Argentina’s Far-Right President is Once Again Advancing Legislative Attacks on WorkersThis version of the Omnibus Law is the second edition of the law designed to subject Argentina to economic “shock therapy.” The new edition contains fewer attacks than the original law which failed to pass the House, but it is still a reactionary attack on the working class. The law was approved in the House of Deputies with 142 voting in favor, 106 against and 5 abstaining. It remains to be seen what will happen in the Senate. The first attempt to pass the Omnibus Law was defeated in February, due in large part to mobilizations by neighborhood assemblies, combative unions, and organizations of the Left and social movements. The Left in Congress, revolutionary socialists like Myriam Bregman represented by the FIT-U, used its position to expose the anti-worker character of the Omnibus Law and to support the mobilizations against it. Months later the law is once again advancing due in large part to the refusal of the CGT — the country’s largest federation of trade unions — to mobilize workers against the attacks. The CGT — in addition to not holding assemblies or promoting the organization of the working class and a plan of struggle until the law falls — negotiates behind closed doors with the government, preventing the workers’ strength from being expressed against the adjustment and the law in the streets and workplaces. The CGT is more afraid of the mobilized workers than of the Milei government itself. Meanwhile, the centrist and center-left Personists who lead the union bureaucracies and social movements have sought to negotiate the terms of the attacks rather than wage a fight against it.
https://www.leftvoice.org/argentinas-far-right-president-is-once-again-advancing-legislative-attacks-on-workers/Global Inequality Has Skyrocketed Since the PandemicThe billionaire once Warren Buffet famously said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” New analysis released by Oxfam this week for International Workers’ Day shows concretely that since 2020, the rich class, as Buffet calls them, are winning big. Global dividend payments to rich shareholders grew on average fourteen times faster than worker pay in thirty-one countries, which together account for 81 percent of global GDP, between 2020 and 2023. Global corporate dividends are on course to beat an all-time high of $1.66 trillion reached last year. Payouts to rich shareholders jumped by 45 percent in real terms between 2020 and 2023, while workers’ wages rose by just 3 percent. The richest 1 percent, simply by owning stock, pocketed on average $9,000 in dividends in 2023 — it would take the average worker eight months to earn this much in wages. This matters because as long as returns to capital increase faster than returns to work, the inequality crisis will grow. At the heart of our economy is a constant struggle between the owners — or capital, as it is known in economics — and the workers, or labor. The measure of progress, or the lack of it, is the extent to which the benefits of all those billions of hours of labor worked each day are accruing to workers and their families, driving greater equality, or the extent to which benefits are accruing to the owners of capital, driving greater inequality.
https://jacobin.com/2024/05/dividends-wages-inequality-covid-taxesFrederick Engels: Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State V. The Rise of the Athenian StateHow the state developed, how the organs of the gentile constitution were partly transformed in this development, partly pushed aside by the introduction of new organs, and at last superseded entirely by real state authorities, while the true “people in arms,” organized for its self-defense in its gentes, phratries, and tribes, was replaced by an armed “public force” in the service of these state authorities and therefore at their command for use also against the people – this process, at least in its first stages, can be followed nowhere better than in ancient Athens. The changes in form have been outlined by Morgan, but their economic content and cause must largely be added by myself. In the Heroic age the four tribes of the Athenians were still settled in Attica in separate territories; even the twelve phratries composing them seem still to have had distinct seats in the twelve towns of Cecrops. The constitution was that of the heroic age: assembly of the people, council of the people, basileus. As far as written history takes us back, we find the land already divided up and privately owned, which is in accordance with the relatively advanced commodity production and the corresponding trade in commodities developed towards the end of the upper stage of barbarism. In addition to grain, wine and oil were produced; to a continually increasing extent, the sea trade in the Aegean was captured from the Phoenicians, and most of it passed into Athenian hands. Through the sale and purchase of land, and the progressive division of labor between agriculture and handicraft, trade, and shipping, it was inevitable that the members of the different gentes, phratries, and tribes very soon became intermixed, and that into the districts of the phratry and tribe moved inhabitants, who, although fellow countrymen, did not belong to these bodies and were therefore strangers in their own place of domicile. For when times were quiet, each tribe and each phratry administered its own affairs without sending to Athens to consult the council of the people or the basileus. But anyone not a member of the phratry or tribe was, of course, excluded from taking any part in this administration, even though living in the district.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch05.htm