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Statement: Rebuild the Resistance! Face down the 6th Austerity Budget! 18 January 2013 The following leaflet was distributed by SD members and supporters at the recent household charge campaign rally in Dublin. The CAHWT has to a large extent been the only focus of resistance in the past year. By and large Irish political forces, be they of the left or right, have joined in a national consensus to enforce the austerity. Any pretence of building a resistance in the trade union movement has largely been abandoned. The ULA never went beyond an electoral vehicle and has now fragmented. Against this background the CAHWT has organized a broad campaign of civil resistance and has aided the formation of broad regional movements. That said, it must be accepted that the campaign has been in decline since the initial rush to persuade householders to withhold payment and is now in no fit state to face into the new wave of austerity. There are many problems. Basing everything on one tactic, claiming initially to have no politics only to announce a policy based on moralistic "tax justice,” faction fighting and a lack of internal democracy. They can all be boiled down to one overarching political failure - the failure to build on a foundation of irreconcilable opposition to all the aspects of austerity, opposition to the rule of the Troika and opposition to the quisling government and the forces of collaboration and appeasement within the working class organizations. The truth is that, despite many resolutions, that the campaign has steadfastly refused to step on the toes of the bureaucrats and directly lobby council workers who are being forced to implement the Household charge. They have stuck to community action even when it has become evident that civil disobedience tactic cannot work by itself. If we can build a broad resistance to the austerity we can then begin to open up the possibility of a real solution to the crisis, a solution based on mobilization of the potential power of the working class. At the moment all decisions on our future remain in the hands of a gombeen capitalist class and their collaborators who were the source of the crisis in the first place. There is one immediate simple issue that we must face up to. That is that the austerity budget is being slipped off the table and our task is to grab and bring it back to the center of attention and resistance. The budget has been signed and sealed. The trade union bosses have agreed it and are now enforcing it through the implementation bodies and negotiating Croke Park ll. They want to move on to "protest" the bond payment in partnership with the government. Such a protest will be sheer pantomime if public services are being torn down and privatised, mass evictions are threatened, unemployment rockets and wages collapse. We have to bring our own agenda to such events and not be patronized and lectured to by ICTU as we were at the pre budget demonstration. It is possible to resist. We must proclaim: No to the Troika!
Bus and rail workers, health workers and many others face wage cuts. Their union bosses make empty threats to strike not against the wage cuts but because they were not negotiated Workers can only succeed if the fight is generalised under their own control and if we build solidarity in every town and city, in every workplace and within and without union branches. Our aim is a grassroots movement that will set the working class, acting on its own behalf, center stage. We must build a national conference to
pull together every form of resistance to austerity. Part of that building
will be to demonstrate in practice that we can offer real solidarity to
those who fight back.
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