A year of struggle

As the last issue of Green Left Weekly is being put together, a million French workers and students are on strike and in the streets, setting a powerful example of resistance to the worldwide drive to put corporate profits above everything else. A placard carried by one of these workers read, "Chirac. The next bomb will be us!", linking this struggle to another that mobilised millions around the world — the opposition to Chirac's nuclear tests in the Pacific. A flick through this year's 44 issues shows that it has been a busy year for the constituency this paper is aimed at and whose interests it defends. Every issue reports campaigns taking place in Australia and abroad. The covers capture in excited colours the demands voiced by mobilisations of so-called "ordinary" people: Stop woodchipping!; Rally for the forests!; End military ties with Indonesia!; Independence for East Timor!; Support Mt Isa workers!; Cities for people not profit!; Stop nuclear tests!; Independence for a nuclear-free Pacific! Just when the rich thought the decade was theirs, millions are warning them to think again. Even "in the belly of the beast" — in the USA — more than a million Afro-American men and women took to the streets in the Million Man March. In the first half of the 1990s, the corporate barons who rule the world had reason to feel cocky. Every government in the world, willingly or otherwise, had embarked on a brutal campaign of privatisation, cutbacks to social services, wage and job cuts. This callous plan to reverse decades of social progress, won through struggle, was given a deceptive name: "neo-liberal reform". In fact, these "reforms" were nothing less than the restoration of the untrammelled right of the biggest corporations (some with budgets bigger than that of most countries) to make a profit — no matter the cost. For them, the death of 20 million people a year from preventable diseases or the ecocide through pollution and environmental destruction were not too high a price. To resolve these glaring contradictions we were asked to swallow outrageous propositions. We're told that the Cold War is over, but France, the US and Britain need to improve their nuclear weapons' capability. Scientists warned of global warming through the greenhouse effect but we were told that "the economy" cannot afford the necessary corrective action. But a year of struggle around the world has shown that hundreds of millions now see that the emperor has no clothes. And millions have challenged their fate as powerless "factors of production" for profit and tasted the extraordinary power they have in united struggle. This can only bode well for us "ordinary" people in 1996.