Producing more but earning less around the world

We are working more and earning less. Productivity is up, but paychecks don’t keep pace. Average wages have been stagnant for four decades as the one percent has enjoyed spectacular gains in wealth.

The disproportion between increases in worker productivity and wages is perhaps most pronounced in the United States and Germany, but is common among the world’s advanced capitalist countries. This upward flow of income has long-term implications because the mass of wealth concentrated into few hands has led to an increase in destabilizing financial speculation — there are not enough opportunities for productive investment and consumer spending erodes because working people have less to spend.

In turn, reduced spending means there is little or no incentive for capitalists to invest, leading them to plow more money into speculation and to move production to newer low-wage havens because their profit margins are squeezed. Round and round the world has gone as the global economic crisis has persisted for half a decade with no end in sight.

The U.S. economy is still the world’s largest and is the model that its powerful capitalists work to export around the world; moreover, the massive U.S. trade deficit means the U.S. is to some extent propping up the world economy. Yet unemployment remains stubbornly high in the U.S. (even if lower than in the European Union). The U.S. economy simply isn’t creating jobs fast enough — that is the conclusion of a February 1 report issued by the Economic Policy Institute. The report, written by Heidi Shierholz, says:

“The U.S. labor market started 2013 with fewer jobs than it had 7 years ago in January 2006, even though the potential workforce has since grown by more than 8 million. The jobs deficit is so large that at January’s growth rate, it would take until 2021 to return to the pre-recession unemployment rate.”

Apologists for austerity as the “solution” to economic downturn often claim that the problem is a mismatch between the skills of job seekers and the skills needed by businesses. It is true that unemployment is lower among more educated people and higher among lesser educated people, but the rate of the increase in unemployment since the economic crisis began has been similar among all groups; in fact it is slightly higher among those with some college or a college degree than those with high school or less.

Among workers age 25 or older who are not high school graduates unemployment has risen 1.7 times since 2007, the Economic Policy Institute reports, while for college graduates it has risen 1.9 times. Among all workers, the rate of long-term unemployed has more than doubled during the past six years. The report says:

“The fact that we still have large numbers of long-term unemployed is unsurprising given that the ratio of unemployed workers to job openings has been 3-to-1 or greater since September 2008.”

Job growth lags behind GDP growth

The economies of the advanced capitalist countries simply aren’t growing fast enough to generate jobs. Because of competitive pressures that lead to layoffs, plant shutterings and moves to locations with much lower wages, and the increasing sophistication of computers and machinery, capitalist economies only increase employment during periods of robust growth, when demand requires more production. Unemployment ordinarily decreases only when an economy grows at least three percent annually.

Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, authors of the book What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism, summarized this conundrum:

“Capitalism is a system that constantly generates a reserve of unemployed workers. Full employment is a rarity that occurs only at very high rates of growth, which are correspondingly dangerous to ecological sustainability. As Christina Romer, former chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, tells us, ‘We need 2.5 percent growth just to keep the unemployment rate where it is. … If you want to get it down quickly, you need substantially stronger growth than that.’ … [I]t is clear that if the GDP growth rate isn’t substantially greater than the increase in the working population, people lose jobs.” [pages 56-58]

As competition for jobs steadily becomes more acute, the dynamics of capitalism dictate that wages will be buffeted by strong downward pressures. Over the long term, not only the past few years, that has happened. A study published in the Spring 2012 edition of the International Productivity Monitor demonstrates the extraordinary mismatch between productivity gains and wages. The authors, Lawrence Mishel and Kar-Fai Gee, write:

“During the 1973 to 2011 period, the real median hourly wage in the United States increased 4.0 percent, yet labour productivity rose 80.4 percent. If the real median hourly wage had grown at the same rate as labour productivity, it would have been $27.87 in 2011 (2011 dollars), considerably more than the actual $16.07 (2011 dollars).” [page 31]

Almost every penny of the income generated by that extra work went into the pockets of high-level executives and financiers, not to the workers whose sweat produced it.

Around the world, workers see little of the gains

Workers in other advanced capitalist countries did not fare quite as badly, but the general pattern is there.

In Canada, for instance, labor productivity increased 37.4 percent for the period 1980 to 2005, while the median wage of full-time workers rose a total of 1.3 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to a Fall 2008 report in the International Productivity Monitor. The authors of this report, Andrew Sharpe, Jean-François Arsenault and Peter Harrison, provided caveats as to the direct comparability of productivity and wage statistics, but find the mismatch to be real as labor’s share of Canadian gross domestic product has shrunk. The authors note that, in Canada, almost all income gains have gone to the top one percent. They write:

“If median real earnings had grown at the same rate as labour productivity, the median Canadian full-time full-year worker would have earned $56,826 in 2005, considerably more than the actual $41,401 (2005 dollars).” [page 16]

Wage erosion is also at work in Europe. Making a few calculations from International Labour Organization statistics on labor productivity and wages, provided for individual countries, I found that average real wages in Germany declined 0.5 percent per year for the period of 2000 to 2008 while German labor productivity increased 1.3 percent per year. (This was the only period for which I could find statistics for both categories.)

The prosperity of German manufacturers is built on the backs of German workers, who have absorbed a decade of pay cuts. Because the International Labour Organization uses average, rather than median, figures, the disparities are likely made to appear smaller than they might be because the wealthiest are increasing their share of income faster than anybody else, distorting the average. (“Average” is the halfway point between highest and lowest; an average will rise if the highest has risen while all others are stagnant. “Median” is the number representing someone at the 50th percentile, or the middle number if everybody was arranged in order, and thus is more representative.)

Using the ILO statistics, French workers’ average wages kept pace with productivity growth for the period 2000 to 2008 while Spanish workers lagged, earning 0.5 percent more in wages per year while productivity increased 0.9 percent per year. Income inequality has increased in France since the mid-1990s, an indication that growth in pay for the highest earners likely masks declines for most workers and therefore could account for the statistical stability in the French wage/productivity ratio.

By contrast, in Britain, a Resolution Foundation paper found a differential between productivity and wage gains, although smaller than that of the United States, but also that British workers did not lose as much ground as did French, German, Italian and Japanese workers. That conclusion is based on a finding that the share of gross domestic product going to wages in those countries has steeply declined since the mid-1970s.

What we have is a structural problem, not a problem confined to a particular country, caused by a government nor solvable by adopting a specific monetary policy. Nor is personal greed the underlying cause, regardless of the personal qualities of individual capitalists.

Intensified competition over private profits, and that “markets” should determine social outcomes, inexorably leads to a consolidation in which industries are dominated by a handful of giant corporations, and those corporations gain decisive power over governments and relentlessly reduce overhead (especially wages and benefits) in a scramble for survival. More inequality means less pay for employees, reducing demand and weakening economies, which leads to more unemployment and less leverage for employees in wage negotiations as corporations use any means necessary to maintain their profit margins.

That a new boom or bubble might occur in the future does not alter the overall picture; such a development would only be a temporary blip. If it is the structure that is the problem, then only a different structure can be the solution.

The high cost of private profit in health care

By Pete Dolack

The United States spends huge amounts of money on health care. But it is only in comparison to other countries that the magnitude of health care spending becomes clear. Because the U.S. health care system is designed for private profit rather than public health, the U.S. spends an extra $1.15 trillion per year beyond what it would otherwise.

If that total astounds you, you are not alone. When I first began making calculations to determine excess spending in health care, the figures were so large that I had difficultly believing them and performed the calculations over again. The result was the same.

The excess spending on health care is not only growing, it is growing much faster than the rate of inflation, in concert with overall health care spending. For instance, the annual average of excess spending for the period of 1990 to 2000 was $685 billion. For the period of 2001 to 2010, the annual average ballooned to $1.15 trillion.

And despite all that extra spending, U.S. residents have poor health results in many key indicators, in comparison to the world’s other advanced capitalist countries. Still more amazing, 51 million people in the U.S. are without health insurance, while all other peer countries have universal care. This is the system that millions of U.S. citizens believe is the best in the world thanks to the world’s most developed public relations and misinformation industries.

The rest of the world is quite in disagreement, to the point that even the harsh austerity-minded Conservative prime minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron, has repeatedly had to deny (whether or not sincerely I will leave to others) any intention to emulate the U.S. system as he attempts to impose changes on the country’s National Health Service.

Let’s do a bit of digging under the surface of numbers. First off, an explanation of where the $1.15 trillion in annual excess spending comes from. I calculated the number by first obtaining total health care spending per capita* of the three largest economies within the European Union (France, Germany and the United Kingdom) and of Canada, the neighbor of the United States. I then averaged the numbers for the years 2001 to 2010 (the latest for which full statistics are available) as compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the club of the world’s advanced capitalist countries and the largest developing countries.

The composite average of Canada, France, Germany and the U.K. for 2001 to 2010 is US$3,479 per capita per year. That number is less than half of the U.S., which had by far the world’s highest health care spending at $7,325 per capita per year. The differential was then multiplied by 300 million, the approximate U.S. population during the past decade. If you prefer a different measure, the U.S. spent 17.4 percent of its 2009 gross domestic product on health care expenditures, again the world’s largest by a wide margin. The average of the 34 countries of the OECD is 9.6 percent.

And if that is not enough, here is one more astounding comparison: Not only are out-of-pocket expenses by U.S. health care consumers higher than in any of the four comparison countries (no surprise there) but per capita government spending in the U.S. is higher than in any of the four comparison countries. Those four have varying versions of what U.S. right-wing ideologues venomously denounce as “socialized medicine” — health care systems either run or closely regulated and supervised by a federal government paid for through taxation — and yet each government nonetheless spends less than does the U.S. government on a per capita basis.

Despite the massive transfer of money to private insurance companies by employers and employees, on a per-capita basis government health care spending by itself in the U.S. is higher than total health care spending in Canada.**

The authors of the paper “Why is health spending in the United States so high?” (a supplement to an OECD statistical report) attempted to draw conclusions from a mass of data on health care expenditures:

“It does not have many physicians relative to its population; it does not have a lot of doctor consultations; it does not have a lot of hospital beds, or hospitals stays, when compared with other countries, and when people go to hospital, they do not stay for long. All these data on health care activities suggest that U.S. health spending should be low compared with other countries.”

The reason that spending is anything but low is because of the high prices extracted throughout the system. The costs of a range of medical procedures or surgeries are much higher in the U.S. than elsewhere, as are pharmaceutical prices. The authors write:

“Overall, the evidence suggests that prices for health services and goods are substantially higher in the United States than elsewhere. This is an important cause of higher health spending in the United States.”

The OECD is an organization that is representative of the world’s most powerful capitalist countries, so the report does not inquire into underlying causes or in any way challenge the economic system that leads to such results; it merely reports facts and figures. Those facts and figures, however, give us a useful starting point. The wasteful spending on health care are subsidies for pharmaceutical manufacturers, hospital-chain operators, insurance companies, managed-care companies and medical-products manufacturers. Money flows to those corporate entities directly from your pocket and indirectly from you via government spending.

Each U.S. citizen’s annual share of wasteful, excess spending on health care — excess spending that goes into the coffers of some of the country’s largest corporations among the many industry profiteers — amounts to $3,846. Business leaders, their lavishly funded think tanks and pressure groups, and the public-office officials who represent them continually assert that private enterprise is always more efficient. It would seem that the efficiency lies in extracting money and wealth.

Noting that “high administrative costs and lower quality have also characterized for-profit HMOs” (health maintenance organizations funded by insurance premiums that supervise health care), a Journal of the Canadian Medical Association article provides the following figures for the percentage of revenue that is diverted to overhead:**

• For-profit HMOs: 19 percent
• Non-profit plans: 13 percent
• U.S. Medicare program: 3 percent
• Canadian Medicare: 1 percent

In contrast to the rhetoric so often employed, government is far more efficient at delivering health care than the private sector. (This is also true in retirement plans, where the U.S. Social Security program’s overhead is much lower than mutual-fund managers or other financial-industry enterprises.) An important reason is that the government does not skim off massive amounts of money for bloated executive pay nor does it need to generate large profits to enrich financiers.

Such large expenditures also flow from a lack of competition. Few people in the U.S. have a choice of insurance provider, which is dictated by their employer, and insurance companies and HMOs frequently limit choice of doctors, and often deny coverage so as to maximize profits. A company that has stock traded on exchanges is legally required to maximize profits above any other consideration; it is no different because health care happens to be the product. A few summers ago, I found myself in a debate with a Canadian woman who was critical of her country’s health care system. I acknowledged that Canadian health care is not perfect, but then gave the example of a friend who had recently died in his 50s of a heart attack because his insurer decreed that he did not require medication for his weak heart and he could not afford it on his own. Does that happen in Canada?, I asked. She replied with silence.

As in any other mature industry, most market share has consolidated into a few hands, a condition that is known as an “oligarchy.” Although competition in younger or more fractured industries does result in price reductions, when an industry is reduced to a small number of dominant corporations, price competition is usually a casualty. Health care constitutes several industries — insurance, pharmaceuticals, hospitals and medical equipment, among others — and each adds to the cost. Giant pots of government money are involved, always a lucrative source of private enrichment. And insurers have people over a barrel because health insurance comes through their employer, who make deals with a single insurer, take it or leave it.

Health care provision also has unique attributes that further inflate costs. In “The high costs of for-profit care,” by Steffie Woolhandler and David U. Himmelstein (the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association article quoted above), the authors write:

“Why do for-profit firms that offer inferior products at inflated prices survive in the market? Several prerequisites for the competitive free market described in textbooks are absent in health care. First, it is absurd to think that frail elderly and seriously ill patients, who consume most health care, can act as informed consumers (i.e., comparison-shop, reduce demand when suppliers raise prices or accurately appraise quality). …

“Second, the “product” of health care is notoriously difficult to evaluate, even for sophisticated buyers like government. … By labeling minor chest discomfort “angina” rather than “chest pain,” a U.S. hospital can garner both higher Medicare payments and a factitiously improved track record for angina treatment. It is easier and more profitable to exploit such loopholes than to improve efficiency or quality.

“Even for honest firms, the careful selection of lucrative patients and services is the key to success, whereas meeting community needs often threatens profitability. … [For-profit] hospitals duplicate services available at nearby not-for-profit general hospitals, but the newcomers avoid money-losing programs such as geriatric care and emergency departments (a common entry point for uninsured patients). The profits accrue to the investors, the losses to the not-for-profit hospitals, and the total costs to society rise through the unnecessary duplication of expensive facilities.”

In the spirit of comparison-shopping, here is a brief examination of the five countries under discussion, the United States and the four comparison countries.

• German health care system: Everybody is covered. Workers pay eight percent of their gross income into a “sickness fund,” a nonprofit insurance company; employers pay the same amount. These contributions account for almost all money in the system. Workers choose among 240 sickness funds. There are no deductibles. Everything, including drugs, is free for children younger than eighteen. The government regulates all insurance companies closely.
• French health care system: Everybody is covered. Workers pay 21 percent of their income into a combined retirement and national health care system; employers pay about half that amount. Payroll and income taxes largely fund health care. There are no waiting lists for elective surgery or to see a specialist. Doctors’ fees are negotiated with medical unions, while hospital fees are regulated. Patients with one of 30 long-term and expensive illnesses pay nothing for care.
• British health care system: Everybody is covered. The National Health Service is funded by income taxes, employs physicians and nurses, and owns most of the hospitals and clinics. The service also pays directly for all health care expenses, with prescriptions and dentistry being the two exceptions. There are sometimes long waiting lists, which are commonly attributed to there being no restrictions on services, particularly hospitalization.
• Canadian health care system: Everybody is covered. The federal government sets standards; provincial and territorial governments administer the system. Medically necessary hospital, physician and diagnostic services are free, although most dental care and prescription drugs are not covered. Services are primarily through private providers. Long waiting times for specialists are a problem, with reduced government payments cited as an underlying cause.
• U.S. health care system: 51 million are not covered. Coverage is through an employer (of which the employee pays a portion), or through own purchase of private insurance, but most can’t afford to do so. Insurance companies frequently dictate what, or if, services will be provided. Coverage generally requires out-of-pocket expenses and includes a “deductible” before payments begin. Patient bankruptcies due to inability to pay bills are common.

Another weakness of the U.S. health care system is that is based on the concept of a “family wage” instead of a “social wage.” That is both cause and effect — unlike other countries where health care is a right, in the U.S. health care is a privilege, and the large disparities in the ability to obtain it reflects the canyon-like inequality there and also aggravates social inequities. Not only because health care is tied to an employer, giving a boss more power over employees, but because a family’s health care coverage is tied to the person who has the job that provides it — usually the man in a traditional family. But it could be any one person in a non-traditional family or within a gay or lesbian household.

Feminist pioneer and theorist Kathie Sarachild of the influential group Redstockings, in a July 4 interview on the Joy of Resistance: Multi-cultural Feminist Radio program, summarized this concept. She said:

“The family wage is another way of saying this old idea that men should support the family. [U.S.] society is built on the idea that men should get higher pay than women because men would support the family and women would stay home and take care of the children. … Even though there were always women who worked, they received less pay than men did because of this family-wage concept. …

“A lot of [the European social wage] came out of socialist and communist theory. … The labor movement and the feminist movement in [Europe] have been able to win a social-wage system, which pays to raise the next generation [through universal health care and paid leave when a child is born instead of being dependent on an employer to pay a ‘family wage’ to the man].”

Nationalized health care becomes part of a basket of social benefits, including more vacation time, life-long education and elder care that liberates working people from dependence on an employer. A shorter work week would also bring benefits, Ms. Sarachild said:

“If the work week were shorter … there would be more jobs. There’d be less unemployment because the work week is shorter so there are more paid jobs. There would be more time at home for the father and mother to be with the child. …. [With the introduction of a] social wage, the unfair family wage would not be necessary. … [Women] are not as dependent on the man, and both of you are not so dependent on the employer.”

The lower wages of women in the “family wage” system boost corporate profits on the backs of women, Joy of Resistance host Fran Luck points out, and many women are forced to stay in bad relationships because they would lose their health care.

For men and women, the price of private profit is enormously high: 22,000 people die and 700,000 go bankrupt per year as a result of inadequate, or no, health insurance in the United States.*** The U.S. ranks among the bottom five of the 34 OECD countries in per capita doctor consultations, hospital beds and average length of stay in hospitals,**** and is well below average in life expectancy and infant mortality. The country’s people pay more than $1.15 trillion per year on top of what they should pay to swell corporate profits and executive and Wall Street wallets — in return, we receive worse coverage. That is the price of capitalism.

* OCED figures. Spending per capita in U.S. dollars adjusted to create purchasing power parity.
** Steffie Woolhandler and David U. Himmelstein, “The high costs of for-profit care,” Journal of the Canadian Medical Association, June 8, 2004, pages 1814, 1815.
*** T.R. Reid, “No Country For Sick Men,” Newsweek, Sept. 21, 2009, pages 43-44.
**** “Why is health spending in the United States so high?,” OECD report, page 5.

Greeks and French vote against austerity, but what did they vote for?

By Pete Dolack

The weekend’s election results in Greece and France can be interpreted in different ways. The most obvious reading, and not at all untrue despite its obviousness, is to see them as a continuation of European voters’ rejection of their governments.

Ten of seventeen Eurozone governments have fallen or been voted out in the past fifteen months, and throwing out the incumbents is a natural response to an extended period of economic malaise. So just as Spain voting in its conservative party to punish the socialists’ austerity can’t reasonably be portrayed as a Spanish lurch to the Right — the conservatives, after all, promised to impose more austerity and swiftly became unpopular when they did as they said they would — we should be cautious in proclaiming a French shift to the Left.

Then again, since there is nothing socialist about the French Socialist Party, we have ample reason to avoid saying France has shifted leftward. Europeans clearly are sick of the mindless austerity being imposed on them, but for the most part have not advanced beyond wanting to throw out the incumbents. The surest way to do that is to vote for the main opposition party, but doing so only reinforces the system that is not working.

French voters at least had alternatives to vote for in the first round of their presidential elections, but the Left Front candidate who offered a clear Left alternative to France’s two main parties, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, finished a disappointing fourth with 11 percent of the vote, below what he had been polling. Worse, the far Right candidate, Marine Le Pen, won 18 percent. The Socialist François Hollande and Union for a Popular Movement’s Nicolas Sarkozy earned only about 55 percent of the first-round voting between them — the French demonstrated they are seeking an alternative.

But what alternative? That is as yet unknown. But the strong showings by crypto-fascists in France (Le Pen) and outright fascists in Greece (the Golden Dawn party) demonstrate the danger inherent in allowing economic malaise to continue without a solution or alternative. If the Left is unable to offer a coherent alternative, the extreme Right will threaten to fill the vacuum. Golden Dawn won seven percent of the vote in Greece on Sunday, elevating a fascist party into a national parliament. And if you have doubts about Golden Dawn being fascist, here is an excerpt from a report by Maria Margaronis in The Guardian on May 7:

“Its leader, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, threw Greek journalists who wouldn’t rise for him out of his press conference and dedicated his victory to ‘the brave boys in the black shirts.’ ‘Those who slander us,’ he barked, and ‘those who betray this country should be afraid: we’re coming.’ Near Kalavryta in the Peloponnese, the site of one of the most terrible Nazi massacres in the 1940s, Golden Dawn graffiti calls for ‘a new Holocaust to clear the filth from the country.’ ”

Greece has enough history with Right-wing extremism that the Golden Dawn’s words can not be dismissed as mere antics. The Nazi occupation of Greece during World War II, conducted through a Greek puppet government, caused hundreds of thousands to die of starvation, and tens of thousands more to be executed. An armed resistance movement, organized by Left groups but widely supported, gradually forced the Nazis to withdraw. A government was installed in Athens by the British, but the Communist-led resistance, having liberated the country, had strong support and could have taken power. Josef Stalin, however, ordered Greece’s Communists not to do so. In return, the British-backed government made mass arrests of resistance fighters while allowing Right-wing gangs to kill others by the thousands. In response, Communists resorted to an armed struggle, reversing themselves in a much less favorable position, touching off a civil war that crushed them and displaced millions, so furious was the counter-insurgency. The British heavily supported the régime it had installed while Stalin simply stood by because he did not want further tensions with his former World War II allies.

Execution, long imprisonment or exile became the fates of many Greeks. The Left was outlawed for three decades, and a period of disastrous Right authoritarian government culminated in the murderous military junta of the “four colonels” from 1967 to 1974. That junta imprisoned several thousand people just in its first month, many of whom were tortured, and imposed a brutal dictatorship. Although this history, completely entangled with Cold War politics, might seem to have no bearing on present-day Greek politics — and definitively rendered armed uprisings by the Left a relic of the past — it left Greece with a legacy of deep social divisions, a weak political center and an archaic class structure compounded by an exemption from paying taxes for the favored.

Considerable force was applied to provide Greece’s capitalists with large advantages. But although in recent decades they have been content to maintain their privileges via traditional legal means, the system they have been reliant on has become unstable. Stirring up nationalism has been a common method for the world’s privileged to maintain power, and nationalistic attitudes below can easily take a violent direction.

When fascists declare an intention to “clear the filth” and threaten violence, they mean it: Fascists speak with fists and weapons, not words and ideas. The showings of Len Pen and Golden Dawn are alarm bells are ringing, loudly. And fascists do not need a majority to seize power — Hitler never received more than a third of the vote and was appointed chancellor by German president Paul von Hindenburg; Mussolini never won more than a tiny percentage of votes. Force elevated them to power, with just enough people susceptible to their simplistic siren songs to provide the shock troops.

The Greek Left — split three ways among the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza), the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and the Democratic Left — did score much higher than the extreme Right, a combined 31 percent of the vote, although this was at the low end of the 30 to 40 percent they had collectively polled during the past couple of months. Syriza finished second and only two percentage points behind the mainstream Right party, New Democracy. But because of a quirk in the Greek electoral system — otherwise a proportional-representation system requiring only three percent of the vote to enter parliament — the May 6 results rendered it impossible for the Greek Left to form a government by themselves, even if the parties could reconcile their significant differences.

That quirk is that the first-place finisher gets a bonus of 50 extra seats above what it earns from its proportional share of the vote. New Democracy, as the first-place winner, therefore was awarded 108 seats instead of 58 — a massive boost. Put another way, N.D. has more than a third of parliament’s 300 seats despite winning nineteen percent of the vote. That, in theory, made the most likely government to be formed a “grand coalition” of N.D. and the mainstream Left party, the “socialist” Pasok, plus at least one other because New Democracy and Pasok together finished short of a majority.

Such a government, to put it mildly, would be seen as illegitimate by Greeks — more than two-thirds voted against the two ruling parties and their policy of pitiless austerity. But that illegitimacy surely was not the reason that N.D. leader Antonis Samaras handed back his mandate to form a government after one day instead of using all three days he was granted to find willing coalition partners. There are two conclusions that can reasonably be drawn: Samaras does not actually want to govern, or he is calculating that nobody will be able to form a coalition and new elections will be called for June that he believes he will win by a greater margin.

The first scenario in the preceding sentence arises because, in essence, Samaras would have his bluffed called were he to become prime minister. The N.D. is Greece’s Big Business party, and has consistently boosted those interests while expanding its base through policies that enable Greece’s middle class professionals to avoid paying taxes the same as the rich and powerful. But its support, in practice, for austerity are a direct contrast to its verbal claims of opposition to austerity, a contradiction exposed by its “solution” to Greece’s crisis: tax cuts for businesses. The Big Business backers of New Democracy are too connected with business and financial interests elsewhere in Europe to abrogate the austerity agreements with the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Greeks voted against austerity. What did they vote for? That is not nearly so easy to answer.

Syriza, itself a coalition of Trotskyist, Maoist, Eurocommunist and other non-orthodox communist Leftists, has called for a coalition with the KKE and the Democratic Left, in contrast to the orthodox communist KKE that eschews working with other parties and the moderate Democratic Left that, during the electoral campaign, sought a coalition only on its terms. As Syriza won more votes than KKE and the Democratic Left combined, and as the party most willing to join hands with other anti-austerity parties, it might develop into a home for Greeks sick of austerity and willing to throw off the shackles of European Union financiers.

Syriza contains differing opinions on retaining the euro (although its leader, Alexis Tsipras, favors remaining in the eurozone) and definitively advocates remaining within the E.U. but with a thorough restructuring. Syriza demands a suspension in debt payments until the economy recovers, followed by a “selective” default; redistribution of wealth; and a re-orientation of priorities toward growth-inducing investment. A day after Syriza’s second-place finish, as multi-sided negotiations to form a government began, Tsipras told Athens News:

“We strongly believe that the country’s salvation will achieved through the rejection of these barbaric measures, through relief from recession and the looting of pensions and salaries, through the cancelation of austerity measures and their replacement with measures to boost the economy and tax built-up wealth so that funds are found to help the weaker sections (of society). … Our message of our people to European leadership is clear, the Greek people last night rejected the policy of austerity, as it is being rejected by all the peoples of Europe. The time has come for it to be withdrawn.”

Having been given the mandate to form a government as the leader of the second-place finisher after Samaras said he is unable to form one, the Greek newspaper Kathimerini reported that Tsipras’ coalition negotiations will center on these demands:

• The immediate cancellation of all impending measures that will impoverish Greeks further, such as cuts to pensions and salaries.
• The immediate cancellation of all impending measures that undermine fundamental workers’ rights, such as the abolition of collective labor agreements.
• Reform of the electoral law and a general overhaul of the political system.
• An investigation into Greek banks, and the immediate publication of the audit performed on the Greek banking sector by BlackRock.
• The setting up of an international auditing committee to investigate the causes of Greece’s public deficit, with a moratorium on all debt servicing until the findings of the audit are published.

The “policy of austerity” has unquestionably suffered a “crushing defeat,” but without any consensus among Greeks as to what the alternative should be. Regardless of whether Greece leaves the eurozone and re-adopts its former national currency, the drachma, Greece’s future is in Europe. There is no Greek solution to Greece’s crisis, nor is there a French solution to France’s stagnation, nor a national solution to any other country’s economic malaise.

The only way forward for Europe is for a European Union radically different from the one that exists — an E.U. that is democratic and designed to benefit all peoples, not a dictatorial bureaucracy interested only in maintaining the fabulous wealth of a capitalist elite, in particular financiers, at the cost of everybody else.

In previous posts, I have summarized programs proposed by various economists, some envisioning Greece remaining in the eurozone and some envisioning Greece dropping the euro and returning to the drachma. What these programs have in common is a vision of a European-wide economic restructuring.

To summarize some of these ideas: The E.U. should be leveraged to internationalize the resistance of working people; full employment demanded as an explicit goal; banks should become publicly owned and democratically controlled so that capital is directed toward socially useful investment instead of speculation; a highly progressive taxation system should be coordinated at the E.U. level; wages raised to account for improved productivity that has, for three decades, gone to capitalists; governments should default at least some of their debts to banks; bank deposits should be guaranteed; and there should be more investment in education to enhance future productivity.

Some of these, or at least moderate versions of some of these, are articulated by the Greek Left. These are, however, yet to be articulated by European politicians elsewhere. Politicians such as Hollande argue for reforms within the current E.U. framework, not a break from that framework or even a strong questioning as to why ensuring profits to bond holders and speculators should be the highest principle of Europe and that entire countries should be immiserated for it.

Although a reformist, it can be said that Hollande came to advocate strong reforms, winning backing for ideas such as including a 75 percent tax rate on France’s highest earners, the hiring of new teachers and social spending to stimulate the economy. Sarkozy, on the other hand, dangerously adopted some of the arguments of Le Pen and her National Front party in a craven attempt to win her voters — thereby giving legitimacy to extremists who scapegoat immigrants and attack intellectuals. Such programs (and its equivalents elsewhere, including the “tea party” in the United States and Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party in the Netherlands) are demagogic attempts to deflect attention from the structural issues underlying economic malaise and the vast wealth inequalities that are destabilizing society. Although these have the appearance of grassroots “populist” movements, they are always supported by Big Business interests and are often, as is case with the “tea party,” lavishly funded by those interests.

Elections for the French parliament occur in mid-June, and that might provide more guidance as to where France is going. But the mainstream Center-Left governments of Europe that have imposed austerity have fallen just the same as Center-Right governments doing the same. It is possible that a spell of both applying roughly similar austerity policies will finally spark the rupture that is necessary. If that proves to be so, then we will be able to look back and say that Greece — having rejected both its major parties — arrived first. But a systemic break with the capitalist logic of austerity can only be an international movement: It is indisputable that “socialism in one country” can’t survive a hostile capitalist world, and a small country such as Greece all the more so could not survive as a socialist island in a capitalist Europe.

Inevitably, a post-capitalist Europe would be an example for the rest of the world, not excepting other advanced capitalist countries. I want to be clear here that I — and those whom I have summarized here and in previous posts — are advocating a democratic system, one much more democratic than currently exists. The 20th century’s top-down, state-owned and -controlled economic system that developed in the Soviet Union failed, and failed for real reasons — sufficient reasons can be found internally. Rather, what is advocated is cooperation in a decentralized economy.

Political democracy is not possible without economic democracy. Economic democracy is impossible without production being oriented toward human, community and social needs rather than private accumulation of capital. Everybody who contributes to production earns a share of the proceeds — in wages and whatever other form is appropriate — and everybody should be entitled to have a say in what is produced, how it is produced and how it is distributed, and collective decisions in turn should be made with community involvement.

A Left that can articulate a democratic vision of a better world can succeed. The signs are around us: the rapid assent of the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States, the electoral success of the Greek Left, the mounting fury around the world at a rigged capitalist system that is failing humanity. But a better world can only be made through international struggle and a radical vision of economic and political democracy. Such a task will not be easy: The rulers of the capitalist world have a panoply of weapons at their disposal (control of the workplace, the ability to fund groups to do their ideological bidding, seemingly limitless budgets for police and militaries among them) and a historical willingness to fund extreme Right movements when feeling threatened.

The breakthroughs of the extreme Right in France and Greece over the weekend are sober reminders that a descent into barbarism and dictatorship under conditions of scarcity is also a possible future if we do not find a way out of the ongoing economic malaise.