World Federation of Trade Unions
The elderly, whose date of remembrance for the United Nations and of our struggle, is the 1st of October, that last year we spent more or less at the height of the coronavirus pandemic and the current one we face at the height of vaccination, although only for some countries and some sectors of the population. The pandemic, like any crisis, only uncovered the pot, to highlight the economic and social scourges, which are inherent (structural and systemic) to the capitalist system, such as the great inequality, between a small group of the world bourgeoisie, of those who are representatives of the imperialist phase, and the vast majority of the world population, limited and lacking all basic services, which must survive in a high percentage of subhuman conditions. The pandemic has meant the worsening of working conditions, unjustified layoffs, wage cuts, the bankruptcy of small businesses, but none of this is new, only now the pandemic serves as an argument, the pandemic has become the front man of the capitalist system, because all the ills of the system are being put in the name of the pandemic. The conditions through which we, the elderly, have had to travel, existed since before the pandemic, the abuses in homes, residences, and nursing homes, the lack of free medical care and medicines, the misery pensions for retirees, the absence of pensions for the majority of the elderly people in the world, which go hand in hand with the illicit and corrupt enrichment of private retirement fund organizations; in the assault of the world’s private banks on the resources of those who gave their lives to enrich them, before when we were active workers they exploited us, now when we are retirees they steal from us. We older people are a responsibility of the State, beyond the fact that in the stage of our previous life we have worked more years or less years, with more or less remuneration, because to give us work and a decent remuneration, is also the responsibility of that State. Then every elderly person should have guaranteed conditions for a dignified life, like any human being. It has become clear, as without a pandemic, that some people and countries are more important than others, because, for example, the pharmaceutical transnationals hand in hand with the rich countries have crowded a few countries with vaccines until they have surpluses, while the poor countries have a dropper, or it does not reach them. It is simply imperialist behaviour at this stage of capitalist development. But it has also become clear that there is an ideological pandemic, which created in the laboratories of the bourgeoisie and imperialism, is lashing out at our peoples, with a variety of social democratic theories of class conciliation, which is aimed especially at workers, in order to make them believe that their situation of misery is negotiable, and that it can be fixed without fundamentally altering the capitalist system as such. They are even capable of questioning neoliberalism, to proposing supposed and non-existent variants of socialism, but without destroying the capitalist system. They are only proposing new economic strains of the same capitalist virus. Consequently, it is the task of the elderly, of those who were conscious workers, and of those who have once retired have decided to fight, to take up the theoretical tools of the class struggle, to train the new generations, in the understanding of what the current system based on the exploitation of the labor force by capital, to arrive at the need to move towards a new type of society, of a…
Read full article on World Federation of Trade Unions:
6th WORLD DAY OF STRUGGLE FOR PENSIONERS – DAY OF THE ELDERLY – OCTOBER 1, 2,021