GAZA’S unemployment rate is among the world’s highest, at 45.2%, the UN has found. The territory continues to be blockaded by Israel, while the Egyptian military will not open the Rafah crossing to men aged between 18 and 40, who are being imprisoned in Gaza.
Real wages in Gaza have fallen by more than a third, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has reported.
What business there was has been shattered by the Zionist ban on almost all exports, with the blockade now into its fifth year.
The unemployment rate, for the second half of 2010, was at 45.7%.
Gaza is a paupers’ prison for the Palestinian people.
However, just across the Med, in Greece, the conditions of life are being being equalised and being driven down to meet those in Gaza by the world capitalist crisis.
In Greece the IMF-ECB central bankers’ austerity programme has driven up youth unemployment to 45%, a 16% rise in a year, while unemployment as a whole has reached 17%.
Wages and pensions, and living standards as a whole are being driven downwards, proving the correctness of Marx’s analysis that the tendency of capitalism as its develops is to reduce wages, and increase the pauperisation of the working class.
The Standard & Poor agency has predicted that Greece will default on its multibillion debt to the EU, the IMF and the major banks, and will be forced out of the EU amidst a complete collapse of its economy. Greece is on the way to a Gaza-style level of existence.
In fact, Spain, Portugal and Ireland are not too far behind, with the UK waiting to be dragged under by the contagion.
Today, the Greek trade unions are taking general strike action whilst the youth of the country are occupying the main squares of the cities and calling for the government and rule from the European Central Bank to be overthrown.
The Popular Assembly in Athens’ Parliament Square has issued a call that: ‘The first stop is the general strike of June 15. We do not stop our action until the government withdraws the Accord.’
The entire Greek economy is being driven down to Gaza levels with the southern Aegean islands reaching 30.4% unemployment in March, while in the Attica region that includes Athens, and is home to about half the country’s population, unemployment was 15.8% in March.
Meanwhile, Spanish unemployment is the highest in Europe. Joblessness rose to 21.3% in the first quarter the National Statistics Institute said. Spain has 4.9 million jobless, while Ireland has 443,000 unemployed and a rate of 15%.
Marx states in his Communist Manifesto: ‘Hitherto, every form of society has been based as we have already seen on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.
‘But in order to oppress a class certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence . . .
‘The modern labourer on the contrary instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class.
‘He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth.
‘And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society…
‘It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within its slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him instead of being fed by him.
‘Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.’
Forward with the European and World Socialist Revolution!
