Last year, on 1 May, I was walking around in Rome after an interesting conference on the Common Good of Humanity. It was the day the former pope, the Polish John Paul II, was being beatified. The city was full of Polish people, many of them walking around with a red scarf around their neck and a red rose in their hands. An alliance between the Church and labour?
In France, since a couple of years, the extreme right wing Front National party is celebrating 1 May, honouring Jeanne d’Arc as patron saint of France and its workers. Almost one third of French workers voted for Marine Le Pen in the first round of the presidential elections. In 2012, even Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative French president who lost the first round of these elections, will be celebrating Labour Day in Paris, honouring what he calls ‘real workers’!
Where does the left stand? Where do trade unions stand? What should they do? There is no doubt that only strong and powerful trade unions can really defend worker’s rights and can resist the dismantlement of labour rights and social protection. It is extremely positive to see that leftwing parties still largely agree with these conquests and most of them support the unions.
Yet, we face huge problems.
The first one is that social protection and labour rights, as they exist, are not sufficient anymore to protect workers and their families. Societies and the economy have changed a lot over these past decades, and our protection systems have not followed. Today, it is neoliberalism which pretends to ‘improve’ them, read ‘dismantle’ them, and trade unions are on the defensive.
Second, the left has no grand protective narrative anymore. All people, at all times and in all places, need protection. This is what socialism gave them. But today we know that the way in which this was done has failed. Now, it is the right which offers protection, in a rather perverse way. It is the protection of police states, of closed borders, of ethnic and religious intolerance, of xenophobia and rejection of international cooperation and solidarity. Again, the left is on the defensive.
Third, for some bizarre and sometimes cynical reasons, quite some people on the left are suspicious of social protection. They fear it will only ‘ease tensions’ and make the necessary revolution more difficult to achieve. In their eyes, social protection is a reformist project.
I want to argue that we have to fight on these three fronts. Neoliberalism is killing our welfare states, is killing democracy and is killing societies. All what will soon be left are repressive states, some poverty alleviation and a vulnerable ‘precariat’ of workers without rights. In these fragmented societies of fearful people, there will be more exclusion and more conflict.
There is not much time left. We have to develop very urgently a credible alternative that takes into account the needs of people in general and workers in particular, the needs of climate change and the needs of societies. We have to work on climate justice, on a new financial architecture and the role of money, on a new social and solidary economy, on a new social protection, and a new political organization with more democracy.
Social protection alone is not enough, but it is a very crucial element of our new world. Not only individuals and families have to be protected, but social cohesion itself. At Global Social Justice we are dreaming of a re-conceptualized, transformative, universal social protection, based on individual and collective rights, material and immaterial needs, guaranteed by strong, democratic states accountable to empowered individuals and societies.
This is what Global Social Justice is working at, with your help and support. We think this is a very urgent and crucial task to avoid the disasters of conflict caused by exclusion and climate change. 1 May is an excellent day to put forward our demands!
