For automatic price compensation and for a higher minimum wage!
Mark Rutte’s thirteen years as prime minister have brought nothing but misery. Impoverishment, social regression, care and education under huge pressure, environmental destruction, slack economy… Everyone can list the dossiers where the smoke is still coming out: consequences of pumping up gas in Groningen, nitrogen, the allowances affair, the housing shortage, Corona and we could go on and on. Rutte said sorry for all sorts of things. But it always sounded as if it was not about his own mistakes, but those of others. Rutte always moved along with the fires he often started himself, but he never put them out. Now ex-prime minister Rutte had one strong side. He always managed to stay politically upright, faithfully supported by his rightwing liberal party “People’s Party for Freedon and Democracy” (VVD). With his resignation, that sole and last virtue also perished.
What caused the fall of this emperor of this tottering Rome? Apart from all those things that went hopelessly wrong under his rule, there is that tendency, firmly associated with Mark Rutte, to suck his political partners dry. After the first Rutte cabinet, the cabinet that was tacitly tolerated by the far right party of Geert Wilders, the far right was left, how else to put it, bewildered.
Enthusiastically, the participating parties started Rutte II. The motto was “Building bridges”. To society or something like that. The cabinet stayed afloat throughout its term, but at the expense of the Labour Party (PvdA), which remained exhausted in the ropes after the cabinet and the elections.
Remember the objectives of Rutte III? One was to restore public confidence. This cabinet fell over the allowances affair In which thousands of parents were wrongly accused of making fraudulent benefit claims and had to pay back allowances, while this turned out to be not correct and discriminatory against persons with an immigrant background. VVD-minister Eric Wiebes Wiebes fell over, but Rutte bounced back.
Rutte IV became, totally unexpectedly, the last round. The ‘leftwing’ liberal party D66’s election gains in 2017 deflated, the CDA all but disappeared from the political map because of the nitrogen affair. This cabinet got nothing done except saying “sorry”. Rutte IV suffered a kind of “sudden death”. But a politically unexpected sudden death also struck Prime Minister and undisputed VVD leader Rutte. Political death, too, sometimes makes unexpected victims….
Perhaps later, we will be granted an insight into what made Mark Rutte change his mind from Friday evening 7 July, when he was visibly still in the mood to fight the elections, to Monday morning 10 July when he announced he quits politics altogether. Was it pressure from the VVD, citing the fact that other parties and the polls no longer wanted him? Was it the prospect of a bigger job in the world like Secretary General of the NATO resuscitated by Putin? For now, it remains speculation.
The fact is that political Holland was left in confusion. The coalition parties are damaged, but the VVD also has to deal with the loss of its above-board list leader. The prime minister’s bonus was lost in one weekend.
It took quite some effort to find a new VVD list leader. There were more dropouts than new candidates. In the end, Dilan Yesilgöz made it and she also seems to have the support of the party leadership. There are warm and appreciative words. She wants to make the Netherlands stronger and more resilient. Very nice, warm hearts all, everyone happy, but what is the political content of her candidacy? Nothing at all is known about that.
Things are not much better with the other parties. D66 and the Christian-democratic CDA have to look for a new list leader, the social democratic PvdA and the Green Left also have to figure it out, the right is big and is already looking forward to opportunities for right-wing policies, but it would be extremely difficult to try to create unity between VVD, BBB (Farmer–Citizen Movement, leading in the polls), PVV (Party for Freedom, led by Geert Wilders), FvD (Forum for democracy, far right party led by Thierry Baudet), Ja21 (a split from FvD), etc. We should not underestimate the danger of the right and the far right, but the divisions are huge. Caroline van der Plas already announced that the leftwing SP of Marijnissen would be allowed to join a BBB-led cabinet…
Gauging the mood at the moment, TV current affairs column “Eenvandaag” announced that the most popular combination would be that of BBB with list leader Omtzigt. Only there is a problem. Former CDA and now independent MP Omtzigt is not even a member of the BBB. And that’s not the only thing. Will the BBB deliver a complete new ministerial team? And who would be the other political partners then? Competitor VVD? Can you govern the Netherlands based on polls? Omtzigt has made it clear that he will not be a list leader with the BBB and that he is considering a new political party. Of course it is possible to establish one, but what does this new political party stand for, other than ‘better governance’?
The confusion is enormous. But we shouldn’t leave it at that. Let’s take a deeper look at why and define the way forward. The fact is that the ruling class, the ruling elite, is deeply divided about the future.
Of course, there are always antagonisms between sections of the ruling class. These can run high. There are bourgeois who make their money the old way and there are entrepreneurs who seek new methods. Some entrepreneurs make their money abroad, others at home. There are entrepreneurs who, under pressure from the labour movement and because they make big profits, pay their workers better and there are entrepreneurs who exploit their workers much more. The interests of big companies like Shell and Unilever are different from those of the baker and the café around the corner.
To weigh all these interests, to make sure everyone gets what they want, to make sure capitalism does not get out of balance and can survive, there is the central organising committee of the bourgeoisie: the government. It heads the bourgeois government, which can rule society by having a monopoly on violence (army and police) and by making and imposing rules on society (the government, the state apparatus, the bureaucracy).
In this way, the businessmen ensure that they continue to rule society. Of course, the state’s overriding task is to keep the workers under it, even if it sometimes has to tolerate the emergence of workers’ parties in politics. At the same time, the state also has no choice but to reluctantly call to order some entrepreneurs who deviate too far from the rules and thereby undermine the system as a whole (the drug mafia, of course, but also entrepreneurs who don’t take safety at work very seriously. Or entire industries that take advantage of the desperation of undocumented workers…).
The need to keep strong workers’ parties within the ropes of capitalism is not present at the moment. In the late 19th century, strong workers’ parties emerged in countries like England, Germany and France, in the Netherlands a bit later. The state normally ensured that workers’ mass parties, as the SDAP and later the PvdA was in the Netherlands, stayed within the confines of capitalism and were mainly active in the bourgeois parliament, not outside it. After the fall of the Soviet Union, mass workers’ parties held a complete sell-out to capitalism and left their working-class constituency to its fate.
So capitalism has less problems with the organised power of the workers at the moment. There is still a mass organisation of the workers, the trade union movement, but the leadership works within the lines of capitalism, very rarely outside them.
At the moment, the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, mainly faces the opposition between entrepreneurs who recognise that capitalism is heading towards catastrophe if more sustainable production is not achieved (D66, GL and the Labour Party) and the entrepreneurs who continue to produce short-term profits with a blindfold on and cling to conservative values (VVD and CDA). There are also contradictions between bourgeois parties that, under pressure from public opinion, are more friendly towards migrants, women and transgender people and bourgeois parties that use sexism, racism and lgbtq-phobia.
Smaller entrepreneurs who do not or cannot care about the new era can also be found with Ja21 and FvD, farmers who see little choice but to continue livestock farming, arable farming and nitrogen emissions now have their own party with BBB. Farmers have been taken for a ride by big agribusinesses with the creation of BBB.
Tensions between these groups of entrepreneurs are now so high that they cannot easily come to terms with each other. On top of that, some groups of businesses are in great need of hefty portions of migrants as cheap labour (agriculture, hospitality industry) but this is of course sensitive to others. There are also growing contradictions between, for instance, nitrogen-producing enterprises such as construction, road building and farmers.
And finally, capitalism faces some difficult technological questions. Which technologies are best for power generation and transport under current ownership? Electricity, hydrogen, what about the power grid that is already succumbing to solar panels, how will we do with heating our homes?
The winning political ideology that won out over the confusion of the 1970s in the 1980s was neoliberalism: the market solved everything. Those ideas wore out after about 40 years: the transition to a different economy requires government intervention and direction. Environment, energy transition, housing, more wars: large-scale government intervention is needed everywhere. One of the reasons for the fall of Mark Rutte is that he could not get used to it. And he was not the only one struggling with it.
The big problem, of course, is that capitalism, as in the 1970s, just doesn’t have a set of ideas to pull off the shelf. Capitalism will never collapse spontaneously, but it does lack a new political vision for the future. This is another reason why we should expect a prolonged period of confusion and tug-of-war.
What to do? Pointless to wait for the upcoming elections. This will still take about four months as the elections will only be held in November. Nothing can be said about the outcome yet: four months is a long time in politics. Nor about the formation of a new cabinet. Of course there will be the new and some old egos, but what will be the political message of the new coalition? There is no point in sweeping together leftist parties of which there are a few smaller ones. That won’t work for this election. And sweeping together political weaknesses (and that concerns both programme and size of organisation) will not achieve anything either.
What can the Dutch labour movement, what can socialists in the Netherlands do in this situation? Defend its interests through solid struggles for automatic price compensation and higher wages as best it can. Demand the fight against growing poverty (one million adults, 250,000 children). And make as much progress as possible in other areas, such as working conditions and work contracts, building on the actions taken recently. The offer of a 10% pay rise at supermarket chain Albert Heijn indicates that there may be more to come. And push harder for a higher minimum wage. That will work its way into benefits. With the current inflation, 15 euros an hour minimum wage is the bare minimum. Most importantly, the struggle for that minimum wage needs to intensify.
The government may be outgoing, but parliament is not. The parliament in its current composition is not going to spontaneously represent the interests of working people and the working poor. That will require strong action pressure. This is the time for the trade union movement to take to the streets with their demands! The trade union federation FNV’s president Elzinga rightly said that we cannot let people fall through the ice in the coming year. But that will require broad action.
It is also the best preparation for the elections and the period after that. What is certain is that the number of social problems in society will not get any less. What the new parliament will look like remains uncertain, and whatever new coalition emerges will not suddenly solve all these problems. New problems will be added.
It is necessary to work on building a new democratic workers’ party to strengthen the struggle and lift it into the political arena, ending the monopoly of bourgeois parties there. Dutch politics can no longer do without a party that fights the interests of the working class as hard as the capitalist parties do for their patrons.
After Rutte, the old politics is not yet dead. And the new one is not yet born. In the short term, it is about defending our interests as hard as possible. The lack of manpower and confusion among the opposition increases our chances, if we take a clear course. Socialism is the only answer to the confusion that now characterises capitalism. Young people are already radicalising against capitalism. Experiences of Stalinism and social democracy often still create confusion. But during struggles, that confusion can give way to a socialist consciousness.