International Socialists

In the 1990s the gap between the rich and the poor grew wider than ever before. But that wasn't the only gap that was growing: right-wingers like Reagan, Thatcher and our own Roger Douglas picked up economic theories that were discredited 50 years ago and force-fed them to us through the media. What was worse, even supposedly left-wing social democrats rushed to embrace the market.

 

But almost as fast as the gap between the rich and the poor, a gap between rhetoric and reality was growing. It became obvious that the "free market" failed miserably in its promise of "short term pain for long term gain." A tiny super-rich minority increased their wealth exponentially while everyone else saw real incomes and living standards fall.

 

For better-off workers this meant working longer hours without benefits like overtime for the same wages. For the unemployed and working poor, things went from bad to worse, with benefit cuts and attacks on healthcare and education.

 

It was worst in the world's economic powerhouse, the United States, which enjoyed the longest period of economic growth in decades. But on the one hand CEOs in the 90s got increasingly obscene amounts in "compensation" (wages to you and me), and on the other there was a huge increase in "McJobs" - non-unionised, low paid, casual work, like call centres and other service positions - and increasing poverty.

 

In other words, what people were told - about the "miracle economy" - didn't square with their experiences of falling real wages and increasing inequality.

 

For workers in the Third World the 1990s meant all this and more - as the IMF and World Bank used "emergency loans" and "rescue packages" to auction off state-owned industry to their mates on Wall Street and push down wages to starvation level. The World Bank and IMF are still at it, in Argentina, Turkey and South Africa; but they are facing more challenges, from massive strike action as well as armed resistance, like the Zapatista organisation.

 

The East Asian economic crisis of 1997 destroyed the myth that authoritarian governments could drag Third World economies up to the level of Japan or the US. It also exposed the destructive policies of the IMF, which forced the former "Asian Tigers" back into dependency by insisting on hardline free market solutions.

 

A revival of struggle in the West also took place, with student activism in particular re-emerging and the December 1995 general strike in France putting working class struggle back on the agenda. In Aotearoa in the early to mid 1990s ordinary people, workers, students, Mäori, and others felt tremendous anger and bitterness about all these things. But unlike before, when anger had led to action, now there was no organisational means to express that anger through class struggle in the form of strikes and occupations, because of two decades of ideological and economic attacks on trade unions and progressive movements.

 

By the end of the decade, there was a huge and growing gulf between the myth of economic wellbeing peddled by the ruling class, their media and their academics, and the reality of life as increasingly experienced by millions of ordinary people. The rebirth of the workers' movement, the anti-globalisation and Third World debt movements, merged with this growing anger and came crashing together in Seattle on 30 November 1999.