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.