Vol. 77/No. 25      July 1, 2013

This issue raises important questions on the nature of capitalism and state power, as working people begin to resist and discuss how to effectively confront the deepening assault by the bosses and their governments.

Militant readers may have noticed that the paper has stopped using the term “austerity” in describing these assaults, which obfuscates the real opposing class interests.

This crisis is rooted in a slowdown of production, trade and employment. Among its financial manifestations, capitalist governments have been confronting budget deficits running too high in relation to production. This is a problem for the capitalists, as the situation poses currency devaluation and raising taxes — the latter ultimately acting as a drain on their profits.

The government of Greece, among the most stark cases today, has amassed debts it cannot sustain to wealthy individuals, banks and financial institutions that threaten to lead to government bankruptcy, collapse of the country’s banking system and other immediate repercussions for capitalist stability in Greece and beyond. The rulers of Greece have been slashing government expenses and raising taxes, a course they call austerity. At the same time, they are reacting to the economic crisis with layoffs, wage cuts and union busting.

In the U.S., the bosses’ two parties — the Democrats and Republicans — have come to consensus that under current conditions they should take steps toward decreasing their budget deficit. But they have been wrangling bitterly over how far and fast to go, what to cut, how to adjust their tax codes, and the use of fiscal and monetary schemes to “stimulate” their economy (which at best postpone some financial symptoms of the economic crisis).

This debate takes place under the false rubric of “austerity” vs. “stimulus,” with all sides claiming their plan is the best road toward renewed economic growth — something that is not determined or affected by government policy of any kind.

And both sides appeal to working people for support and seek to convince us their budget is something that we should be concerned about, while both aim to defend and stabilize capitalist exploitation at our expense. In this, the “anti-austerity” camp led by the Democratic Party gets help from the top labor officialdom.

In some ways, tailing the liberal “anti-austerity” faction is most deleterious to the working class. It rests on the dangerous illusion that “the government” can be a force for good in reining in the excesses of finance capitalism, making “the economy” work, and “providing” services workers need — fostering attitudes of dependency on the propertied rulers’ government bureaucracy as opposed to working-class solidarity, self-confidence and combativity.

The logic of the “anti-austerity” campaign is the bigger the government, the better. Contrary to popular misconception, the view of the communist movement has always been the opposite, whether it’s a government representing the state power of the capitalist exploiters or a revolutionary government of workers and farmers. Talking about the 72-day Paris Commune of 1871, the first workers government in history, communist leader Karl Marx wrote, “The Commune made that catchword of bourgeois revolutions, cheap government, a reality, by destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure — the standing army and the state functionarism.”

“Financial austerity measures, like those taken by European nations, destroy jobs, increase inequality and likely feed the public’s mistrust of government,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, said in Paris May 28 at an event sponsored by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

According to the AFL-CIO Now report on the OECD forum, Trumka outlined a series of “policy alternatives to ‘kick-start job-rich inclusive and sustainable growth.’” Among them were “fiscal and monetary policy focused on job creation and growth,” and others proposals put forward by Obama in his Inaugural Address and State of the Union speech earlier this year — none of which have or could create a single job.

Textbook definitions of government austerity lack historical or class content — the governments “tightening their belts” are apparatuses of bourgeois state power, not working-class families trying to make ends meet.

Since their inception in Europe and North America, capitalist governments have financed budget deficits by selling bonds and other debt to ruling families, big banks and other capitalist creditors.

Interest from these loans serves as a huge source of enrichment for a layer of the big capitalist families. In fiscal year 2014 alone $223 billion was allocated by Washington for interest payments. Similar payments are carried out at state and municipal levels.

The purpose of the bourgeois state is to maintain and defend capitalist social relations — above all private property in the means of production — against capitalist competitors in other countries and against those at home whose labor is exploited by these social relations, us. That’s why such a substantial portion of state budgets go to the cops, courts, jails, military and other instruments of repression. Working people have no interest in telling the capitalist rulers how they should run their governments.

Many “social services” workers use represent concessions wrested from the capitalists by working people in struggle, however watered down and contradictory they may be in practice. Every cent is “paid for” by wealth created through our labor. We are supposed to feel “grateful” and dependent on the diminishing crumbs dispensed by a bloated government bureaucracy.

What is most needed is a class-struggle course of working-class political action, independent of the bosses’ parties. It’s through common experiences in struggle that working people can strengthen our unity, organization, self-confidence, class consciousness and political clarity — and come to recognize the bosses’ government as an instrument of class repression that cannot be reformed any more than capitalism can be made to serve the economic and cultural needs of toiling humanity.

Along this road, working people can develop into men and women capable of leading a revolutionary movement of millions to wrest political power out of the hands of the propertied class, establish a government of workers and farmers and use it to transform social relations on the basis of working-class solidarity, not profit.

What will replace the capitalist government is not a socialist version of a big “benevolent” state, but a cheap government that defends the interests of workers and their allies against the reimposition of capitalist rule in a period of transition toward the withering away of government altogether.  
 
 
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