The Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard is staying earnest to
the draconian neoliberal austerity economics of tax breaks for the rich and
structural adjustment for the poor. With 75, 000 people in attendance, the
people of Quebec consisting of mostly students and members of unions, held
their fists at the vacuous promises of a secure future made by the Liberal bourgeois
party in office.
The crux of the matter is the hegemonic neoliberal narrative
being reinforced in the Canadian media, as well as major media networks the
world over. This narrative is the genial story that by giving tax breaks to the
rich (accumulated from the tax dollars of the working people and businesses) it
will make a “business friendly” environment so that corporations will invest in
the country and in turn generate employment. This theory, often labelled as “trickle-down
economics”, which is a fascistic engineered method to raise people’s hope that
their boat will rise with the tide of new business. However this theory, in
praxis, is discordant with the ideas it has embroiled in the minds of the working
people.
The cost of social reproduction of labour is at the heart of
this issue. Before the rise of neoliberalism which began in Chile, US,
Argentina, and Britain, spreading to a large portion of the world, Keynesian economics
(demand control) ensured that the cost of social reproduction of labour (i.e.
rent, food, healthcare, education, urbanization, etc…) was supported by the
taxation of the rich bourgeois (up to 90% corporate tax in the US). However, over
three decades of neoliberalism (since the 1980’s), corporate taxation has
decreased to nearly a quarter of what it once was (26% in the UK) and wages
have remained stagnant: putting a benign smile on the face of all the fat cats.
Of course the working people, precluded from the bourgeois government decisions
regarding their faith, were the most affected by these tax cuts: leaving the
working people to increasingly pay for the cost of their social reproduction
thus raising the government deficit. It is important to mention that other bourgeois
led initiatives such as wars abroad also added to the general deficit.
Today neoliberalism is accumulating wealth through dispossessing
the working people of their already cash starved basic social services: turning
hospitals and schools into private enterprises, while continuing to attack the
minds of the working people to think that what is good for business is also
good for them. Protests in Quebec have now lasted two weeks with no clear end
in sight. The students on the streets represent an inflexion point in the
neoliberal class assault, attempting to bar further encroachments of capital. The
remedial solution to a crisis prone capitalist economy is not through further “ameliorative”
actions of the Liberal bourgeois government conducting a fire-sale of working
class social services, but step by step out of an exchange-value system of
capitalism towards a society tailored to the needs of its citizens.
Chia Barsen
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