What can the Basque-Spanish journalist say about the greatest wave of strikes and mobilizations that France has seen since May 1968? Knowing that they will be remembered in the 2020 news with the titles “Ten years ago...”, it is difficult for him to understand why they have mobilized so much in the Hexagon than in England or Spain, where they have to suffer even more bitter setbacks.

In the Southern Basque Country and in Spain in general, the main donors, whether left-wing or mostly right-wing, follow neoliberal orthodoxy in their analyses.

An Antton Pérez Calleja mocked the mobilizations of the French workers in the following way: “I’m having a lot of fun with what’s going on in France because of the retirements. The present is not a struggle between the Chinese and the wicked, in which the people oppose absolute evil, against absorbing capitalism. It's not the same in this. The system administrator, the State, is warning in horror that the accounts do not come out. It requires assets to work more, to charge less to liabilities. We need to balance the equation.”

Leftist readings have been much more abundant in France. In case of choosing one among the opinion makers who have justified or explained the rebellion in the streets, Frédéric Lordon, who animates La pompe à phynance (Financial Punp) in the blogs section of Le Monde Diplomatique, has published an article entitled “The melting point of Retret”. Long, complicated, but with a strong argument that clarifies what many workers have long suspected: that the last and perhaps most important of the deceptions of many years is what the authorities have organized with the retirements.

As part of an overwhelming policy of deregulation, says Lordon, the government speaks to two very different communities. On the one hand there is the community of citizens that make up the nation, and on the other hand there is the community that makes up the finances of the world. And as its arbitrator, the State “gives these second forces reason against the first.” This is the new

situation that has led to the globalization of finance: “We thought that the sovereign people was the only community reference of the state (...) but we have seen that the authorities do not mandate for the citizens who have given them legitimacy, but for others.” In other words, in order for the world’s “markets” not to deprive the State’s debt of the AAA category (Lordon summarizes “la retraite contre la triple A”), it is said that citizens’ pensions must be changed immediately.

The French parliament has publicly approved a reform, but under the apparent change a much deeper move is taking place. That is, what in French is called retraite par capitalisation and in Spanish individual capitalization of pensions. It is a system that has spread in all of the last decades, to a lesser or greater extent, if the jubilee that must be collected from public money is to be completed.

Pension systems that many people on the left still consider to be an advance among us, in Lordon’s opinion, leave workers imprisoned in the arms of those who manage their savings. In the past, the public pension system has been allowed to deteriorate after having previously allowed railways, postal services, health or care services, etc. to deteriorate and be privatized.

Our soss of old age

Since the objective of social services was the partial distribution of a country’s wealth, and consequently its well-being, privatization has over the years derailed this achievement, deepening the class divide.

The “reformers” have acted with the psychology of the people in the task of demolishing the welfare state. I mean, with individualism. “Everyone takes care of their own, each one immersed in his own calculations, who has no choice but to surrender to the system, each one accepts what he puts at his disposal.” This is what has happened to anyone with private pension plans, for Lordon: as a miserable retirement has been announced to him, he has often swallowed his principles and introduced some coins into any pension plan.

On the other hand, the nefarious results of the private system that is now being established here in the United States are being seen. Lordon cites the results of the study conducted by Robert Novy-Marx and Joshua Rauh for the National Bureau of Economic Research. They seem to show that most U.S. pension funds, including the public, have lost money over the years.

As pension funds have made risky bets trying to profit from where or where, they have suffered the bursts of all the bubbles, from the one on the Internet to the one that was torn apart by the collapse of the subprimes. But caught in the whirlwind of speculation in the world of finance, lobbies paid for by these funds have put pressure on Washington, and finally President Obama himself has overturned the law decided in 2006 under George Bush to guarantee pension capacity.
As a result, says Lordon, “it is predicted that many U.S. workers will have no choice but to continue working in Methuselah until the age of (if possible, of course).” How much of

the rumors that have spread over the years have not contributed to the goal of generalizing private pensions? At the head of everything, mutuals, etc. that pay for propaganda – those that are part of the financial system – will always charge their commissions, whether they win or lose pension funds.

Trapped in savings plans like this, the worker has a hard time showing his teeth to the financial system. On the other hand, in many of the restructuring operations that have proliferated around the world, this type of funds are making investments... and leaving thousands of workers on the streets. The funds supposedly owned by the workers throwing the other workers into the mixeria in the neighboring village.

Another thermometer to predict the reactions of workers imprisoned by the new system has recently been the aftermath of the pollution caused by the oil company BP in the Gulf of Mexico. Due to the high cost of cleaning up and compensation, BP’s shares fell sharply on the London Stock Exchange, where Footsie is one of the pillars of the index. Millions of British pensioners and retirees have been walking through the months as badly as they were angry at how they were losing their savings.

At the forefront of everything, with this plan, one of the identity documents of France and in part of a rich Europe has been put into question: the solidarity between generations with the retrets and the one that allowed part of the profits generated to be redistributed in old age. The bankers have drastically tightened the living conditions of the workers. The same goes for the old ones.