State Budgets Can Never Serve The Class Interests of Workers

national | anti-capitalism | opinion/analysis

Thursday October 29, 2015 23:41

by Paddy Hackett

paraichackett at gmail dot com

The annual budget statement is a bourgeois matter. It is the obligation of communists to highlight the latter rather than getting exclusively immersed in its details. No matter how popularly appealing a budget appears it can never serve the class interests of workers. Sections of the Left relate to state budgets as if they are pliable and can consequently meet workers' needs.

The annual budget statement is a bourgeois matter. It is the obligation of communists to highlight the latter rather than getting exclusively immersed in its details. No matter how popularly appealing a budget appears it can never serve the class interests of workers. Sections of the Left relate to state budgets as if they are pliable and can consequently meet workers' needs. In this way they seek to delude the working class and thereby promote capitalism. The state budget cannot, by its very nature, transcend the limits of capitalism. No government can transcend these limits through the medium of the budget.

It is not a subjective matter. It is an objective matter determined by the laws of capital. Conservative bourgeois governments do not introduce annual budgets that fail to meet the needs of the working class because of their immoral nature. Capitalist constraints prevent this just as the law of gravity and the second law of thermodynamics impose objective constraints on the physical world. The nature of budgets is not a moral question.

Consequently arguments made by the radical Left as to how adverse the substance of a particular budget is amounts to no more than mere political rhetoric designed to obstruct the development of class consciousness. Such delusional rhetoric is designed to suggest that capitalism is a progressively rational system capable of serving working class needs. It falsely suggests too that bourgeois governments fail to meet the needs of workers for morally subjective reasons. This assumes that such governments consist of "bad people".

In the light of the foregoing it is clear that it is not the obligation of communists to evaluate budget details in themselves. To do so is to base a budget on the false assumption that it can serve the interests of workers. At most the content of a budget must be discussed as evidence of the inherent inability of budgets to meet the needs of workers.

Having said this I am not claiming that all budgets, although bourgeois, are of equal value. Some budgets may more adequately serve the class interests of capitalists than others. Analogously some bourgeois governments are better than others at representing the interests of capitalism. Bourgeois governments can vary in competence.

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Comments (2 of 2)

Do you know what a budget is?

by Mike Novack

Sun Nov 01, 2015 14:29

Assume for just a moment that you get to carry out your revolution and establish the workers' state of your dreams. Do you imagine that this state would be operating without a budget? Zero planning about what resources were to be allocated to which public activity?

Look guys, even if you are not for a democratic form of communism, even if you are for rule by some sort of revolutionary council, you are STILL going to have a budget. If you try to tell people nonsense like "in our workers' paradise resources will appear by magic, there won't be any need to make hard decisions about how to divide up what is available" NOBODY is going to take you for anything but fools.

capitalism lives in fear of "the good example"

by fred

Mon Nov 02, 2015 23:25

Mike, your post reeks of "capitalism is the only way" smug condescension.

often the problem with communist or socialist states is that the menacing external threats from capitalist states
mean they end up backed into a corner and having to spend far too much of their budget
responding to external menacing military threat and the threat of meddling and internal subversion
by those same well funded forces, and all the while having to battle a tide of well funded and orchestrated propaganda.
Not an ideal way to have to spend large chunks of your budget when what you really need to be doing is feeding, housing and educating people, providing healthcare and decent public utilities and services.

That is what often ends up breaking the back of any such states. It's a systematic and relentless assault.

The menacing external threat from capitalism totally distorts wanna be communist and socialist states
and systematic external sanctions / embargoes cripple them economically.

Capitalism lives in dread of the "good example" where a state does what it was meant to do
and genuinely attempts to look after the interests of it's people.

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State Budgets Can Never Serve The Class Interests of Workers

Comments (2 of 2)