Thanks for Anton and Margarethe and others at
Rotor for inviting me to speak and for looking after me since I moved to Graz.
This is an exhibit about standard of living, so I would just like to say that
they have definitely helped me to have a “good standard of living”
here in Graz! Especially in terms of good company, good food, good art, good
discussions…
The exhibit will paint the diversity of different living standards in different
places and for different people within the same place. I will say a few words
about the relationship between these different living standards.
In a world where trade, banks, production, consumerism and ecological problems are all intimately inter-related throughout the world, it is unsurprising that so too are standards of living, people’s differing access to resources, the fruits of their own labour and the fruits of other people’s labour.
In the current moment, the world-financial crisis is rapidly turning into world-economic crisis, which is in turn already rapidly turning into a political crisis. Already the Iceland government has gone under, there have been major riots in Greece, Bulgaria, Latvia, France general strike, Italian strikes. This is just in Europe alone. It is very likely that the political crisis will deepen and spread to more and more locations in the coming months and years.
For many years, and throughout most of the world, the existing mechanisms for reproducing livelihoods have been under threat: on the one hand state welfare has been greatly undermined (both in its social democratic forms, and its state communist forms) and it is becoming harder to survive in waged employment due to unemployment and lowering of wages. Agriculture is also becoming increasingly squeezed, with land prices rising and prices for products on the market falling. However, in I parallel to this, there is an inflation in the costs of meeting basic needs to ensure a minimum standard of living, such as food and energy. Last year there were fuel and food riots in more than 30 countries last year. The crisis is likely to greatly exacerbate all these already existing trends.
All of this throws up a crucial question. How will people ensure that they have a basic standard of living, in a way that provides them both with physical requirements for their basic needs, such as food, shelter, security of person, social security, pension etc, and also the spiritual and cultural requirements of a dignified and meaningful existence?
There are no easy answers to this question, yet the answers that people do in fact find and create, either intentionally or otherwise, will be decisive in shaping the political and economic relations of the coming period and for many years ahead.
A crucial factor in shaping the outcome will be whether people choose to relate to one another through solidarity across hierarchies and borders (both between countries, and between different populations within the same country), or through competition and fragmentation, enforcing borders and divisions where they already exist and creating new ones where they are currently non-existent.
In the face of social unrest, governments will find themselves under increasing pressure to provide reforms, at least for the most dominant, organized and vocal sectors of their populations. Failure to do so will mean that they find themselves kicked out and few governments want such a fate.
However, where will these reforms come from? Who will benefit from the reforms and who will be excluded? Whose work will they rely on, and whose resources?
Will they come through national/regional/ethnic pacts and new forms of imperialism and colonialism, or will they come through world-wide class solidarity, based on solidarity between waged and unwaged workers, citizen and non-citizen?
Will they seek to satisfy today’s generations at the expense of future ones? This is especially a concern in terms of ecological destruction, but also in terms of debt. The current bailout of banks and industry are literally mortgaging the future of several generations of workers. I don’t have a kid, but if I did, for sure it would already be heavily indebted…
In the past, national ways out of crises have been found, in order to answer social struggles while at the same time avoiding and fundamental and emancipatory rearrangement of social relations and power structures. This has resulted in colonialism, imperialism and world war, and very high standards of living for some and very low standards of living for others.
For instance, the workers movements which developed in Europe, both East and West in the 19th Century necessitated imperial expansion in order to provide the labour, raw materials and markets necessary to finance domestic reforms and keep social unrest under control. The post second world war “class-compromise” in the USA was based on privileging white male unionized wage labour, while at the same time relying on heavy racial discrimination, unwaged domestic labour, and cheap imports from abroad, most recently China. All of this has been essential to the US “high standard of living” in recent years. Or, to take a different, but in some ways similar example that is very close at hand: in the face of the crisis and depression of the 1930s, Europe first chose to blame the Jews for the problem, and then, decided to “solve” the problem of “European” anti-Semitism in such a way as to create a racist settler state that would usurp Palestinian land, water and other resources, the terrible ongoing consequences of which can be seen in the racist massacres which the Israeli Army has perpretated in the last weeks.
In all these examples, one group of workers in the world-economy have gained real material living standards, greater access to resources, political and cultural freedoms. However, their new improved situation has been granted at the expense of other workers within the world-wide division of labour, rather then through fundamentally changing power relationships. People have climbed the ladder of inequality, but have not broken the ladder itself.
Need for fundamentally challenging power relations, along world-wide class lines and the autonomous collective use of resources outside of the market, rather than creating new pools of privileged labour that get reforms which give them a higher standard of living at other peoples expense. An example of this can be seen inn Britain. Today, solidarity strikes are breaking out in the oil industry. However, the workers are protesting the employment of foreign workers from Italy and Portugal.
This week this difference is highlighted by the World Economic Forum in Davos and the World Social Forum, in Belem, Brazil. In Davos, former UN-Director General, Kofi Annan, has spoken of a “crisis of governability”. When world leaders speak in such words, it is clear they are very scared of losing a grip. Reforms are almost certainly on the agenda. The question is whose reforms, and at whose expense?
Kolya Abramsky