The last week of September has seen rising anger in a number of European countries in response to the brutality of the attacks and the endless succession of austerity plans. Despite the growing anger, expressed by increasingly regular confrontations with the police, the official ‘days of action’ have proved to be useless. For decades we have seen that this kind of ‘action’ serves as a means of sterilising and containing the class struggle, lining us up behind union banners, dividing us up into different sectors, trapping us between police lines and union loudspeakers which prevent any real discussion.

In the Summer 68,000 health workers (including junior doctors) in the South West of England learnt that their employers were considering cutting their pay by up to 15%, through possible reductions in basic pay of 1%;  a 10% reduction in unsocial hours  pay; an increase of the working week by 1 hour without extra pay; cutting 2 days of annual leave; reducing sick pay to new staff – which will start at only 50% of pay and a 10% cut in annual pay increments.

The main factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie have been slapping themselves on the back in raucous celebration the past two weeks after the Supreme Court dealt it two key victories in its vicious faction fight with the insurgent right-wing factions in the Republican Party. First, the Court threw out just about about every provision of Arizona’s contentious anti-immigrant law (SB 1070). Later the same week, the Court upheld President Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement—his plan to reform the nation’s health care system that has become known as “Obamacare.”

Almost exactly two years after Mr. Obama signed his signature health care reform legislation into federal law, the acrimonious dispute between Republicans and the Democrats continues. Like most reforms, they are actually cuts and measures of austerity against the workers, and will do little to improve the quality of health care for workers and their families.

From 2007, France had a president, Nicolas Sarkozy, whose arrogance and stupidity knew no limits. His open love of money, his violent tirades against the young people of the poor suburbs and the immigrants, his provocations, his propensity for talking about nothing but himself...all this and more created a very strong feeling of exasperation throughout the population. It was thus no great surprise that the presidential elections ended in his defeat. His replacement, the ‘socialist’ François Hollande, relied almost exclusively on this anti-Sarkozyism to win. Prudently avoiding any promises of a bright tomorrow.

This is an extract from a text prepared for a recent internal meeting of the ICC’s section in Britain. The article clearly shows the increasing level of attacks that workers are faced with.

In the last few months, the world economy has been going through a disaster which the ruling class has found it harder and harder to conceal. The various international summits aimed at ‘saving the world’, from G20s to endless Franco-German meetings, have only revealed that the bourgeoisie is powerless to revive its system. Capitalism has reached a dead-end. And this total lack of any solution or prospects is beginning to stir up tensions between nations, as we can see in the current threats to the unity of the Eurozone and even to the European Union itself, and within each country, between the various bourgeois cliques who make up the national political panel. Serious political crises have already broken out.

The events of July and August all came in such rapid succession that the ruling class seemed dizzied by their speed and depth: the debt-ceiling crisis, the downgrading of the U.S. creditworthiness from AAA to AA+ by Standard & Poor, the plunges and volatility on the stock markets, the news of the insolvencies of countries like Spain and Italy and the impasse at the IMF over what to do, the flight of capital away from U.S. Treasury bonds to gold. The ruling class is running out of arguments with which to reassure an ever more uncertain working class with hopes for a better future. To add insult to injury, its options about how to address an ever-aggravating economic crisis are also wearing thin. What is going on?

More than 50,000 health service jobs are due to be lost, including doctors, nurses, midwives and ambulance personnel. In fact Trusts plan to shed 12% of qualified nursing posts over the next 4 years, while the NHS already relies on their unpaid overtime, carried out by 95% of nurses with more than 1 in 5 doing this every shift.

Political pundits are predicting meltdown for Fianna Fail at the Irish general election. Whatever the result, all four of the main political parties in Ireland voted through the austerity measures required to get the €85 billion bail-out from the IMF and the EU. Whatever party or parties forms the next government, it will have little room for manoeuvre.