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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. |
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Jump To Comment: 1 2Assume 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.
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.