WPU may-day school interventions pt. 3: Anej Korsika and Sašo Furlan
Channel: Inštitut za delavske študije
Date: 2012-05-03

Anej Korsika:
Austerity Measures as a Form of Class Struggle

European union is a bourgeois political form that serves the realisation of the class interests of capital. Free flow and accumulation of capital and maximisation of profits have been the integral moments at every stage in the historical development of the EU. From the Paris treaty, which established the European Coal and Steel Community, up to the currently valid Lisbon treaty the functioning of capital has been gaining ever new institutional backup and facing less and less barriers. Internally, this class character of the EU expresses itself as a disciplining of the workforce, which doesn't enjoy rights comparable to those of the owners of capital; and externally, it expresses itself as a restrictive immigration policy and a subsidised agricultural policy. As the true political essence of the EU is completely subordinated to the logic of capital, it is no coincidence that attempts to define a wider European identity are met with such anxiety.

In the time of conjuncture this role was played by the conceptual castrato of multiculturalism, which provided a safe folklore and culinary haven against the effects of productive process. But in the time of crisis even this illusion has evaporated, which means that at last we can look at the EU clearly and see in it a terrain for the realisation of class interests. This became apparent with the on-going debt crisis, the escalation of relations between the centre (Germany) and the periphery (Greece), and the austerity measures that are supposed to solve the crisis. However, austerity measures are just a metaphor for a redistribution of value, they don't create new value in any sense. Therefore, the vivisection of Greece is a notebook example of class struggle and shows how the EU functions for the sake of capital accumulation, whose prerequisite is the exploitation of workers. What should then be a revolutionary strategy in relation to the really existing European integrations?

Anej Korsika is a member of Workers' and Punks' University and a PhD student at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana.
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Sašo Furlan:
Exit from the Eurozone and the Devaluation of Currency -- Progressive or Regressive Strategy for Greece?

Two years have passed since the emergence of the crisis in Greece and the rest of the eurozone periphery, the crisis that turned out to be a symptom of a failed macroeconomic architecture of the whole eurozone, and the problems of the Greek economy still seem far from being solved. Greek political elites, constrained by directives of the leadership of the European Commission, International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank, are tackling the crisis with a so-called "internal devaluation" strategy, which is nothing but an euphemism for an attack on the working class through the dismantling of the welfare state, wage reductions and massive job cuts. In all the countries of the eurozone periphery, this strategy resulted in social devastation and proved to be completely inefficient in achieving its economic objectives -- in all cases, it has lead to a turbulent slowdown of economic growth, a rapid decline in investment and a massive rise in unemployment. In light of completely failed attempts to solve the debt crisis and the destructive consequences of these attempts, which are most evident in Greece, alternative suggestions have emerged among Marxist economists such as Costas Lapavitsas, as well as among mainstream economists such as Nouriel Roubini, Kenneth Rogoff and Martin Feldstein. According to their opinion, the most elegant solution for an overindepted state faced with a recession such as Greece is to exit the eurozone, return to a domestic currency and devaluate the exchange-rate. All the above-mentioned economists set Argentina, which faced a similar situation in 2002 but managed to rise out of the recession and the debt crisis relatively quickly by devaluating its domestic currency, as an example for Greece. Therefore, the paper will conduct a comparative analysis of the respective crises in Greece and Argentina, and then go on to tackle the question whether the Argentine scenario can be repeated in Greece.

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