ABSTRACT
The paths of neoliberalization and (neo)-conservatism are similar in many countries. But each country has its own history, has its own particular context; each country has its own balance of class forces, its own level of organization of the working class and the capitalist class, and different levels of confidence within the working class and within the capitalist class. In countries where resistance to neoliberalism is very strong, as in Greece, then the government has found it actually so far very difficult to engage in large-scale privatization. When the Greek government tries to privatize public sector activity, the ports, the buses, the trains, the museums and so on, these efforts are met with general strikes. In Greece, working-class consciousness and class organization, in a situation of naked – and literally deathly – class war from earlier, are highly developed. In Portugal, to take another example, recently there were one million on strike, one million in demonstrations. That is in a small country of eight million people.
