Ten friends out for a meal.
If you added up all the wealth of the table, one has 90%. The other 9
have the remaining 10% between them. The
rich one is dining out on steak, lobster, and expensive wine – while the other
nine are ordering the side salad and water as it is all their budget can
afford. The bill comes and the wealthy person turns to the nine and says ‘we
must split the bill equally’. The nine look at each other and grimace. Someone
pipes up ‘But…we didn’t have any steak or wine’ The rich person quips back
‘That may well be true…but I didn’t have any of your salad either!’
Osborne and Cameron claim that the whole population will
have to make “sacrifices”. What these defenders of capitalism utterly and
deliberately fail to tell us is that the overwhelming burden of the sacrifice
will have to be made by the working class. Perhaps, the average
multi-millionaire or billionaire will only be able to “afford” two yachts in
the Caribbean, instead of the more normal, three. Perhaps, some of the wealthy
will have to delay refurbishment of their opulent gated homes, for a few months
etc. The reality is that capitalism can never be made to work in any other way.
It always works in the interests of the rich minority and against the interests
of the majority.
Osborne said his Budget would set "out a plan for
Britain for the next five years to keep moving us from a low wage, high tax, high
welfare economy; to the higher wage, lower tax, lower welfare country we intend
to create". Of the present Budget itself it is hardly necessary to speak. It’s
the same old story. Profits are being squeezed and the government is trying to
protect them by squeezing costs. This, at a time when workers are themselves
being squeezed by rising food prices and gas and electricity bills. As members
of the working class living on state benefits are well aware, it is quite
impossible to put a little by for a rainy day, for every day is forecast as a
downpour, and trying to keep your head out of the deluge is a constant problem.
And for those who are wholly dependent on benefits as their only source of
income, their whole lifestyle is dictated by their resourcefulness in eking out
their pittance from one day to the next. Yet this Tory government is planning
to make things worse. As socialists who know how capitalism works – how it
can’t be controlled by governments and how it can never been made to work in
the interest of wage workers. It is not “Britain’s hard working families” that
are being put first, but profits. As it has to be, and always will be, under
capitalism.
When chancellors of exchequers oppose higher wages and decent
welfare benefits they do so because their immediate and predominant
responsibility, by virtue of being the Government, is to keep the capitalist
system functioning in the only way that capitalism can function, that is by
enabling the capitalists to make profits. Socialism is not a scheme for
redistributing wealth and income inside capitalism, but a system of society to
replace the capitalist system. Like a has-been stage magician, the government
must keep on performing its budgetary tricks to give the appearance of doing
something—anything. Taxes go up, go down, and are moved from place to place in
a blinding game of find the lady. Underneath it all is a watered-down version
of an old illusion—the illusion that the state can control the economy, can
direct its course, by playing around with its tax structure. That the act
remains the same, time after time, will not stop the show, since the has-beens
refuse to stop. The Budget confirm that the role of governments is to run the
state machine in the general interest of the capitalist class, the tiny
minority of super-rich who own and control the means of wealth production. That
governments really are the ‘executive committee of the ruling class’ that Marx
said they were.
In the meantime we have to live with it. That doesn’t mean
we have to take what the government has planned lying down. The precise cut in
our living standards is not something the government can decree. It depends on
how determinedly we resist. In other words, on the class struggle. But, since
the cards under capitalism are always stacked against us, this will only be a
defensive, rearguard action to try to stop things getting worse. Yet another
reason why we should be organising, not just to limit the damage, but to put an
end to capitalism and usher in a society based on common ownership and
democratic control of productive resources, so that production can be geared to
satisfying people’s needs instead of being subordinate to making profits for
the few.
Austerity should be resisted to the extent that it can be –
that’s what trade unions and such organisations are for – but without illusions.
The most that can be achieved is a few mitigations here and there or a
different distribution of the cuts, but they cannot be avoided. This is not
defeatism. It is realism. The only alternative to the present austerity is
neither a change of economic policy nor a change of government. It is a change
of system, from minority ownership and production for profit to common
ownership and production directly to meet people’s needs, in a word, to
socialism. What a future capitalism has to offer workers: struggles to try to
slow down things getting worse in a world that it technically capable of
providing plenty for all. Socialism is, quite literally, the only realistic alternative
to the present austerity. That’s what those who call themselves socialists
should be advocating. As long as the employing class own the means of
production the toilers will battle in vain for a large share of the world’s
wealth. The only remedy is for the workers to own and work in common the land,
factories, railways, etc. The path to the socialist cooperative commonwealth is
contained in the policy of the Socialist Party. Join it and work for its
triumph.
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