Much has been made by the capitalist media and their politicians of the looming “fiscal cliff.” This is occurring amid intensifying imperialist rivalry causing the bosses to impose more fascist austerity measures to force workers to pay for unending wars.
In a political move described as “kicking the can down the road,” the fiscal cliff date was arbitrarily set by lawmakers two years ago as a time bomb to guarantee creation of a new crisis if draconian cuts were not made. On that date the Bush tax cuts would expire, amid sweeping spending cuts threatening to cause a massive retraction of the economy. We’re told that without massive cuts to Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance and other benefits, an economic doomsday is inevitable.
The rulers’ solution for the crisis, with its fiscal cliff, is economic blackmail designed to force through wildly unpopular austerity measures. The U.S. ruling class has for decades fought to roll back gains won by U.S. workers in the first half of the 20th century. These gains made it more difficult for U.S. corporations to compete with many countries with cheaper labor as well as those that had built up more modern and efficient industries. All this time U.S. bosses were spending trillions on a huge military at the expense of upgrading their industries.
But the bosses have to deal with U.S. workers’ massive opposition to austerity policies. In election-night polling by Hart Research Associates, people rejected using cuts in Social Security, Medicare and federal unemployment insurance to bring down the deficit by varying rates of from 70 to 84 percent; 68 percent opposed raising the Medicare eligibility age. Meanwhile, 64 percent supported addressing the deficit by increasing taxes on the rich. (Findings confirmed by a recent Washington Post poll, The Nation.)
‘Fix the Debt’?
So despite workers decisively rejecting these austerity measures, they are still the preferred ruling-class club to beat the working class into submission. As such it is a top priority of both Republicans and Democrats.
A recent New York Magazine article (11/30) reveals this ruling-class effort to force austerity measures down workers’ throats. The article describes a coalition called Fix the Debt, comprising leading U.S. capitalists, organized around neo-liberal economist Peter Peterson, Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles who headed Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, and the heads of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Citigroup among others.
Fix the Debt pushes the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan: massive cuts to social programs to pay for a deficit created by imperialist wars and bank bailouts.
The borrowing of $16 trillion for decades of wars — to pay for over 1,100 military bases in 130 countries — has been robbing the U.S. of resources and destroying the living standards of U.S. workers. The latter face a future of austerity and one of fighting and dying in these wars.
The Fix the Debt group has launched an all-out media offensive featured on all the major news networks and newspapers. They’ve also created “CEO tools” that help employers pitch their platform to their workforce, including sample letters to give to workers and power-point presentations.
Fix the Debt is the latest front group in a 70-year ideological struggle by U.S. rulers to replace working-class consciousness with a pro-business consciousness, centered on shifting the tax burden from the bosses to the workers: deregulation, union-busting and destruction of any social safety net.
Austerity is Class War
Austerity measures will not help the economy as Fix the Debt claims. Rather they lead to reduced growth and greater debt according to the research of many noted economists including Paul Krugman and Ha-Joon Chang (see “The Return of Depression Economics” and “Bad Samaritans”). Austerity attacks “dangerous” political ideas, like the one that the capitalist state should make even the smallest effort to alleviate the worst effects of capitalism. The bosses don’t want to be obligated to give the slightest consideration to workplace safety, pollution or the deteriorating condition of their exploited workforce.
A major reason capitalists push austerity is to try to prevent an economic depression. But all the austerity and infrastructure programs over the decade of the 1930s couldn’t get U.S. capitalism out of the Great Depression. It was only World War II and putting 14 million workers into the military that solved their economic and unemployment problems.
Austerity also is used to break the back of the working class. But U.S. workers have resisted these efforts. In Wisconsin tens of thousands marched on the state capital to oppose a union-busting law that was shoved through under the guise of “solving” the state budget crisis. Similar attacks in Indiana and Ohio were met with massive street protests.
It took a serious effort by the Democratic Party to either co-opt these working-class movements or destroy them, only to have another nation-wide movement pop up opposing austerity measures — Occupy Wall Street. It ultimately had to be put down by a series of coordinated police raids organized by a conference of big-city mayors and launched out of the Obama White House and a relentless media blitz slandering the movement. (“Truthout,” 3/20; “CounterPunch,” 5/14) To overcome this mass resistance to austerity measures, the ruling class is using the debt crisis as a cover to shove through these unpopular policies.
The battle over austerity measures proves that any reform won by workers under capitalism will face constant ruling-class attack until it is ultimately driven into the ground. This attack is relentless. The bosses will demand total domination, both physical and ideological, of the working class.
But it also demonstrates that despite the mass propaganda campaigns, workers are highly skeptical of capitalism’s trickle-down economics and its maxim of “All for capital and nothing for the working class.” Workers are willing to fight this class war. What is needed is a revolutionary communist party — PLP — to develop their politics and lead the struggle to smash capitalist exploitation forever.
Additional Sources: Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, and Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Fones-Wolf’s Selling Free Enterprise, Carey’s Taking the Risk Out of Democracy.
