Enough is enough! We need a massive, unified movement against the attacks!

The cards are on the table: the federal and regional governments each want to impose tens of billions of savings within the scope of their respective powers in order to make the Belgian economy more competitive and profitable. All sectors of the working class will be strongly affected by this broad austerity programme.

While workers in private companies are being made redundant on a massive scale, the automatic indexing of salaries and benefits continues to be challenged, overtime and night work bonuses are being reduced, labour flexibility is being increased, access to unemployment benefits is being restricted, pensions and health insurance are being drastically cut, the total number of civil servants is being reduced, the tenure of teaching staff is being jeopardised, etc.

And this at a time when working conditions are becoming increasingly unbearable everywhere: underemployment, faster pace of work, blurring of the boundary between professional and private life, inflationary price increases, reduction of all kinds of subsidies, growing environmental disasters, depression, burnout. Enough is enough!

We should refuse to pay for the crisis of capitalism!

The government claims that there is no choice. In the logic of every ruling class, it is necessary to increase competitiveness to face the decline in economic growth and the trade war accentuated by Trump's protectionist economic policies, but also by the growing cost of military spending linked to imperialist tensions and wars. In every country, the ruling classes are trying to pass on to the workers the consequences of their own crisis of overproduction, i.e. commodities that they can no longer sell at a sufficient profit on the available markets. Labour must be made cheaper. Once again, the focus is not on the well-being or the needs of the workers, but on the profitable sale of goods and services. We need to reject this destructive and suicidal logic of the bourgeoisie.

We are not alone in reacting! In 2022-23, in Great Britain, tens of thousands of workers from companies in different sectors were fighting for almost a year. In 2023, in France, workers participated en masse in 14 ‘days of action’ against the government's attacks on pensions. In Belgium itself, from the first ‘leaks’ concerning the planned measures, the strength and dynamism of the mobilisations during the cross-sector demonstration on 13 January or the teachers' demonstration on 27 January resulted in a massive turnout of more than 30,000 demonstrators, far more than was ‘expected’ or rather hoped for by the unions. Protesters gathered in Brussels from all regions, and the movement spread to sectors other than education and rail, contrary to the unions' original intention. The mobilisation thus showed that the discontent goes beyond a particular measure or a specific ‘reform’: it expresses the will to resist the intention of the employers and the government to make the working class pay for the crisis.

Enough is enough! We must refuse to passively endure this avalanche of attacks on our living conditions. Our first victory is the struggle itself. But to truly counter these attacks, we must wage the battle as widely as possible in a unified manner, beyond the company, sector or region in which we work. All workers are “in the same boat. All these groups are not separate movements but a collective group: workers and employees, unionised and non-unionised, immigrants and natives’, as a teacher on strike in Los Angeles said in March 2023.

Our strength lies in the unification of struggles in a single movement

Against all manoeuvres and divisions

The bourgeoisie has understood all too well that its plans would provoke reactions in large parts of the class. It is mainly the unions who have the job of controlling and diverting this expected resistance. They have seen the workers' concern and discontent grow from week to week and are pre-emptively occupying the field to prevent discontent from manifesting itself in ‘uncontrolled’ actions.

Proven tactics are being used again: isolating and dividing the different sectors when the measures affect everyone. A demonstration solely for health and social care staff in November; then on 13 December a day of action in protest against the ‘European austerity measures’. For the day of action on 13 January, a strike against the ‘pension reform’ was announced only on the railways. It was only much later, under social pressure, that the unions decided that education would also participate and later, other sectors joined in. In Wallonia, the unions organised separate strike days for teachers in the French-speaking areas on 27 and 28 January, thus avoiding massive participation in Brussels on 13 January. The demonstration on 13 February is about the ‘defence of public services’, as if private sector workers or the unemployed did not need defending! In short, the aim is to plan a series of futile days of action, as they did in France, or to try each time to limit the mobilisations by concentrating them on certain sectors, as they did in the UK, or on particular aspects of the austerity plans. The aim is to finally exhaust the will to fight and pave the way for far-reaching concessions to the austerity measures under the fallacious argument that ‘sacrifices are inevitable, provided they are fairly distributed’.

To avoid the traps set by the unions, these saboteurs of the struggles in the service of the ruling class, and to develop the response, it is important to mobilise in large numbers, but that is not enough: we must also take our struggles into our own hands. To do this, we must:

- create places for discussion and decision-making, such as sovereign general assemblies open to all, and unite behind unifying demands;

- overcome regional divisions, those between public and private sector workers and the unemployed;

- counter every tendency to divide struggles, by sending massive delegations to other workers to join the struggle;

- refuse to pay for the crisis and the wars of capitalism.

It is this dynamic of solidarity, expansion and unity that has shaken the bourgeoisie throughout history.

International Communist Current

10.02.2025

Come and discuss it at the public meeting on Saturday 1 March in Brussels: rue du Fort 35, 1060 Saint-Gilles from 2 to 6 p.m.