Fighting Thatcherite austerity drive…
Czechs bounce back!
AS WE GO to press, the resignation of Czech Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus has been announced, along with much of his cabinet, amid a major financial scandal stemming from the country’s privatisation programme. This article, from our special correspondent in the Czech Republic, HALKA KUDLIKOVA sets the background to the developing political crisis.
ON NOVEMBER 8 more than 60,000 people from the, length and breadth of the Czech lands took to the streets of Prague.
With a population of 10 million, this is proportionately equivalent to more than 350,000 in Britain. People have had enough of the government and its policies of the past few years. There is no longer any "ra-ra-ra, give us capitalism". People have begun to wise up.
The turning point came with the government’s currency floatation crisis in May (an almost automatic whopper devaluation of 15 per cent) and subsequent austerity package, which included huge tax increases on workers and lower and middle-tier professionals.
In part this was to pay for the massive flood damage in early summer. The underlying factor is the huge trade imbalance,which has grown unremittingly since mid-1993 – standing at over $3 billion for the past year alone.
The government also imposed certain import restrictions . These, however, were quickly abandoned in response to outcries and heavy lobbying from big busines.
The top directors and managers are former Stalinist bureaucrats turned born-again capitalists , who are now slamming their beloved Klaus government for its pathetically minimal pro-export policies.
These are mainly due to an ideological ultra-fetish for classical free marketism and thus minimal state ‘interference’ in the economy – including support to exports!
On the one side this is an aspect of the government’s total sycophancy to the EU and on the other, pleadings to multinationals for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) - "the Czech Republic is safe for your cash –look there is no state interference, and we have the workers under control".
As a result of the devaluation and trade figures revelation in May, the government’s ideological No. 2, Pavel Dlouhy, Trade and Industry Minister, was chosen as sacrificial lamb (or stinking goat).
Since then, half-a-dozen more ministers have gone down like ninepins or resigned. More critically perhaps, the beginnings of a power struggle have opened up between Josef Lux (leader of the Christian Democrats) and Vaclav Klaus (Prime Minister and leader of ODS - Civil Democratic Party, the main coalition party in the government) .
The coalition is very rickety, dependent on a couple of small parties, and a consensus from the social democrats on the essential thrust of the government’s programme. Since the recent elections, all manner of ministerial horse-trading has gone on, with the coalition’s minority partners demanding more posts from Klaus.
The once invincible and omniscient Klaus is now only hanging on through sustained media support based on the needs of the nascent bourgeoisie, for whom he is a Thatcherite necessity. If he were to fall, a shattering political and ideological crisis would open up.
For now, he’s just about got his feet on the ground. However, slowly but surely, the coalition rats are beginning to abandon the fast sinking "Good Ship Klaus and his Free Market Pirates".
Meanwhile, the social democrats, led by Milos Zeman, are allowing the government to hang on, but have now at least been forced to call, or posture for fresh elections next spring or possibly "even" February.
Constitutionally, the government’s term extends to June 2000, which the government and media are using as a disclaimer to Zeman’s weak-kneed call . The social democrats gained 26 per cent of the vote at the last elections – about equal to Klaus’s ODS – with the Stalinsts receiving around 7 per cent. Although by default, the social democrats are likely to do much better if an early election is forced.
Meanwhile, the government is in urgent need of formulating and imposing another mini-budget, which will further turn the screws on workers, state employees in particular. The EU and economic conditions demand it, but political hostility from the unions precludes it.
Recent polls show 60 per cent of the population believe material conditions were better under the pre-1990 "Communist" (Stalinist) regime. The previous artificially cultivated 80-90 per cent "consensus" on the all-out rush to capitalism has evaporated almost overnight.
The till-now cocky Klaus can no longer ridicule the unions with "dinosaurs from the past". Oh, how are the mighty (almost) fallen.
Unemployment
Currently, unemployment stands at more than 4.2 per cent and steadily growing. Levels range from 1 per cent in the capital (pop. 1.3 million) to 10 per cent or more in several hard-hit regions, particularly those traditionally based on heavy industry (steel and coal mining especially).
Huge job cuts have taken place in these – for example from 100,000 miners in 1989 to 60,000 now. Teachers, rail and textile workers have also taken a hammering.
For teachers there has also been an assault on salaries, which are now chronically low – in many cases at the level of a shop assistant, with many posts unfilled, including in universities .
Railways are being geared up for privatisation – in even worse haphazard form than in Britain. The value of state pensions has plummeted, including substantial cuts in miners’special pensions. It is planned to phase these out, and raise their retirement age from 50 up to 60.
The national norm is 60 for men and 57 for women plus one year less for each child born. Notto be left out, students are also taking a battering, both on the grant front and fees. Most are truly poor.
Amid this, price liberalisation has meant enormous food-price increases. They are no longer subsidised and have shot 3-fold ahead of wage increases since 1990.
There has been a policy of gradual increases of prices and rents in to west European levels, and the removal of a broad spectrum of former social-wage subsidies. The average wage is now $185 a month – except that two thirds of workers receive less!
Thus, classical wage/salary differentials have clearly opened up, with the gap set to widen yet further.
It is in these conditions that workers mobilised for the mass demonstration in the capital. However, the heavy battalions were not satisfied with a mere protest. In the days leading up to the demonstration, open calls for a one-day general strike rang out from miners, steel and rail workers.
However the union bureaucratswere reeling, and have for now –but not very long – managed to stave off the call. On the march itself, a sea of banners called for a 24-hour stoppage. In unison, the crowd –including thousands of cash-strapped pensioners –demanded the union bosses declare an all-out shutdown.
On the platform, there was competition amongst the union bosses for who could be the most sycophantic to Klaus and the nascent bourgoisie in their drive for total capitalism.
The award must surely go to Richard Falbr, leader of the Czech TUC, who argued "We are not against the liberalisation, we stand for it, the problem is that this government has shown itself incapable of its <I>successful implementation<I*>, thus the economic calamity", (sic!). This was met with spontaneous barrages of, "No to liberalisation, yes to a general strike!".
In the background lies ever growing racism – openly and unashamedly promoted on TV and in the press, with little or no reaction from politicians. This is most visibly directed at gypsies (2 per cent of the population) who now live in continual fear of skinheads and bootboys associated with the xenophobic and increasingly fascisized Republican Party of Miroslav Sladek.
Non-white foreigners, students in particular, are also targeted for the fascist boot gang attacks. A Sudanese student was stabbed to death by skinheads in Prague the very morning of the demo, but unlike in the past (which has seen 25 or more murders of gypsies) there was more than enough hard evidence to force the racist police into arrests.
The two murderers who were actually caught are expected to receive 15-year sentences.
The impetus of the mass mobilisation allowed anti-racists to demand the calling of protests against these atrocities for the very next day.
15,000 turned up at the Prague College of Economics in the heart of a major gypsy community, 5,000 or more in Pradec Kralov, and the same in Liberec where a 1-minute silence was maintained in memory of the Sudanese student – with clenched fists held high in defiance of Sladek’s fascist murderers!
Saturday’s demo, the strike call and the nationwide mood have now opened up the ground for the sizeable core of trade union militants and anti-Stalinist socialists to organise within the mass movement and among students and anti-racists.
This was clear from the 2-3,000 sales of the half-a-dozen or so leftwing and openly (non-Stalinist) socialist papers, which met with no negative or backward response from any section of the demonstrators – a virtual impossibility just a year or so ago.
A shift is now possible from propaganda to organised intervention by activists, and for concrete sector-by-sector agitational demands to be placed on the union leaders.
In the face of stepped-up agitation and the rapidly unfolding events, a main threat from the government – to be echoed no doubt by many of the union bosses – will be to pit Czech workers against (in particular) Polish and Hungarian workers, to harness them to the EU yoke, and to buckle under and compete in the scramble for FDI (Poland now leads the ‘league table’ in the relatively meagre amounts so far received vis-à-vis the "Asian Tigers" and China, where wage levels are lower still and unrestrained capitalism reigns supreme)
Increasingly, already now for the past few years, various EU governments have remonstrated to the EU Commission over the "dumping" – especially of steel and textiles – by Czech, Polish and Hungarian firms, achieved on the basis of wage costs (10% to 20% lower than EU countries), and in parallel have used it as an excuse to slash jobs and wages among their own workers.
Visits to the country from organisations of EU workers now become vital.
Workers on each side of the former imperialist-Stalinist divide must establish contact and form links, not least among those currently in dispute.