The worst has yet to come posted by Richard Seymour

I wrote this for Jacobin:

Labels: anti-capitalism, austerity, british capitalism, capitalism, capitalist offensive, the meaning of david cameron, tories, working class

Precarity in 21st Century Britain posted by Richard Seymour

My latest piece for the Guardian on the growth of soup kitchens as the latest symbol of precarity in the UK:

Lambeth council is turning to food banks in order to manage the crisis of soaring poverty in the borough. This is never a good sign. When soup kitchens started to appear in large numbers in the US during the 1980s, it was supposed to be a form of crisis management. Now they have become a threadbare safety net for masses of jobless and working poor Americans as the welfare system fails them. Dependence on charitable food provision has soared during the recession. Evidence suggests that they don't begin to meet the nutritional needs of those who use them.

The trend is for what is supposed to be a temporary stopgap to become a permanent part of the welfare system. It turns welfare into an entrepreneurial wild west, dependent on often inexperienced providers, institutionalising and stabilising chronic insecurity and undernourishment for millions. Whereas in the postwar era poverty was residual or the product of the economic cycle, it has acquired a structural permanence. Nor can this be assumed to be an accidental outcome. States that cut welfare systems are knowing actors, well-placed to evaluate the predictable effects of their actions.

Labels: austerity, capitalism, cuts, neoliberalism, precariat, precarious labour, ruling class, unemployment, welfare, working class

Spanish miners posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: austerity, capitalist crisis, counter-hegemony, gramsci, hegemony, miners strike, neoliberalism, socialism, spain, working class

Syriza vs zombie government posted by Richard Seymour

My latest for The Guardian is on the future for Syriza and the pressures it will face in the immediate future:

The key slogan through which Syriza won support was its call for a government of left unity to express popular opposition to austerity. Amid a deepening nadir of European social democracy, and a protracted crisis of global capitalism, the issue of leftist governments is going to be a recurrent one. Syriza was the first of the European left parties (Die Linke, Fronte de Gauche, etc) to come near to taking office, but it is unlikely to be the last.

However, Syriza now finds itself in an ambiguous position. Having come close to forming a left government, the pressure will be on to establish its credentials with international lenders and EU leaders. But they must somehow do so without losing the support of the most radical workers. Already, before the election, there was a tendency to soften their stances; pledging to repeal the memorandum laws, but insisting that they would not act "unilaterally". These pressures will only increase in the coming months.

Labels: austerity, capitalist crisis, european union, eurozone, greece, left, neoliberalism, pasok, socialism, syriza

Spanish civil war posted by Richard Seymour

My piece in The Guardian on Spain's miners' strike:

...However, the latest spending squeeze, which includes 63% cuts to coal subsidies resulting in thousands of job losses, has provoked furious and desperate resistance by Spanish miners. The cutback came just as the government spent billions rescuing the banks. So, toward the end of last month, approximately 8,000 workers went on strike, indefinitely. In the Asturias province where the mines are largely based, the main square of Oveido was occupied by workers using the same tactic as the indignados.

This is not to say that the miners are simply following the indignados. As one of their most widely seen banners put it: "No Estamos Indignados, Estamos Hasta Los Cojones" ("We Are Not Indignant, We Are Pissed Off To Our Balls")...

Labels: austerity, class struggle, european union, indignados, miners strike, socialism, spain

Greek election results analysis posted by Richard Seymour

A bit of psephological analysis has been carried out on the recent election results in Greece.  The first finding was that in Athens, about half of police men and women voted for the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party.  So, think about that next time you see the kindly officers helping protesters on their way with tear gas and batons.  The more substantial survey, however, is here.  I don't have the time to fully parse these, but the key points as appropriated from Facebook are:

• The shift toward Syriza in the core working class vote.  Syriza got 27% of the public sector workers and 21% of the private sector workers. The bulk of its electorate is in generations 35 to 65. 
• The rise of the radical Left throughout the whole working class.  The radical Left (Syriza-KKE-Antarsya) got 55% of the blue-collar vote in the public sector and 45% in the private.  The 'lower' down the working class, the higher their vote.   The radical Left increased its representation among all age demographics except those over 65.
• The dissolution of PASOK in the working class.  Only 10.6% of traditionally strongly PASOK public sector employees votes for the party this time, while only 7% of private sector workers did.  Less than 7% of professionals, lone traders and small to medium bourgeois voted for the party, another demographic which PASOK has historically done much better out of.  Their worst result was among young voters (18-24), from whom they received just over 2% of the vote.  Their highest vote was among pensioners, with 23%.
• The crisis of the traditional/liberal Right.  Only the peasantry (self-employed farmers) remained to a certain extent faithful to their traditional representation on the Right, with over a quarter voting for the New Democracy.
• The fragmentation of the petty bourgeois vote, and the displacement of far right votes.  Most of the Nazi vote is petty-bourgeois, and is formed by dissaffected rightwing and far-right (LAOS) voters. The Golden Dawn received 19.2% of the petty bourgeois vote, the Independent Greeks 13%, and the New Democracy 9.6%.

The flurry of constitutional wrangling to one side - and today's financial and political panics over a Eurozone exit will undoubtedly be used to pressure DIMAR into commiting suicide by throwing itself into a coalition with the austerity parties - is entirely short-term, intended to buy time for the bourgeois parties, the state bureaucracy and the troika to cobble together some solution viable for capital.  But their ability to do so for any length of time depends on their holding the initiative, which they won't if the struggles - strikes, occupations, protests - continue.  Meanwhile, the forms of political representation emerging are profoundly strengthening the Left in ways that could only be reversed by means of a shattering defeat of the working class.

Labels: austerity, class struggle, eurocommunism, european union, greece, left, marxism, neoliberalism, socialism, troika

Syriza! posted by Richard Seymour

In recent days, the signs have been accumulating to suggest that the radical left coalition SYRIZA would perform some sort of remarkable upset in the Greek elections. Well, stow your cynicism because the exit polls say they're in second place in this election. In the actual vote, poll experts say they may even come first, though I hasten to say that we need make no such assumption in order to appreciate that this is a tremendous victory for the Left.

At present, SYRIZA appears to have 16-18% of the vote, with New Democracy first on about 19-20%, PASOK third on 16%, Independent Greece (right-wing anti-austerity) fourth on 10%, Communist KKE fifth on 9%, the neo-Nazis of the Goldan Dawn (note, actual hard-core neo-Nazis) on 7-8%, with other left parties and the Greens taking up the remainder.  The distribution of the seats will probably favour a coalition of the capitalist austerity parties, with New Democracy and PASOK forming a government. But make no mistake: this is a cataclysm for the Greek and by extension European political establishment. It signals a fundamental realignment of Greek politics, to an extent that wouldn't have been predictable even weeks ago.



Importantly, SYRIZA have taken the lead in all of the major cities of Greece, meaning that they have made real in-roads into the core working class constituencies resisting the cuts. This party had less than 5% of the vote at the last election, which PASOK won. SYRIZA have now pushed the winners of the last general election into third place, and have become the leading left party. This is not only important because of the rejection of austerity politics that it signals (and the austerity parties are in a minority), not only because of the new possibilities for resistance that will now become apparent, but also because of the crisis and re-thinking it will create within the anti-austerity Left. For example, the KKE's consistently sectarian approach of staging separate marches, rallies and events from the rest of the Left, their refusal to countenance unity with forces to their own left, will come under scrutiny from the section of the working class which it still leads. Those workers who support the KKE will want to be united with, or at least open to, those workers who support SYRIZA. The argument that they can't do so because of the ambivalent attitude of some SYRIZA leaders to PASOK was always dangerously Third Period, and is unlikely to be persuasive now. That too will create new possibilities for unity in the workers' movement.

The neo-Nazis should not be ignored. Their emergence, almost out of nowhere, as a mass fascist organisation with actual Third Reich-style paraphernalia, shows how perilous the terrain is, and how much danger awaits Greece's most vulnerable communities. Recently, the state has been stoking up racism toward immigrants and planning a crackdown on the grounds that they 'spread diseases'. In this toxic, unpredictable climate, any gains made by the radical Left are likely to be subject to new tests on a routine basis. Any serious defeat for the Left amid continued austerity and the ongoing stalemate of the parliamentary system would certainly give the far right their best chance since the dictatorship. Already, they stand poised with their legions of voters and their parliamentary delegates and their marching squads of thugs to wreak havoc. Do not underestimate them.

But for now, the radical Left has siezed the initiative, upended the electoral system, and torn apart the austerity script so painstakingly drafted by the ECB, the presidency and the finance ministers. And in this context, the defeat of Sarkozy assumes a new significance. The mandarins of the EU are worried, as they should be, by the failure of the austerity formula to permit resumed dynamism even in the core European states. From rattled heads of state to the head of the ECB, they have started to wonder if there might not be a case for emphasising growth policies, stimulus rather than austerity. This is all very timid, and it is by no means intended to benefit the working class. But EU elites are also aware that they face an even graver climacteric than two quarters of negative growth if they cannot appear to offer some material inducement to the working class to acquiesce in the politics of austerity. In that situation, the deposal of PASOK as the main party of the workers in the weakest link of a weakened chain of national states, gives the EU leadership all the more incentive to rethink what they have been doing. And that means a more divided and uncertain ruling class than we have hitherto seen.

Labels: austerity, capitalist crisis, eurozone, fascism, greece, kke, nazism, new democracy, pasok, socialism, syriza, working class

Jim Wolfreys on the French elections posted by Richard Seymour

This is a detailed talk that explores the context of the far right's success.  Well worth watching:

Labels: austerity, fascism, france, french elections, merkozy, neoliberalism, nicolas sarkozy, socialism

The state in capitalist crisis (part one) posted by Richard Seymour

In trying to think through the changes that we're going through, that are being imposed on us, we constantly find we have to account for the state's role in managing and mediating the crisis and the forms it takes. For what is happening now, unmistakeably, is the re-organization of the state's presence directly in productive relations; its provision of investment conditions; its socialization of the costs of investment; and its disciplinary apparatuses.  In the terms used in a previous essay, it is a process of state re-formation, given the name of 'austerity' because of its implications for popular constituencies historically benefiting from the welfare state.  And I wanted to know whether it was possible to say anything general about this subject; that is to say, whether there are principles governing marxist research into the role of capitalist states in specific crises that are distinct from those governing marxist research into capitalist states tout court.  This is the first in a series of posts trying to work out what these might be.

Before proceeding with this, I want to point out that the return of 'the state' (or a theoretical concern with the state), however tentative at the moment, is the result of two developments: first, the anticapitalist movement and it sequel in the Occupy movement; second, the aggressive assertion of imperialism and thus the re-emergence of anti-imperialist critique during the last decade.  This means that the discussion of capitalist state in crisis must be a strategic one, conducted with a view to confronting the state as a factor in our struggles over the social product.  But it also means that we cannot begin to discuss the reorganization and fiscal down-sizing of welfare states without situating them in relation to the imperialist chain, and the patterns of exploitation of the dominated societies.  To put it simply; the politics of austerity cannot be decoupled from the question of inter-imperialist rivalry between the US, EU and China, and their competitive alliances in the Middle East, and sub-saharan Africa.  And since I intend to focus on austerity in the UK, its unique position as an 'Atlanticist' EU member, the once favoured 'link' between the US and Europe, must play a role here.  Both of these issues will be raised in more detail in future posts.

***

First, I think it's important to say that while austerity has as its primary justification the imperative of reducing public spending, cutting the deficit and thus maintaining the fiscal 'credibility' of the British state with financial markets, and while suppressing the growth of the state budget is a real institutional commitment, the policies introduced under its rubric are much broader than those which could plausibly be related to cutting spending.  Whether it is cuts to the minimum wage, the introduction of private provision in the NHS and schools, or changes in the tax structure to benefit the wealthy, these are policies whose overall thrust is unlikely to increase revenues to the Treasury.  In fact, as regards the changes to public services, the involvement of private companies such as Virgin, as well as the wasteful 'markets' imposed on providers, will probably drive up costs and lead to further fiscal crises.  No one is suggesting that the state will stop collecting the taxes to fund core services such as pensions, healthcare and education.  And even if they are under-funded, and the provision is rationed in ways that favour residents of relatively wealthy, middle class areas, it is highly unlikely that the costs will stop increasing.

This isn't to say that the welfare system isn't being pared down drastically, with lamentable results for millions.  But I think it is best, following Claus Offe, to characterise welfare state capitalism as a form of crisis management: or, more accurately, a crisis-ridden form of crisis management.  And despite its limitations, capitalism cannot simply wish away this form of intervention.  The fact is that, just as in the most controversial reforms being undertaken the state isn't so much withdrawing from the provision of public services as out-sourcing and marketising it, so in general the state isn't so much cutting its costs as shifting them around.  No doubt there is an aim to suppress costs, and this commitment is institutionalized in various ways, but I would be surprised if the capitalist state in the UK cost much less in 2022, as a proportion of GDP, than it has over the last two decades.  In the period from 1987-2007, during which there was only one recession of medium severity, public spending was generally kept at or below 40% of GDP, a feat last accomplished during the high growth years of the 1950s.  In a period of sustained crisis, this becomes extremely difficult because not only is growth depressed and social overheads inflated, but the relative costs of investment are higher, and the capitalist class constantly needs incentives from the state to put its money into circulation.  Even once the crisis recedes and a period of relative capitalist dynamism resumes, this particular neoliberal format of capitalist dependency on the state will continue to drive up costs.

Relatedly, it would be mistaken to conclude that what is happening is a de-regulation of capitalism; it is a re-regulation.  This is true not only in the sense that even supposedly privatized utilities quickly accumulate a plethora of regulations and government interventions just to prevent the most egregious abuses and keep the system basically functional, but above all in the sense that the state's regulative powers are becoming all the more necessary to capitalism in a period of organic crisis, even as their limits are disclosed.  For example, it is a well-known factoid that the number of financial regulations in the neoliberal period, and particularly after the repeal of Glass-Steagall, actually increased dramatically; because the financiers had more freedom did not mean that they were less regulated.  The regulatory structure was simply reformed to increase their powers; this only appears to be a contradiction in terms if you assume that real freedom is 'negative freedom'.

So what is happening under the rubric of austerity is neither simply cost-cutting nor de-regulation, nor any kind of withdrawal of the state from 'the economy'.  Rather, the combined effect of the measures will be to shift the balance of power between classes, as condensed in the institutional ensemble of the state, in such a way as to fundamentally enhance the advantage of capital, with the rationale being a 'growth model' in which such policies are said to improve the wealth of the whole society through a temporary tightening of the belt.    The logic is clear, for example, from Vince Cable's argument for freezing the minimum wage for under 21s: lower wages equals (more profitable investment therefore) more growth and more jobs.

***

One of the arguments we have made against austerity is that the fiscal crisis isn't really real: the debt can be paid off through growth, which won't be assisted by austerity politics.  And in a sense, this is true.  The idea that the UK is in a situation like Greece, held over a barrel by bankers, the IMF and EU finance ministers, is palpably absurd.  The UK's debt situation is far from unmanageable in either historical or comparative terms.  Further, the UK ruling class has sufficient clout that were it, through the state, to embark on an alternative growth pact for one reason or another, few international creditors would be seriously alarmed.  Actually, given the way speculators and lenders are responding to austerity programmes once they are imposed, a stimulus-based strategy might actually endow them with more of that fabled 'confidence'.

But there is nonetheless a 'rational kernel' in the notion of a fiscal crisis.  The capitalist welfare state, even in the neoliberal period, demonstrates a tendency (note, tendency) to exceed in expenditures what it is able to collect in taxation.  The reasons for this can be enumerated thus: i) the periodic crises of accumulation, which not only reduce tax receipts in the short-term but result in pressure from business, on pain of investment strike, to reduce taxes on profits and investment; ii) the pressure from popular constituencies for services and provisions, based on expectations raised by the welfare state itself, which acts as a limiting factor on any fiscal cut-backs that state personnel are able to make; iii) the tendency for long-term regulative and growth strategies coordinated through the state (and here I don't mean just the 'Fordist' corporatist strategies deployed in the post-war era) to fail in the context of unplanned, competitive and exploitative production relations.  The latter results not just in sectoral imbalances within 'the economy', but more importantly sustained sectional struggles within the capitalist class, and class struggles over the social product which always upset any long-term calculations, and make it impossible for a capitalist state to impose a rational, planned growth strategy even through its considerable leverage as a factor in production.

The attempt to get this tendency under control has been an institutionalised commitment of capitalist states throughout the neoliberal era.  In the United Kingdom, this has taken the form of constant class struggles with public sector workers to facilitate down-sizing, as well as the embedding of policies such as 'Compulsory Competitive Tendering' based on the orthodoxy of public choice economics, which holds that bureaucratic budget-maximising is responsible for spending increases.  It has also, due to the first factor mentioned above, resulted in a shift of the structure of taxation so that employers pay less, and workers more, toward the 'social overheads' of capital - that is, the reproduction of labour power in its complex forms, as well as of the growing 'reserve army' of labour.  With the increase in VAT and various indirect taxes, and the cuts in corporation tax and other taxes on profits, this trend is being amplified.

More broadly, the suppression of public spending, as an element in the austerity formula developed in West Germany, has been institutionalised in the EU since the Treaty of European Union, and certainly since the Stability and Growth Pact in 1997.  How well has this gone?  Well, the Pact ruled that member states should have a public deficit at no higher than 3% of GDP.  Prior to the crisis, this was achieved by most member states, barring 'periphery' economies like Hungary, Greece and Portugal.  We have seen that, despite being 'peripheral', such economies can nonetheless can have disproportionate significance, condensing all the weaknesses and instabilities of the system in one 'weak link'.  At the moment, however, the problem is far more general: across the Eurozone at the moment, the public deficit is more than twice the permitted level.  And the Merkozy axis aims to drive this back down by forcing punitive austerity measures on the weakest economies.

***

But there is another aspect of the transformation we are witnessing, and here we have to return to the commodification of health, education, and social security.  The state is not just a political factor in the capitalist mode of production, securing the 'general conditions' for the reproduction of capitalism but otherwise abstaining from direct involvement in 'the economy'.  In several respects, even if not in its totality, it acts as a capitalist.

The capitalist state doesn't only reproduce the capital-labour relation externally in relation to its action (infrastructural investment, social outlays), but also internally, through its exploitation of waged labour in nationalized or semi-nationalized industries.  Whether it is in the direct ownership of post, banking, or railway companies, or in the heavily subsidised, incentivized and bailed out industries such as cars, energy, armaments and, of course, finance, the state is involved not just in appropriating surplus value through fiat, the better to invest it for the 'general good', nor just in realizing surplus value or redistributing it but, in a number of key instances, extracting surplus value.  It is true that, in the neoliberal period, the British capitalist state has taken the lead in withdrawing from the direct or complete ownership of productive industry, but it has still been involved in putting part of the total surplus value back into circulation as capital in various industries.  And even where it doesn't directly extract surplus value, it is involved in the realization of surplus value generated by productive labour, just as capital-intensive industries are.

What appears to be happening with the re-commodification of core services is that the government is giving capital-intensive industry sectors that work in the orbit of the national state - those involved in financial and other services particularly - the option of realizing a considerable share of the surplus value produced across the economy.  This sort of action can temporarily act as a spur to investment, in a way that benefits the politically powerful sectors of capital, but it also contributes to solving the underlying crisis of profitability to the extent that the spread of 'market conditions', the erosion of 'spaces of resistance' in the welfare state, and the suppression of wages that it allows affects the general balance between capital and labour to the former's benefit.

***

Some general features of austerity, then:

1) the state is not withdrawing from 'the economy' - it is never absent from 'the economy' - but changing its mode of presence in productive relations.

2) the state's cost-cutting commitments are subordinate to its crisis-management commitments, the former tending to be defeated by the latter due to the growing relative costs of investment and the long-term tendency toward crisis.

3) state institutions act within a context of a class struggle between labour and capital, and as such their policymaking must respect the relative strengths of each (hence, the state acts as the material condensation of the balance of class forces), but the state also has a form-determined selectivity in favour of the capitalist class.  These factors determine the form that crisis management takes.

4)  nonetheless, the state acts not on behalf of capital 'in general', but in the interests of hegemonic fractions of capital, and any charge that state managers are behaving 'ideologically' and 'non-pragmatically' must be understood in those terms.

5) the relationship between the state and the social formation that it regulates and reconstitutes is permanently characterised by dysfunction and disequilibrium. This is not to take the absolutist position that there is in essence no distinction between 'Keynesian' and neoliberal remedies.  The fact that 'Keynesian' solutions based on demand management and state investment, cannot resolve the crisis in the long term doesn't mean that they cannot play a role in abating the most egregious features of the crisis.  But the fact is that 'Keynesian' welfare and nationalization policies, by raising expectations of the state, and by empowering resistances, can only in the long run deepen the dysfunctions of capitalism.  As such, they make most sense in the context of a 'transitional' approach, of which more will be said in future posts.

These are not quite the theoretical principles that I sought at the beginning of the post, but rather theoretically informed descriptions.  But in future posts, we can deepen these observations by drawing more on Offe's analysis of the 'contradictions of the welfare state', and the 'crisis of crisis management'.

Labels: austerity, british state, capitalist crisis, capitalist state, class struggle, marxism, neoliberalism, public spending, welfare

Galloway wins posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: anti-cuts, anticapitalism, austerity, ed miliband, george galloway, new labour, socialism, socialist strategy, tories, working class

A short history of privatization in the UK posted by Richard Seymour

My latest in The Guardian explains the course of privatization over the last thirty years or so:

Royal Mail is being auctioned, and not necessarily to the highest bidder (and stamp prices are going up). The London fire brigade is outsourcing 999 calls to a firm called Capita, at the behest of the oleaginous chair of the capital's fire authority, Brian Coleman. Multinationals are circling hungrily around NHS hospitals. Schools are already beginning to turn a profit. In the technocratic nomenclature of the IMF, this would be called a "structural adjustment programme", but that doesn't really capture the sweeping scale of the transformation. We can see this through a potted history of privatisation in the UK...

Labels: accumulation-by-dispossession, austerity, capitalism, education, fire brigade, neoliberalism, new labour, NHS, privatisation, public services, royal mail, tories

European meltdown posted by Richard Seymour

My article for Overland on the Eurozone meltdown is now available online:

Like ‘sex’ and ‘violence’, the words ‘Europe’ and ‘crisis’ seem to have a near permanent affinity these days. This constant conjunction tells us that the nature of the crisis is no transient thing. It is what Gramsci would have called an ‘organic crisis’, one that condenses multiple chronic problems at various levels of the system in a single, epochal spasm. Growth rates across the Eurozone are close to zero, unemployment is over 10 per cent on average – a figure masking extremes of joblessness in Greece and Spain. But it is not just an economic crisis. The Eurozone is a political creation, and it is at the level of politics that the strains are manifested at their highest level. Repeated sovereign debt crises threaten debt default, the withdrawal of economies from the euro currency and the ultimate collapse of that currency. The material basis for the European Union (EU) to continue to exist in its present form is endangered, and the solutions only seem to exacerbate the problem.

Labels: austerity, capitalism, europe, european union, eurozone, gramsci, neoliberalism, organic crisis, recession, ruling class

Tories retreat, bemoan isolation posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: austerity, capitalist class, capitalist crisis, coalition, neoliberalism, ruling class, tories, trotskyism

In Athens, Tahrir posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: austerity, capitalist crisis, eu, greece, neoliberalism, pasok

Scenes from the class struggle in Greece posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: austerity, capitalist crisis, class struggle, eu, europe, greece, left, militancy, neoliberalism, pasok, socialism, working class

Salaried bourgeois on "revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie" posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: austerity, bourgeoisie, class, class struggle, immaterial labour, imperialism, rent, ruling class, salaried bourgeoisie, strikes, working class, zizek

Austerity in Canada: Canadian Labour at the Crossroads posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: austerity, canada, capitalism, class struggle, labour, liberals, occupy wall street, tories, trade unions, working class

Labour's strategy of right-wing populism posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: austerity, ed miliband, labour, neoliberalism, new labour, populism, reactionaries, welfare

The Unilever strike, pensions and structural adjustment posted by Richard Seymour

An article for The Guardian about the Unilever strike:

Unilever workers have embarked on the first national strike in the company's history, over the company's attempt to close the final salary pensions scheme, which will result in a 40% reduction in retirement income for many of its workers. The company, in a stunningly inept move, decided to punish the strike by cancelling Christmas parties and bonuses for the workers. Thus, Unilever, a blue chip company that takes pride in its philanthropic past and "responsible" industrial relations policy, found itself branded Scrooge.

Unilever is one of the companies to have weathered the global crisis in robust fashion. In February 2011, its profits were up 18% on the previous year, at some £5.2bn. Labour productivity has always been reasonably high, in part due to negotiated productivity deals with trade unions. Yet, the company is on the offensive against its workforce. Why is this?

Unilever will say that the current pension system is impossible to fund. This was the argument it used in 2008 for closing the scheme to all new entrants, only three years before closing it to existing members as well. The workers argue, though, that the pension fund is financially robust, and that the company itself admits there is no immediate financial imperative driving the cuts.

This is taking place in the context of a record number of firms shutting final salary schemes and replacing them with much less generous settlements. The GMB's negotiator argues that Unilever simply saw an opportunity to follow the trend. But there is probably more to it than that...

Labels: austerity, class struggle, militancy, pensions, ruling class, strike, tories, wealth transfer