[D66] The way forward for Dutch teachers

[A.OUT]

wsws.org:

The way forward for Dutch teachers
By Harm Zonderland and Parwini Zora
30 January 2020

Teachers in the Netherlands have decided to carry out a new two-day 
national strike on January 30–31, following national one-day strikes in 
February and November of 2019. These strikes are part of a protracted 
struggle for state funding to provide increased staff, better 
facilities, increased pay and reduced workloads.

The teachers’ strikes in the Netherlands come amidst a historic 
resurgence of international class struggle against social inequality, 
austerity and imperialist war, increasingly defying the political grip 
of traditional parties and their appendages, the trade unions.

Since 2018, a wave of teachers’ strikes has swept across five 
continents, ranging from the United States to India. In 2019, teachers 
in Poland organised their first national strike since the Stalinist 
regime restored capitalism more than 30 years ago.

Workers entering into struggle in the Netherlands are confronted with 
critical political issues. The decisive question is the international 
unification of the struggles of workers and youth and the adoption of a 
politically independent program and perspective based on socialism.

For free public education

The Dutch ruling class has decimated education budgets over the past 
decade, siphoning off public funds to bail out the banks and 
corporations responsible for the 2008 financial crisis. The past decade 
has seen the largest ever transfer of public wealth from the bottom of 
society to the top.

The burn-out rate amongst educators is at an all-time high due to 
increasing class sizes and demands outside of the classroom. Children 
are frequently sent home due to chronic shortages of teachers, or are 
forced to do their homework at school. In Amsterdam, several schools had 
to cut the school week to four days due to “unfilled vacancies,” while 
growing numbers of teachers work on temp contracts with little job security.

Education is a basic and universal democratic right. It is critical for 
teachers in the Netherlands to unite with their class brothers and 
sisters internationally to coordinate and unify efforts to provide free 
and universal education for all.

For a socialist programme

Workers must reject the lie that “there is no money” for basic social 
needs. Capitalist governments and union bureaucrats use this false claim 
to beat workers into submission.

In the Netherlands, the richest 10 percent own 68 percent of the 
country’s wealth. Worldwide, 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than 
the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 percent of the planet’s 
population, as Oxfam reported in its latest survey of social inequality.

Tax evasion in the Netherlands plays a significant role in the widening 
gap: 10 percent of the profits multinationals divert worldwide to avoid 
paying taxes end up in the Netherlands, which serves as a tax haven.

The Netherlands illustrates the obscene growth of social inequality 
worldwide. According to Rabobank, disposable household income has 
stagnated since 1977. Many Dutch workers have actually seen a fall in 
their real income since the 2008 financial crisis, though the AEX stock 
market closed 2019 with record gains.

The only progressive way to address the acute social problems caused by 
this concentration of wealth is to expropriate the parasitic financial 
aristocracy and place its assets under democratic workers’ control. This 
requires the revolutionary political mobilisation of the working class 
on an international scale.

Break with the trade unions! Build action committees!

The way forward for Dutch teachers is to take their struggles into their 
own hands. Workers cannot fight for socialist policies by appealing to 
the government or limiting themselves to protest strikes orchestrated by 
the unions. The union bureaucracies work relentlessly to coerce workers 
into accepting social cuts.

The treachery of the teachers’ union AOb reached a new low when it 
called off a national strike in early November 2019 after reaching a 
deal with Education Minister Arie Slob for a one-off funding supplement. 
But teachers rebelled, courageously striking on November 6.

In every country, the nationally-based trade unions have undergone a 
grotesque degeneration. When General Motors workers in America staged a 
month-long strike last year against plant closures, falling real wages 
and the expansion of temporary labour, they were betrayed by the United 
Auto Workers union, which is embroiled in a corruption scandal for 
taking massive bribes from the auto companies.

The way forward for Dutch teachers and associate workers in education is 
to build rank-and-file organizations—action committees—independent of 
the unions and their so-called “independent” third party affiliates. 
These action committees will mobilise the growing opposition of other 
sections of workers, including health care workers who also struck last 
November, to coordinate industrial and political action and imbue the 
developing movement of the international working class with socialist 
consciousness.

Workers need their own party

The existing Dutch parties offer nothing to workers and will prove 
bitterly hostile to independent struggles by the working class. The 
social democratic Labour Party (PvdA) carried out most of the social 
cuts in recent decades and has overseen Dutch participation in many of 
the imperialist wars of the NATO alliance. As for the Green Left and the 
ex-Maoist Socialist Party (SP), they pursue the nationalist agenda of 
their affluent middle class social base, whose politics are 
indistinguishable from Greece’s pro-austerity Syriza party.

Their cynicism and right-wing records disgust workers, leading some to 
vote for the far right. Across Europe, the ruling elite is promoting the 
neo-fascists. The Alternative für Deutchland (AfD) has become Germany’s 
largest opposition party. In Poland and Hungary, far-right parties are 
in power, while they are rapidly rising in France, Italy and Spain. In 
the Netherlands, the far-right Forum for Democracy (FvD) gained 12 seats 
in the parliamentary Senate after the provincial elections in March 2019.

Workers who break with the unions, which are wedded to the political 
establishment, and take up an independent, international struggle 
against the capitalist system will face pressing political issues. The 
fight against social and political reaction demands one thing above all: 
the formation of a new, independent political leadership in the working 
class, a section of the International Committee of the Fourth 
International (ICFI).

The ICFI bases itself on an unbroken record of struggle against national 
opportunism and for the independence of the working class from all 
bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties. It stands in the tradition of the 
Left Opposition and the Fourth International, which, led by Leon 
Trotsky, defended Marxism and socialist internationalism against the 
betrayals of Stalinism. Amid the growing strikes, it seeks to develop a 
socialist and internationalist movement of the working class to 
reorganise economic life on the basis of social need, not private profit.

We urge workers seeking a way to fight austerity, defend democratic 
rights and oppose militarism to read the World Socialist Web Site, 
contact the ICFI via the WSWS, and support the fight to build a section 
of the ICFI in the Netherlands.

The authors also recommend:

Teachers strike wave spreads across five continents
[7 March 2019]

Dutch health care strike: The defence of health care requires a 
socialist perspective
[20 November 2019]