It was in a crowded room in Athens that parliamentary deputy Sofia Sakorafa, recently excluded from the governing socialist PASOK party for refusing to vote for austerity measures, opened the conference, "Debt and austerity: from the Global South to Europe.” From the outset, she set the tone by moving the debt issue beyond the borders of North-South divisions: "Debt is tied to the class question."The emphasis that has been advocated by this organization, CADTM, is the cancellation of debt to Third World counties. But, it appears to me that people are increasingly coming together at conferences like the one depicted here and are formulating more radical solutions to the debt problem. For example, the author reports that the keynote speaker "set the tone [of the conference] by moving the debt issue beyond the borders of North-South divisions: 'Debt is tied to the class question.'" Unfortunately, the article does not indicate whether the participants developed this theme.
So permit me to expand on it. The statement rather clearly states that it is not merely a North-South problem, but a class problem. If she understands the world she lives in--and I don't doubt that she does--she understands that humanity is divided into two basic classes that exist nearly everywhere in the world: those who produce wealth (workers) and those (mostly capitalists) who both enforce "ownership" rights to appropriate much of this wealth for themselves and control the issuance of money through their indirect ownership of central and international banking institutions. The latter class have succeeded throughout much of the world to appropriate so much of this wealth that the working class has to go into debt to the latter class in order to live decently. This has happened all over the globe: in first world countries as well as third world countries under globalized capitalism.
If this analysis is correct, then the battle being waged is global, but also frequently a one sided war being waged by capitalists against workers many of whom, especially in first world countries, are still unaware (except in places like Wisconsin) of what's going on. Workers who are aware must reach across borders with their brothers and sisters in order to organize effective campaigns to rid themselves of a system that is not only putting themselves into debt slavery, but is destroying the planet for future generations.
