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The Fiscal Cliff and the Coming Swindle of "Shared Sacrifice"

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Fred Goldberg
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   Of course nothing like this will ever happen.  This is because the government does not represent the interests of the people; as the government of the capitalist state, it represents the interests of the capital class.  While we cannot here make this case from a policy point of view, a single image will nail down the point.  When workers strike and assemble in a picket line, armed police straddle the line.  The message from the mayor or police chief is that the police are there to keep order and prevent the breaking of law.  But law and order is not a socially neutral concept.   The question is always:  What law?  Whose order?  To see this one need only reflect on the fact that when production is interrupted not as the result of a worker strike, but because of a plant lockout, or because the plant is permanently shuttered and its business moved to China or Mexico, you don't see any policemen at the homes of the company's Directors or its executive officers.  The state, in the application of its coercive apparatus, is selective when faced with the disruption of a productive enterprise.  When workers shut it down, the state shows its teeth; when capital does the same thing, it pretends nothing is happening.

   But all this aside, the fact remains that the idea of shared sacrifice, indeed the very act of raising the specter of a fiscal cliff, is a political and ideological ruse behind which to steer more of the economic surplus away from working people and the poor and into the bank accounts of the corporations.  You don't see this?  Well, let's do what any investigator of financial crime does:  let's follow the money.

   Every dollar of wealth, or market value, produced in our capitalist society is produced by the labor of working people.  Once that dollar of value is realized at the point of exchange in the market, it is steered to one of three places:  to the workers in the form of wages and benefits; back to capital as profit; or to the state in the form of taxes.   The state uses its tax proceeds to fund its various functions, from managing entitlement programs and social services, to paying for a military and its arsenal of destructive machinery, to running myriad bureaucracies, to foreign aid (military and otherwise), etc.  Now every dollar of produced wealth that flows to the state in taxes is a dollar lost to the bottom line of corporate America.  Of course some of the state's expenditures are useful to capital, even critical, for example the maintenance of a powerful military, or the propping up of the military of a foreign regime aligned with US corporate interests.  But other dollars spent by the state are, from the point of view of capital, gratuitous, and thus wasteful.  So it is with much of the monies spent on those social programs that together constitute the welfare state, programs initiated and developed beginning in the depths of the Great Depression under President Roosevelt and his New Deal, and culminating during the Lyndon Johnson administration under his policies of the Great Society.  Cut these programs and you release their funding to be captured by capital, for other than wages and benefits, they have nowhere else to go.  

   So when "our" representatives rail against government spending, they are speaking from the vantage point of the national corporate balance sheet, and not, as they would have us believe, from the point of view of the national interest.  Indeed, when you come down to it, in a class divided society--a society divided between those who own productive wealth and those whose labor actually produces wealth--there is no such thing as the national interest.  There are only class interests.  And only an ideology that would have us believe in the commonality of what has in fact always been an imagined community, viz. the nation state, with its putative national interests supposedly serving the entire commons, keeps us from being able to see this.  It's time to take off the blinders.  Then we'll see who gets to share and who has to sacrifice under the coming reign of shared sacrifice.

 

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

      

                

 

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F.Ivan Goldberg holds a doctorate in philosophy from Brandeis University and has taught philosophy at M.I.T., San Jose State University, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. Subsequent to that he was for several years the senior vice (more...)
 
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