On Austerity

Austerity is not "about the economy." It has nothing to with competition, job creation or fiscal solvency. It's not about efficiency. It's not about the commonweal. Austerity is about changing the function of the State back to an older, more versatile, more enduring stable form. Austerity is about preserving the State as a military-policing instrument, whilst shedding those functions which currently provide a buffer against the mastery of the class which controls the state. Where once the ruling class had to buffer the laboring class from the worst excesses of capitalist accumulation, in order to maintain a sufficiently stable and trained laboring population, this condition no longer obtains. The ruling class can, because of globalization and the "offshoring" of plant capacity to crippled and re-colonized "third world" nations, now return to a more traditional set of relations with labor and the growing lumpenproletariat.

Tripling the rate of tuition, or cutting social security - regardless of your opinion of public education, government schools or social insurance - doesn't make the state any more or less solvent. The ruling class will have the State which serves its interests best. It will always fund the State it needs.

It - especially now that globalization has engendered a compact supranational master class -  no longer needs nationally disciplined industrial working populations. So, from the vantage of the ruling class interest, it makes sense to reduce the size of the managerial education pool by pricing out those competitors for positions who lack the class interest. This has the added benefit of more clearly identifying those persons who are willing and able to pursue management and professional education, as well as those with the drive and self-deceptive skills necessary to rule others and pretend that this means "liberty."

So too, with the now overt intent to reduce the carrying capacity of the already meager American social insurance system. Again, regardless of opinion about government social welfare, the ruling class no longer needs a labor force shielded against the vagaries of the market. Nor does it any longer require the artificial construct of the nuclear family, in any large numbers, to produce the isolated and alienated workers and professionals who formerly staffed and managed large scale industrial concerns, as well as their support, food provision and health maintenance adjuncts. So, it has begun to shed those State functions which encouraged both the disciplining of labor by education and social security, as well as the disciplining of persons by the artificial nuclear family isolated in single family homes, and raised with an insular, parochial morality of "self-determination."

This is what austerity is about. The transformation of the state. We are lucky enough, if our perspectives are sufficiently broad, to be witnesses to a new set of initial conditions.

And to fuck with them hard, if we get our act together...

[h/ts to Dead Horse and slackbastard for the inspiration]

UPDATE, some 8 hours later: Well damn. BDR says it really well, and in less words:

"Corporate (I'd change the metonym to Triskelions if I thought enough people got the allusion) doesn't want more or less gov't, it wants gov't to do what the fuck Corporate wants gov't to do which is to enact regulations that protect private property from Democracy and to dismantle regulation that impedes their amassing capital at such a greedy pace the machine would crash of itself and/or spark a revolution. Call the first the GOP, the second the Democratic Party, in either case the motives are the same.

It's not coordinated - the economy may collapse yet, resource wars are sure to erupt between competing triskelions - but Corporate enforces orthodoxy and orthodoxy says power always wins."