Mobilising the European Socialist Parties in order to find an effective solution to the crisis, both within and outside Europe

Mobilising the European socialist parties in order to find an effective solution to the crisis, both within and outside Europe
Socialism for the Twenty-First Century: a Utopia, a lie or a Solution?, Sunday, October 2, 2011 at 11:22


            The current economic crisis has already been extensively studied and discussed its causes. Factors such indebtedness motivated by the greed of easy money promoting banking credits for everything and anything, the relocation of jobs to countries with rudimentary standards of social protection, the complacency of political power and many other factors contributed to an easy diagnosis to the point where we are and to make us suspect that the worst days lie ahead.
            One would expect a crisis that makes life difficult for workers, erodes the Welfare State, would lead citizens to seek the support of leftist parties, but, paradoxically, is that there is a rise in the whole of Europe right-wing parties and a "sweep" of the general European Socialist Parties, which ultimately bear the burden of blame for the state we have reached.
            Revenues from international law to resolve the political crisis based on more and more austerity, reducing public spending and shrinking the Welfare State to a residual sample of what was until very recently.
            Greece is an example and lab tests that show that the solutions suggested by the ideologues in the payed by  big business groups to solve the crisis only add crisis to crisis, increasing the number of unemployed workers, reduced consumption, a slowing economy, the contracting GDP. The miraculous solution to solve the chronic deficits of the public accounts of the states in distress (in which one has to include the United States ...) is to increase exports ... Therefore, Portugal has to increase exports, Greece has to increaseexports, Ireland needs to increase exports, the United States to increase exports, etc ...
            Does the planet's resources can bear so great a burden of increased exports to GDP increased to balance the public accounts of the countries affected?
            And exporting to whom? For emerging countries that have social costs of production much lower than ours?
            In a European Union increasingly disunited and individualistic places to change course.
            Not only is the Socialist Party of Portugal, which needs to initiate a new cycle, but all European Socialist Parties that must initiate a reflection on how it was possible to reach this state and especially how we can overcome this crisis while maintaining a cohesive society, which respects the rights of workers.
            For new situations new responses are required. It is true that the ultra-liberal solution will only aggravate the difficulties of Europeans, increasing the intra-state and between states disparities, it is also true that the European Socialists can only aspire to be part of the solution if they dare to innovative solutions.
            I do not understand that makes sense to move towards self-enslaved creating unemployment in order to pay less to those who work, which in turn will have to work longer hours and more years they would lack a layer bound to highly qualified youth  with their parents.
            I do not think also that we can continue to fill the commercial areas of low-cost products and ignore the social costs of these products.
            You have to disassemble the whole neo-liberal model sponsored by the Socialists who were attracted to Blair's Third Way, it is necessary to go back to the sixties and find out why the human society planned for the year 2000 did not materialize.
            Just doing a retrospective analysis of what should have been but was not, and only returned to the root of the problem, we can construct a path that allows to build a caring society that respects workers, which respects human dignity, which will be based on ethics and whose aim is the welfare of ordinary citizens and not just the profit of a few.
            We'll probably have to rethink our current standard of welfare based on consumption, one or two steps down, but in return gaining more free time and other quality of life that dispenses the latest gadgets fashion, status symbols, the premium brands, but we ensure a healthy social life.
            If we can not, among the Socialists and Democrats, to find the magic formula that will catch the cycle of self-destruction that we started, we will be co-responsible for a belician implosion of the European Union, equivalent to what happened in 1939.