demanded the official persecution of those Rectors who are unruly: “I have done no offence of any kind. Let them arrest me!”

The message from this highly original event whereby the academic community on strike summons the students for an alternative welcome was that the true university is here in its historical building and it cares and fights for the protection of its academic quality, its democratic function. Last but not least the academic community fights for the future of Greece within the chaos and catastrophe brought upon it by the Memorandum and the government that slavishly tries to enforce upon us all.

***

Petition

Protect Status and Staff of Greek Universities

Eight universities in Greece (University of Athens, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki the Athens Polytechnic and University of Economics and Business as well as the University of Crete, Ioannina, Thessaly and Patras) have been forced to halt all activities as a result of Greek ministry of education proposals to suspend unilaterally 1349 university administrative workers.

The impact on teaching, research, clinical work and international collaboration is unparalleled and the threat to higher education in Greece as a result of stringently imposed EU austerity measures is a cause of great concern far beyond Greece’s shores.

As academics, university workers, students and others, we call on the EU and the Greek government to protect the status and staff of Greek universities, to ensure that they remain able to engage in education and research and to recognize that these institutions are more important now than ever.

They are and must remain beacons of critical thinking in a Europe whose social structures are being eroded by massive cutbacks and over which the shadow of far-right extremism looms.

Sign the petition here.

Source: http://leftunity.org/the-struggle-in-the-greek-universities/

Source Link allegralaboratory

ALLEGRA: Dimitris, you are a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sussex. In the past you have studied highways and infrastructures and currently you are carrying out a research project entitled « The City at the Time of Crisis », funded by an ESRC Future Research Leaders grant. Can you briefly introduce yourself to those who are not familiar with your work and describe your projects?

DIMITRIS: For my PhD I studied anthropologically political transition via infrastructures and vice versa. More precisely I studied the main cross-border motorway between Albania and Greece and via that peculiar -at the time- ethnographic site I studied in a new way -via the road and its flows- the postsocialist conditions in the Balkans. By extension this study of infrastructure provided an insight into the materiality of the wider European neoliberalisation project.

We have to understand that the project of European neoliberalisation of the 1990s and 2000s passed precisely via a mass development of built environment in the continent. Moreover an additional element of that process was the re-determination of European boundaries and a related inter-European movement of populations which crossed these re-determined borders. Indeed, the replacement of State-run economies by market-based capitalism in half of the continent and the parallel expansion of Western European capitalist interests in Eastern Europe had a crucial role in this neoliberalisation project. So given this context the cross-border road between postsocialist and non-socialist peripheral European states looked like an ideal ethnographic locus for analysing such process anthropologically.

Today we are seeing one more stage of that neoliberalisation process with a capitalist crisis centered on the periphery of Western Europe.

In 2012, together with a team of colleagues, we started the ‘City at the time of Crisis’ project funded by ESRC. In this project we study the new forms of governance implemented in that periphery of Western (as political determination rather than geographic) Europe. A basic idea is that one of the most important parts of this new form of governance is the transformations of the notions of public. So ethnographically we study political transitions and social change in the form of socio-spatial changes in the public urban and infrastructural materialities of Athens.

ALLEGRA: You seem to suggest that Athens is the ideal ‘laboratory’ from which to observe the global financial crisis. In their recent book, Theories from the South, the Comaroffs argue that it is rather the global South that is best placed to help us understand contemporary world transformations. The obvious fact that you are Greek put aside, can you tell us why you chose Athens as your primary site of inquiry?

DIMITRIS: The Commaroffs are right, but they are also wrong. The reality is that we first saw extreme capitalism being applied in the global South. Gradually, more advanced and elaborated versions of capitalism were applied there. However, a very similar version of extreme neoliberalism -like the one that emerged in the 1970s in the South- was then applied in Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Now it is the turn of the Western European periphery to experience a similar regime.

The anthropologists who happen to have ethnographic knowledge of both the postsocialist and non-socialist European periphery would be able to confirm the similarity between e.g. the loan and “aid” agreements between EU and postsocialist states and the current agreements between e.g. the Greek or Spanish governments and EU institutions.

So in the current historical stage it is not only organisations like the IMF:  there are other institutions involved in the shaping of the world political economy. For instance the EU leadership and especially the European Central Bank along with several other European banks play a crucial historical role in the expansion of an extreme neoliberalist form of governance that is applied in the crisis-ridden euro-zone countries. More and more populations are subjected to that regime and what we used to call Global South governance extends well beyond the South. So the category itself is a bit problematic.

As I mentioned in the previous question Greece is centrally located in a process of global proportions that is unravelling at this very moment. Greece’s centrality in this project starts from the re-definition of Greek borders which changed radically after 1990, given that it was surrounded by socialist European countries. Phenomena like migratory flows, big construction projects and capitalist expansion of Greek capitalist entreprises in Eastern Europe just complete this picture.

Under such circumstances the anthropology of Europe and European politics keep asking the same questions since the 1990s: How did the continent change after the collapse of socialism? What will come next? These questions are very similar to the ones we ask about e.g. China or India and especially North African countries.

The end of the cold war has led to radical transformations globally and we are still seeing them in front of our eyes. If European communism had really been the point of reference for the Left everywhere we would not have the squares movements occuring around the Mediterranean. So it is not a process that is detached from what is happening in the so-called Global South. Overall I think that unless anthropology starts including more substantially Europe and the West in its own perception of the world we will end up running behind change.

ALLEGRA: A few weeks ago, ALLEGRA launched a discussion on the future of universities, and tried to define the nature of the ‘space’ that current movements against cuts are seeking to preserve. Some of our conclusions were relatively optimistic, in the sense that we also tried to highlight the regenerative potential of the public to achieve positive change. In the past when ASA asked you to write a text on the crisis of higher education you jumped to similar conclusions. However, seeing your more recent work you seem to suggest that the current global crisis has deeply transformed notions of ‘public space’, ‘public good’, ‘public interest’ and so on…to the extent that the public as we used to know (or fantasize?) it seems to be slowly disappearing. To a certain extent, one is left with an impression of Athens as a city under a permanent state of exception, to use an Agambian expression. What has changed?

DIMITRIS: Since you used the term of a political philosopher I will respond with a political answer. In that ASA article I concluded that higher education in Britain does not deserve to be defended for what it is or what it was, but for what it may potentially become. I guess this applies in the case of Athens and Greece as well.

In the last two decades, as  European neoliberalisation reached a more intensified form,  we saw some of the resistance movements in the Western world romanticise or imagine a capitalism with better public social provisions. Much of the Occupy movement in the US had such demands, while many of the European movements suggest a return to a recent past of better social provisions. While I see the value of these benefits for the better quality of life of many, as a political proposition I think that implies a crucial mistake. If the middle classes of the Western World had a better life during the recent past, the majority of the world, the poor in the West or globally had very bad time.

The issue is that the current crisis is quite crucial for the evolution of capitalism in Europe and probably globally, and as we know in anthropology crises signify a transition while they also provide a window for anti-structural events to take place. This is our case at the moment and unless societies come up with a radical alternative (way forward from just better social policy) the future of European people will look very bad.

I think that the potentialities of the crisis are visible to economic elites and state authorities who are trying to make sure that no anti-structural events will occur. This is the reason why they employ some of the most violent apparatuses, like e.g. extreme police violence or armed neo-Nazi groups.

For example when the large anti-austerity and anti-governmental movement in Greece appeared in the summer of 2011 the police brutality was profound. Soon the neo-Nazis were funded with huge amounts of money and were activated on the streets of Athens but also electorally.

Neoliberal governance since its birth was ready to employ fascists such as Pinochet or go to fascistic extremes such as declaring national wars out of the blue like e.g. Margaret Thatcher did in the case of the UK or her social democratic offsprings did with Iraq and Afghanistan.

Researching the use of extreme violent apparatuses in Greece these days might make you pessimistic. In order for the austerity experiment to work, in order for the bankers’ interests to be protected, the current form of governance in Greece is ready to spill a lot of blood. A similar escalation in state’s violence has been seen in Britain in the last couple of years when the student movement emerged: police brutality against the protesters has been profound in recent British history. We even saw the police being invited on campus to arrest protesting students:  I personally saw it twice in my university, Sussex, and I have worked there only for only five years!

ALLEGRA: Your work brings an important contribution to the scholarship on statehood, by documenting changing everyday experiences in public spaces. With the mass privatization of public infrastructures, it seems like the only means left for the state to manifest itself is through violence, symbolic or real. What do you think is remaining of the state in Greece today?

DIMITRIS: Well, violence is a crucial part of statecraft anyway. Even the most democratic socialist or mild state mechanisms have used and/or use apparatuses of death and pain. For example, one of the most quoted of such examples: the Swedish state was force sterilising women until the 1970s. For another example, we have to remember that every state apparatus discriminates against people: citizens and non-citizens alike.

As the history of Europe shows in the best case scenario such division just implies less rights for the non-citizens and in the worst case scenario it implies exterminating non-citizens massively.

Even the most democratic states are still states and have the monopoly of legal violence, so potentially the state authorities or their agents can crash, kill, torture, and imprison any of us at any moment they will decide. They do not have necessarily to do it, but the fact that apparatuses are ready to do so is violent enough. And indeed these days they have a nice army of journalists, academics and so on who will provide good excuses about public order and social peace that need to be restored.

When the revolt of 2008 happened in Greece you had people like Greek Yale professors up to famous journalists supporting the government and indirectly excusing the police assassination of a teenager, and this is precisely what triggered the revolt.

Within this barbaric mechanism modern states provided various things to their citizens and selected citizens from other states to become part of the national body. That happened for many reasons, which I do not have the time to analyse at the moment. However, such provisions maintained some kind of social peace and consent between the State (or what we imagine to be the state) and a critical mass of state residents.

So in our case, EU citizens and migrants with visas probably had a better life at some point, but a substantial part of the population was faced with a state that did not even give them the right to exist, that arrested them, deported them and killed them. The same dynamics stands for the new poor, for example: many young people in Europe mainly experience the state as an apparatus that deregulates labour and that makes sure that the majority will work like slaves for small salaries, will have no job or social security etc. If they protest, the state will beat them up or in some cases may even kill them just for being around a protest, as Metropolitan Police did with Ian Tomlinson a few year ago. It is just that today we see this state of exception expanding towards social groups who have not had direct experience of state as violence before.

And certainly we are in a very difficult position, because the state and the capitalist market have ended up being the main controllers of social provisions, so now that state policies enforce poverty and austerity and fewer and fewer can afford private provisions, we see suffering of important proportions of the European population. This has been a usual phenomenon outside Europe though and among the non-citizens within Europe!

What one should stress is that the last few decades when the state has been as social provider have been nothing more than a happy break in the history of capitalism, based on the fear of social unrest.

Today that states have achieved so advanced repression and silencing mechanisms, is probably what allows them not to find it necessary anymore to provide social provisions. Anyhow, Western European middle classes as consumers of the products of global capitalism lose their significance given that we have new consuming classes emerging in other places of the planet. So their future is that of most Eastern Europeans: lots of work for peanuts, extreme inequalities etc. When it was happening there very few Western Europeans complained or protested against the barbaric form of postsocialist capitalism.

Indeed while European states decrease social provisions to the citizens in a drastic manner and provide only violence for non-citizens, simultaneously great proportions of state’s wealth is chanelled to global financial institutions and other corporations through various paths.

To end this answer with a final note though. I think that when the elites start busting their cards one after the other, namely when the police violence is not anymore enough to control social disappointment and rage and they have to use the para-state neo-Nazis apparatuses, we are in a situation where they are running out of legal responses, running out of cards, while running towards a potential dead end.

ALLEGRA: Michael Herzfeld, in his now famous books The Social Production of Indifference, argues that Greeks have always maintained some kind of indifference or at least, some kind of distance towards the state. In which ways does your work confirm or contradict this argument? How has the current crisis transformed citizens relationship towards the state? Is this pattern illustrative of broader transformations taking place in European/Western democracies?

DIMITRIS: Herzfeld’s question was phrased in the right way, one could summarise it like this perhaps: If Greeks are generally polite and welcoming people how comes when they become civil servants they are so unhelpful? My take on that phenomenon can be summarised like this: generally people are polite and nice until State and other power apparatuses intervene. For example when the civil servant’s role provides them with e.g. three options to the way s/he will treat a citizen and all three are nasty options, going for the least nasty one is actually a good option. At the same time remember that the official state does its best to create obedient people who will follow the rules.

It is like the banality of the evil argument of Hannah Arendt who suggested that some of the people who carried out the Holocaust were just civil servants who saw the mass extermination of people as just doing their job, like they would do any other job. They were good civil servants.

Back in 2011 when the people in Greece rose against the government, more than 500 people were hospitalised only in Athens due to police brutality.

Last summer when I was in Gezi park in Istanbul, I saw how Turkish policemen attacked the camp beating up people while, in the meantime, they were chatting and having cigarette breaks. Similarly in London, when Occupy London started in front of St Paul, the riot cops brutally attacked peaceful demonstrators without any reason, when 10 minutes before they were queuing next to each other in front of the same toilet in a nearby cafe. While I do not consider police or Nazi officials as simple civil servants, the reality is that the modern state apparatus filters and fractures its violence so much that the actual state’s employees/attackers often feel that they are merely serving the state and the government that feeds them. Indeed the state makes sure that they can do whatever they want, that they are fully potected and that they will never have to face the consequences. Most Nazi officials never paid for their crimes and quite a few of them were happily integrated in capitalist post-war state apparatuses. This does not imply that police officers who beat up demonstrators or shoot migrants are innocent. Only certain kinds of people can remain silent under such circumstances or blindly obey orders. So this is not an excuse: it is just an analysis of the production of indifference.

The reality is that civil servants (with the exception of riot police!) are on the forefront of salary and personnel cuts in Greece these days. The same mechanism that was programming them to misbehave, by e.g. giving them few resources, poor training, unjust promotion or employment system, poor and misleading explanation of tasks and roles etc. is the same mechanism that now blames them for doing what they were told to do. In other words everyone, even the cops are just consumable for the political and financial elites. So people do come to a realisation with great potentialities, as far as insecurity and state violence reaches one of the most secure social class such as permanent civil servants, there is a discontinuity in the continuums that have made the system sustainable so far.

Banners stretched out along the railings of hospitals proclaimed: “Against the dismantling of the state” and “Hard-won rights cannot be stolen”.

Uncollected rubbish bins overflowed, littering the pavements of the capital Lisbon.

School gates were closed.

“The Portuguese will not accept more salary cuts and sacrifices,” said Ana Avoila, coordinator of the public sector unions, which estimated turnout for the strike varied between 70 percent and 100 percent.

Portugal’s state secretary for public services, Helder Rosalino, said she could “understand the discouragement of public workers” but she did not expect turnout to exceed 20 percent.

The 24-hour strike was launched jointly by public worker federations linked to the country’s two main unions, the CGTP, which is close to the Communist Party, and the UGT, close to the Socialist Party.

Unions are protesting new austerity measures unveiled in mid-October for the 2014 budget.

The budget increases the public sector work week to 40 hours from 35, cuts retirement pensions by 10 percent and lowers the salaries of those earning more than 600 euros gross a month by between 2.5 percent and 12 percent.

“If public sector workers want to bother the government that’s fine, but not at the cost of the children,” said 44-year-old construction worker Manuel Paulo, who found the gates closed at his 10-year-old son’s primary school in northern Lisbon.

The public sector protest follows a series of strikes in the transport sector, including railway and city bus services, which will culminate in a demonstration on Saturday in the capital.

Workers at river ferry companies Soflusa and Transtejo, which link Lisbon and its southern district, were holding partial strikes Friday.

Source: http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/3/12/85921/Business/Economy/Portugal-schools,-hospitals-strike-against-new-cut.aspx