Conference of the Southern Forum of the European Left

Felicity Dowling reports.

Left Unity were invited to send observers to this #southrEUvolution in Barcelona on 23/24th January, the eve of the Greek general election. Further accounts and video can be found on european-left.org.

The conference represented the views of more than a dozen different political parties, social movements and trade union organisations, with full simultaneous translation via headset. It involved campaign groups such as those defending the rights of women, the health service, opposing evictions, defending education and opposing racism and fascism, opposing TTIP, opposing fracking and other green issues. These groups were referred to as ‘solidarity networks’. Also present were left and green parties, including elected representatives at local regional national and European levels.

Holding the conference in Catalonia ensured that the issues of national rights were not forgotten. There was much interest, in informal discussions, on the Scottish independence vote. Left Unity were guests at the conference and we were given a very friendly and helpful reception and invited to speak. It will be good to be involved in other such discussions.

There were three conference sessions and a public meeting with about 400 people attending. The first session was a model for social and ecological development, debating debt, austerity and an economic model at the service of the people and the environment. It began by describing the failures of the neoliberals (like the Tories/Labour/Liberals) to end the crisis through competition, growth, employment deregulation, austerity, etc.

Yannis Milios, a Syriza economic advisor, described the situation like this: “Austerity is a class program to concentrate income and wealth in fewer hands, a project to change Europe destroying the European social model. … What it has created has been more unemployment, deflation, stagnation and deterioration of the sovereign debt.” He added that the employment generated by the austerity is that of work without rights, with low salaries, with more hours and precarity, and for some, part time jobs.

“Debt, this means the national debt through bonds not personal debt, is the trap which pushes countries into austerity, a trap based on creating surplus based on primary resources, depriving governments of using those resources to create political and social wealth.”

The second session was on democracy, human rights and immigration, debating also the fight against xenophobia, the TTIP, housing and social exclusion. The TTIP campaign was well represented. The trade deal was presented as an anti-democratic challenge in a way not often stressed in Britain. One of the speakers talked about the right to an income and a European minimum wage, all of which are really relevant to Left Unity and the campaigns in Britain.

A Catalan comrade spoke eloquently on this: “To establish a general income level which guarantees that no individual or family income will fall below the indicators of poverty… In the case of Catalonia this would fit into the framework of establishing an European harmonised indicator and a unified minimum level of income as a subjective right for all European citizens.”

I was invited to speak in this session on Left Unity’s campaign against drowning as border control and in favour of the rights of the migrant. (My speech is at the end of this article.) It was an honour to be speaking at a meeting in Barcelona, a city with a huge history of struggle.

The third session was social and environmental politics, debating gender and class inequalities, public services and basic resources, ecology and climate change. Housing was moved into this area and fitted well. The financialisation of human habitations was also discussed and ideas on how to remove housing from the huge financial markets. Members of Left Unity and other housing campaigns will be interested to know that anti-evictions work is getting stronger across the continent.

Syriza from Greece was represented by many speakers including Yannis Milios, Maria Karamenesini, who is now an MP, Lukeris Konstantinos and others. Their campaign was an inspiration to all.

The theme of all the detailed and well-thought-out contributions was fighting austerity, reigniting demands for democracy and human rights and changing the role of political parties. Speakers challenged the triangle of power between the media, big business (including the banks) and politicians. There was an underlying and serious discussion of austerity as part of the main capitalist, neoliberal project to take wealth from the people towards the very rich.

Heinz Bierbaum, from Die Linke in Germany, discussed how the German workers too had their conditions held down by this project even as Germany as a main centre of wealth and industrial production grew ever richer. He said that demands for wage rises in Germany were part of their campaign against the austerity project. I found it really interesting to listen to a key discussion on the responsibility of the political parties present to talk to people about accepted but reactionary “truths”.

Syriza described how their elected representatives were responsible for funding solidarity groups from parliamentary salaries. The elected representatives were discussing in detail how to support Syriza and the change in Greece. The discussion was how representatives present at the conference (and their parties) could expand the struggle against austerity and in favour of the Greek campaign at local, regional and national European levels. The message was clear: Syriza is best supported by fighting austerity in all of Europe.

The conference ended with the reading of the Barcelona declaration below.

First European South Forum: Declaration of Barcelona.

This is the time to end Austerity and Inequality! It’s time for Democracy and Solidarity! Time to change Europe!

The struggle for change in Europe has begun.

The overthrow of the Greek memorandum government is an important step that will be completed on January 25th, 2015 by the imminent grand electoral victory of SYRIZA.

This victory will not be confined only to the restoration of democracy in Greece. It will be expanded to stop the humanitarian disaster inflicted on the Greek people.

It will send a strong message to all the peoples of Europe and especially of the southern countries that would portray the following:
“The Merkelism is not invincible. Austerity can stop. Europe can change”

We, the representatives of political parties, social movements, trade-unions and other social activists of the European South that met in Barcelona, on at the 1st European South Forum, express our determination, in common, to work together, in order to defeat the neoliberal austerity strategy that has been brutally imposed in our countries through the Troika’s Memorandums, extreme national austerity programs and the structural counter-reforms. Together, we promote a collective and concrete alternative for a progressive exit from the crisis, in the direction of the re-establishment of Europe on the basis of democracy, solidarity, and social and environmental sustainability.

We do not face the current crisis as if it were either a series of “national abnormalities”, or as a conflict between Northern and Southern Europe. Instead, starting from the south, our priority is to enlarge the European front of resistance against neoliberalism and push forward European solutions that will strengthen the unity of the peoples of Europe, against the current resurgence of austericide, reactionary, chauvinistic, and extreme right-wing projects and forces.

The future of the Eurozone is not jeopardized by our plan for an immediate break from austerity and an alternative strategy for economic and social development. On the contrary, it is jeopardized by the destructive austerity that is being imposed by the neoliberal establishment, under the guidance of the present conservative majority in Europe.

Therefore, in order to put an immediate end to the European crisis and to rescue the idea of the European peoples’ unity, we urgently need a policy change:

1. A Green New Deal for Europe. The European economy has being suffering 6 years of crisis, with an average unemployment around 12%. The dangers of a 1930’s style deflation is on its doorstep. Europe could and should collectively borrow at low interest rates to finance a program of economic reconstruction, ecological transition, and sustainable and social development with emphasis on investment in people, social protection, public services, energy, technology and needed infrastructures. The program would help crisis ravaged economies to break free from the vicious cycle of recession and rising debt ratios, to create jobs, and to sustain recovery.

2. Defeating unemployment. The average European unemployment is today the highest since official records began. Today, almost 27 million people are unemployed in the European Union out of which more than 19 million belong to the Eurozone. The official unemployment Eurozone average has risen from 7,8% in 2008 to 11,5% in August 2014. For Greece, from 7,7% to 26,4% and for Spain from 11,3% to 24,4% during the same period. We urgently need a major job creation plan, which will create, through targeted European and national public investments supported by the ECB, secure, stable and dignified employment and viable life-prospects for millions of Europeans, especially young people, women and immigrants who have been brutally victimized and relegated to social exclusion.

3. Credit expansion to cooperatives and small and medium-sized firms. Credit conditions in Europe have deteriorated sharply. Small and medium-sized firms have been hit especially hard. Thousands of them, particularly in the crisis-hit economies of the European South, have been forced to close, not because they were not viable, but due to the absence of credit fluidity and the lack of demand. The consequences for jobs have been dire. Extraordinary times require non-conventional action: the European Central Bank should follow the example of other Central Banks all around the world and provide cheap credit to banks, on the strict pre-condition that those same banks increase their lending to small and medium-sized enterprises by a corresponding amount.

4. Suspension of the new European fiscal framework, as a pre-condition for the exercise of a truly sustainable and developmental fiscal policy.

5. A genuine European Central Bank – lender of last resort for member-states, not only for banks. The commitment to act as lender of last resort should be unconditional and should not depend on the conditioning or submission of a member state’s agreement to a reform program with the European Stability Mechanism.

6. Macroeconomic and social readjustment: Countries with surpluses should do as much as deficit countries to correct macroeconomic imbalances within Europe. Europe should monitor, assess and demand action from countries with current account surpluses, in the form of stimuli, in order to alleviate the unilateral pressure on deficit countries. The current asymmetry in the adjustment between surplus and deficit countries does not harm the deficit countries alone. It harms Europe as a whole.

7. A European Glass-Steagall Act. The aim is to separate the commercial from the investment banking activities and prevent such a dangerous merging of risks into one uncontrolled entity.

8. Effective European legislation to tax offshore economic and entrepreneurial activities.

9. A European Debt Conference, with the participation of all the public members involved at a state, European and international level, inspired by the London Debt Agreement of 1953, which essentially relieved Germany of the economic burden of its own past and thus assisted the post-war reconstruction of the country. Such a conference must come up with a solution negotiated and adapted to each country, for each creditor and bondholder including the partial restructuring of terms and interest rates, the abolition of a large part of the public debts and the introduction of a “growth clause” for the repayment of the remaining parts. In that context all available policy instruments should be employed, including the European Central Bank, acting as last resort lender to issue special Eurobonds that would either replace national debt or lead to a significant debt forgiveness.

10. A resolute fight against fraud and corruption, and the crony capitalism suffered by our countries.

All these must go hand by hand with a committed struggle against patriarchy, inequalities, and against racism and xenophobia.

Before and after the outburst of the crisis, ideas as those proposed above were treated by the neoliberal establishment as “illusionist” and “populist”. Today, such ideas that formulate a concrete alternative against austerity are becoming more and more assumed and defended by our peoples and compete for social and political majorities in a number of European countries. It’s high time we transform popular discontent and aspiration into a massive political wave of change, for the establishment of economic democracy, popular sovereignty and environmental sustainability. The year 2015 can signal a new historical cycle of progress for our countries and Europe.

It’s time to make markets pay! The drift to increased inequality and precarious employment is not a real option for working people in Europe. Market structures affect protective institutional arrangements (welfare states, industrial relations rules, political systems, and other societal arrangements) in a way that Europe is stepping back from human rights and the burden of economic adjustment is not at all shared equally across European societies.

Therefore, we, the forces and organizations gathered here, commit to:
• Work in coordination and provide the political and social momentum to achieve these changes;
• Monitor the social and economic performance in our countries and our continent;
• Foster the European Conference on Debt; and
• Ensure continuity to the work of this Forum. And from this promoting team, and with the incorporation of all parties and organizations here gathered and the ones still to come, bolster new and future editions of this Forum.

See you at the next Forum, that we propose to be held in Athens!

Barcelona, 24th January 2015

Notes for Felicity’s speech

Thank you for the invitation to speak today. It is truly an honour to speak in Barcelona, this city of struggle.

Our governments and media want to divide people using anti-immigrant sentiment. It’s a vile, dangerous and destructive ideology but one so well present that an unthinking mind can easily blame the migrant. The neoliberal project has constructed financial and economic centres of gravity pulling in workers. All the academic studies show this, but the popular press and media demonise the migrant, making migration some kind of crime.

Neoliberals have caused destruction and war in Iraq, Libya and now in Syria. Yet the blame for subsequent migration is placed on the migrant, the refugee. Some migrants cross the Mediterranean, in appalling conditions, in unregulated transport. More than 3,000 died last year alone.

The attack on the welfare state is seen as part and parcel of the migration issue: “British workers too lazy to work for the wages migrants might accept” in UK prime minister Cameron’s words, so the government sets out to cut all benefits. Then, there is the cruel cut of denying child benefit to those who work here but leave their children at home.

Cameron wants to withdraw search and rescue from the Mediterranean in order to deter migrants. We oppose “Drowning as Border Control”. Then there is the situation for migrants in Calais, and the appalling detention procedures used at Yarls Wood. Workers, migrant and settled, should struggle together.

Left Unity is asking for joint action across Europe to defend the rights of the migrant and to defend the search and rescue in the Mediterranean. We want a day or a week when our organisations across Europe stand up for the migrant and stand up for the rights of humans, and oppose drowning as border control, where we jointly reject the racist story and stand for human rights including the rights of the migrant.