[D66] Europe sees unprecedented social polarisation

[Antid Oto]

Europe sees unprecedented social polarisation
28 September 2012

The giant consumer goods company Unilever has announced that it has 
begun employing its “third-world” marketing strategy in Europe. This is 
eloquent testimony to the growing social inequality now besetting the 
continent.

Jan Zijderveld, head of European operations, stated bluntly that the 
decision had been made because “poverty is returning to Europe”.

The group would begin producing the smaller, cheaper packages that it 
sells in Africa and Asia for the European market. “In Indonesia, we sell 
individual packs of shampoo [for] two to three cents and still make 
decent money,” Zijderveld said. “We know how to do that, but in Europe 
we have forgotten in the years before the crisis.”

Unilever has already adopted the strategy in Greece and Spain, two 
countries targeted for draconian austerity by the troika—the European 
Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank. 
The troika’s austerity policies have only compounded the economic crisis 
in these countries, causing mass suffering. Youth unemployment is 53.8 
percent and 52.9 percent in Greece and Spain, respectively.

But mass hardship is by no means confined to southern Europe. Two recent 
reports on conditions in Britain and Germany reveal sharp social 
polarisation in Europe’s “core”.

Who Gains from Growth?, drawn up by the Institute for Fiscal Studies 
(IFS) and the Institute for Economic Research (IER), forecasts that 
living standards for Britain’s low- and middle-income households will 
fall sharply over the next eight years, even if the country manages to 
emerge from its current double-dip recession.

Such households will see their incomes fall by up to 15 percent by 2020. 
A typical low-income family currently struggling on £10,600 per annum 
will see its net income fall in real terms to £9,000 at the end of the 
decade, while a middle-income family on £22,900 per annum will see a 3 
percent decline. In contrast, the rich will see a rise in living standards.

These projections are all the more damning given that the report takes 
as its scenario annual growth rates of between 1.5 and 2.5 percent up to 
2020 and no further spending cuts. In fact, conditions are likely to be 
far worse.

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition has recently signalled that 
it intends a further assault on welfare benefits. Chancellor George 
Osborne is expected to announce a further £10 billion reduction in 
welfare, on top of the £18 billion cut already underway.

The measures come under conditions where 2.5 million people are 
officially out of work and where the majority of workers have been 
subjected to wage cuts and pay freezes. Some 3.6 million children are 
officially counted as living in poverty. A survey earlier this year saw 
four out of five teachers report pupils going without food.

In contrast, this year’s Sunday Times Rich List revealed that the 
combined wealth of the richest 1,000 people had risen to a record 
£414.260 billion.

A four-yearly report drawn up by Germany’s labour ministry, The Wealth 
and Poverty Report, shows that the gap between rich and poor is widening 
in the country that is usually proclaimed to be Europe’s sole economic 
success story.

The share of total wealth owned by the wealthiest 10 percent of the 
population rose from 45 percent in 1998, to 53 percent in 2008. Half of 
all households owned just 1.0 percent.

With nearly 16 percent of the population “at risk” of poverty, the 
report states, “Hourly wages that are no longer sufficient—even if 
someone is working full time—to feed a one-person household are 
exacerbating the poverty risks and undermining social cohesion.”

The two reports received an anxious response from sections of the media.

Britain’s Observer newspaper editorialised, “We need to avert this 
polarisation of Britain”.

“This polarisation, and the hollowing out of the already struggling 
middle Britain, is damaging for individual citizens, the body politic 
and social cohesion and for the future health, wealth and well-being of 
UK plc. It must not be allowed to occur,” it warned.

Responding to the German labour ministry report, the Frankfurter 
Rundschau opined that the gap between the rich and poor was widening as 
the result of a “re-deploying” of assets from the “bottom to the top”. 
Forecasting that without remedial action, the next report would show the 
wealth gap had become even greater, it asked: “How long can society 
tolerate the rich getting richer? Nobody knows the answer.”

Beyond their complaints, however, neither newspaper had any remedies. 
The Frankfurter Rundschau wrote, with an air of desperation, “Since we 
have no solutions we need to find them. We must try. Experiment.”

The Observer suggested a “national debate on…a new social contract,” but 
this consists of only vague and minimal proposals like “vocational 
education, childcare and a living wage.”

Such calls are as meaningless as they are bankrupt. They are directed to 
the same ruling elite that has seized on the global economic crisis it 
has created in order to carry out a social counterrevolution across Europe.

This scorched-earth strategy is led by the German and British 
bourgeoisie and, as the recent reports make clear, applies to workers at 
home as much as to those in southern Europe.

The Observer and Frankfurter Rundschau are correct that this is a recipe 
for major class confrontations and social explosions. But their appeals 
for the ruling elite to see sense and introduce certain palliatives to 
ameliorate class tensions fall on deaf ears.

The ruling class and its political representatives have repudiated any 
notion of social reform. Whether conservative, liberal or social 
democrat, they are all oriented to the super-rich and committed to a 
policy of class war. The European “social model” is now one of 
impoverishment without limit, policed by the trade unions and backed by 
police violence and state repression.

It is not a question of how long “society” can “tolerate” this state of 
affairs, but what the working class can and must do to change it. The 
only genuine solution to the catastrophe being visited across Europe 
lies in its own independent class action and programme.

The stranglehold over economic and social life exercised by the 
financial oligarchy can be broken only by a conscious, revolutionary 
struggle by the working class for the overthrow of capitalism and the 
formation of workers’ governments based on socialist policies in the 
fight for the United Socialist States of Europe.

Julie Hyland

http://wsws.org/articles/2012/sep2012/pers-s28.shtml