This article by Maeve Connaughton opened the fiftieth issue of Red Banner in December 2012.
As the recession just keeps rolling along, the figures are there to show that we are anything but all in it together. The latest National Income and Expenditure report in September contained tables which, like any honest attempt to tell the truth about the economy, really come into the category of seditious material. From 2008 to 2009 total wages in Ireland fell sharply by 9.3 per cent, another 6.5 per cent in the following year, and then a further 1.4 per cent from 2010 to 2011. If you really wanted to see a glass less than empty in those figures, you could maybe raise a pathetic cheer at the slowing of the rate of decline. But look at this picture, then at that. Total profits also fell from 2008 to 2009, by 7.8 per cent: not as much as wages did, but still down. The very next year they were up again, however, increasing by 4.3 per cent. Nor was this some freak bounce, because 2011 saw an even bigger rise of 6.6 per cent. The upshot of it all is that the total profits of Irish capital are now back above 2008 levels again, whereas the wages of Irish labour are now 16 per cent lower than they were in 2008.
Some people are clearly having a very good war indeed. Certainly good enough to sustain a veritable legion of spokespersons to pop up at every opportunity to tell us that we have to sacrifice yet more in the national interest of keeping them in the style they have become accustomed to. Times are tough, they tell us between puffs of their cigars, and we have to think the unthinkable. Incomes and services we have become used to will have to be seriously looked at, they say, and no one can be immune. Every one of us has to do their bit, they opine when a Churchillian mood takes them.
Watching such characters makes it very easy to empathise with Elvis Presley’s habit of critically reviewing the television with his shotgun. Because the imperative to tighten our belts doesn’t apply to their class. Apparently, if any attempt were made to divert some of those profits into paying for useful services, it would damage the economy and hamper their ability to create employment. Hmm, so that increase in profits over the last three years has led to an increase in employment, then? Well, no: just the opposite, in fact. Capitalists don’t create employment, or anything else for that matter. They appropriate wealth created by those they employ, the employment being very much a necessary evil from their point of view. The less people they employ, the better, and they would soon go out of business if they didn’t keep it to a bare minimum.
When they say that everything has to be on the table, they don’t include the things their class enjoys, of course. The criminally low contribution they make towards state expenditure is especially sacrosanct. The people who tell us the money isn’t there are the same people who tell us that we have to find it from anywhere, even our grandchildren’s communion money, in order to bail out banks that are no more use than a chocolate teapot.
A particularly pernicious aspect of their strategy is to divide workers into groups and invent antagonisms between them. The supposedly soft conditions of workers in the public sector is claimed to have privileged them above private sector workers facing harsh times. This crock holds little water, especially when you remember that they are not advocating cutting pay in the public sector so that they can raise it in the private sector, but the exact opposite: trying to enforce a lower pay level across the economy so that they can depress wages further still.
There is something sickening about the concern these spokespeople evince for frontline services. The time-honoured patronising of nurses, for instance, tries to counterpose their work to the penpushers supposedly clogging up the health system. But a hospital requires administering too. You don’t just need nurses and doctors to take your appendix out, but someone to schedule your appointment in the first place and make sure the hospital is running smoothly. Refusing to replace clerical workers, together with demanding ‘flexibility’, means that more and more administrative work is thrown on to the shoulders of nurses, pushing the frontline into the back office.
The hue and cry over the Croke Park agreement underlines how offensive (in every sense of the word) the Irish capitalist class is. Having already enforced a cut in public sector pay across the board, they agreed to go no further on condition that workers agreed to an open-ended agenda of working harder for longer. The income of public sector workers still gets cut further, purely by defining some of it as ‘allowances’ rather than ‘pay’. In the meantime, anyone newly employed comes in on far worse wages and conditions. This historic advance for the interests of the rich hasn’t satisfied them, though. While unions are apologetically pointing out just how much they have given away, employers have simply pocketed all the concessions and pushed ahead for more, showing an aptitude for class warfare unfortunately absent on our side.
Never wanting to waste a good crisis, the bosses are attacking outright the principle of universal benefits. ‘Why should millionaires get the children’s allowance?’ they ask with an innocence that would almost make themselves eligible for it. It seems funny that the very people who would scream at the prospect of millionaires having to pay another €140 a month in tax are scrambling to take that much away from millionaire parents, and that’s because they’re playing another game entirely. Once a means test is in, the cut-off point can be lowered way below millionaire level. And of course, means tests function to deny benefits to those who should be entitled to them. There is no shortage of people whose earnings or lack of them should qualify them for a medical card, but still don’t have one, because proving your poverty to the HSE inquisitors is an achievement in itself. The very fact of having to show officialdom where every cent comes from and goes to, not to mention what you had for breakfast, is enough to make sure that means-tested benefits are taken up at a lower level than they should be—which is precisely the point of the exercise, of course.
The upshot is that we are trapped within an ever decreasing vicious circle. If we want to maintain special needs assistants, we have to close hospital wards. If we want to keep wards open, we have to cut the pay of clerical assistants. If we don’t want to impoverish already low-paid workers, we have to get rid of special needs assistants. And so on: in this scenario, robbing Peter is the only way to pay Paul. With the notorious ‘low-hanging fruit’ well and truly macheted to the ground by now, cutting into the diminishing remainders can do nothing but harm. However you spin the cylinder, every chamber of the revolver is loaded in this version of Russian roulette.
This is why the current economic parameters can’t be tweaked, pushed out, or even revised: they have to be broken. The vicious circle can’t be squared. Attempting to stay within those lines means accelerated misery for working people, and attempting to defend a decent life for working people means walking all over those lines.
We have to put forward an altogether different way of looking at the problem. ‘The economy’, this boat we are all supposed to be in, is a domain more mythical than anything found in a C S Lewis wardrobe, and a lot less picturesque. It chains us to the idea that maximising profit for a few is the only conceivable way of producing, hoping that if we stuff their pockets enough, a little might fall out in the direction of the likes of us. We should fight instead for the idea that wealth is produced by and for human beings, and that their needs should determine how it is used and distributed. To paraphrase Marx, the political economy of labour has to triumph over the political economy of capital.
Of course, this does mean advocating an entirely different kind of society, rather than a budgetary adjustment or a reform of taxation. This has presented some problems on the left since the recession hit. Socialists haven’t been immune to the demoralisation inflicted by the crisis, or the overwhelming pressure to lower expectations. Trying to halt and reverse the cuts has taken the place of trying to replace capitalism. It’s almost as if revolution was a luxury we could afford to be talking about in the good times, but now we have to cop ourselves on and be realistic. In the space of a few years, many have gone from insisting that another world is possible to pleading that a return to 2007 levels of public expenditure is possible.
The fact that the change in direction we want to see amounts to a revolution is something we should be delighted about rather than apologetic. No other point of view can inoculate us fully from the ever-present centripetal pull of the limits of orthodoxy. It is time socialists shouted from the rooftops that capitalism as a system is to blame for all of this, that it will regularly lead us into similar catastrophes as long as it lasts, and that our present predicament is all the more reason to be scrapping it.
Making this argument is not an academic business, a question of philosophically expounding the merits of a socialist society. It is rather a matter of showing in practice that the fight to defend a human existence against the ravages of capitalism logically leads to the building of a socialist society. There can be no contradiction between present battles and final aim. Anyone who thinks or acts as if there was—presenting socialism as something separate in time or place from the reality we live—is no socialist at all, frankly.
It was commonly maintained until recently that this year’s would be the last tough budget, that the bulk of the adjustment would be done, most of the metaphorical heavy lifting (metaphorical heavy lifting is the only kind that politicians ever do) out of the way. The claim soon wore thin, and like an ageing rock band insisting that this next comeback tour would be the last, it soon came to be seen as an obvious marketing ploy. They’re not even bothering to spin this line any more. But could it possibly be the last soft budget as far as the left is concerned? The last time they counter it with proposals to stimulate capitalism, and instead come up with proposals to undermine it, to point beyond it, to unashamedly put the interests of working people forward in open antagonism to the class which currently runs things?
Socialists need to be formulating and presenting demands which can make sense to large numbers of workers today. But that is not the same thing at all as demands which make sense within current mainstream ideology. The consciousness of the working class at the moment is a complicated mixture of resignation and indignation, putting up with things rather than agreeing with them, open at some level to the notion of an alternative way if only it seemed plausible. Socialist politics shouldn’t just mirror these contradictory attitudes, but engage with the fighting aspect of them, arguing for it to go further and look deeper, taking things all the way to the necessity of a world run to satisfy people’s needs and capacities.
Any significant success that such an approach met with would not just be a great promise for the future, but a powerful contribution to beating the austerity offensive here and now. Many of us have repeatedly asked ourselves of late: When will it all end? When will the relentless drive to take away what we took for granted stop? The answer, of course, is that it will never stop as long as capitalism is left to its own devices. It is a system which learns from our mistakes, thrives on our weakness, prospers on our poverty. It never ceases to maximise its profits, which is only another way of saying that it never ceases to minimise our lives. The devastation it is wreaking these days is only an extreme blitzkrieg version of the constant attack it inflicts as a matter of course.
The one thing that has stopped it, from its dawn as an economic system onwards, has been the resistance of the working class. That resistance has always been fuelled by the conviction of workers that they were entitled to more than capitalism was pleased to allow them. The tragedy of this recession is that millions of workers have seen little option but to go along with the sacrifices demanded of them. They have to persuade themselves that they deserve better, to develop a self-respect which demands that what they and their class and humanity needs should come first: We are nothing, and we should be everything! In times like these, that requires an outlook which is unafraid to envisage a fundamental transformation in society. And the existing possession of such an outlook—a socialist outlook—entails a duty to come out and argue for it, now more than ever.
RED BANNER 