Comment by Ted Trainer
Green Left has frequently urged us to block the budget and fight the cuts. If you agree, I think you might be making some serious mistakes.
Capitalism ran into major over-production in the 1970s. The factory owners now cannot sell anywhere near all they can produce. The volume of capital available for investment in the US is doubling at about 20-year intervals. This problem has produced the era of "casino capitalism": frantic speculative "investment".
It has also produced globalisation, the massive push for a unified, open global economy. It has become critical for the big corporations and banks that remaining restrictions to their access to additional business opportunities be removed. Thus the manic rush to deregulate, free market forces, remove protection, privatise state enterprises and reduce government activity.
Globalisation will rapidly result in dramatic reductions in living conditions in rich and poor countries. Australian workers will have to compete against the lowest paid workers in the world. Australia's economy will depend on what it suits the transnational corporations and banks to locate here, and what will they manufacture here when our wages are 50 times those in some Indonesian factories?
Our governments will not be able to intervene to guarantee safety, health or environmental standards, because that would raise production costs and reduce competitiveness.
All political leaders not only go along with these strategies, but rush to facilitate them because they have no choice. The global capitalist system requires them to do these things or be dumped.
Economic rationalism and those who oversee it are not the problem. The problem is the global capitalist system, which now requires that governments deregulate and increase the access of corporations to more business opportunities.
Howard cannot go against these forces. If he, or Keating before him, had decided to raise taxes so as to be able to spend much more on welfare and the environment, to bring in an industrial relations package guaranteeing decent wages, to impose protection enabling Australian industry to survive, or to do the other things that those urging us to block the budget would want, then Australia would be immediately dumped by global capital.
Investment would plunge, our credit rating would be devastated and our costs of production would skyrocket, making us even less able to compete and earn export income.
We are up to our ears in debt and heavily dependent on exporting. We are locked into a global system which gives Howard no choice but to cut our real living standards in an effort to improve our chances of competing.
Just to call for opposition to the cuts is to assume our problems are due to Howard's meanness, that if only we could get rid of the Thatcherites and their ideas, we could have a sane and humane economy.
Well, we can't, unless we also go much further and get rid of almost the entire present economy — not just the private ownership of capital and reliance on market forces and production for profit, but also the taken-for-granted demand for affluent living standards and economic growth. A system with these elements requires and imposes economic rationalism, and finds Thatchers and Howards to implement it.
We could easily break out and build a sustainable, just and marvellous society — if enough people wanted to take a radically different path, one centred on simpler and more cooperative lifestyles within highly self-sufficient economies, and within a zero-growth overall economy.
But at present people in general are a very long way from accepting that the present economy and the consumer way of life that goes with it have to be scrapped.
Maybe what we should do is not try to block the cuts or fight the budget but welcome them as teaching aids. There will be no significant change until large numbers grasp that this economic system is fundamentally irredeemably wrong, and unfortunately it seems that this will not happen before a great deal more destruction and pain are experienced.
The main point here is not that we should welcome the cuts for their potential educational effects. It is that it is quite wrong to assume that nicer leaders could adopt more sensible and humane ways of running our present economy.
You cannot run a sensible, humane, just and ecologically sustainable national economy within the world capitalist system; if you try to, you will have to tax, protect and regulate in ways that are not only intolerable to global capital but that would make you uncompetitive.
So trying to block the cuts won't get us very far. What is to be done then? Ignore Howard, the budget cuts and the system and get on with building our own local alternatives right now. Naive and impossible? Maybe, but my The Conserver Society argues that this is what we should be doing.