Running Commentary: Austerity for Spain (1983)

The Running Commentary column from the February 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Austerity for Spain

After France and Greece, Spain is the third Mediterranean country to elect a "socialist" government. Actually, of course, the new Spanish government under Felipe Gonzales is no more socialist than its predecessors. The PSOE, despite its name of Spanish Socialist Workers Party, is a reformist party which has been elected to run the affairs of Spanish capitalism; and it has already announced that it will do so in accordance with the economic logic of capitalism: profits for the capitalists, austerity for the workers.

A few days before he was appointed "super-Minister" for the Economy, Miguel Boyer revealed to the Madrid correspondent of Le Monde (27 November) precisely what the new government's approach was going to be. We reproduce his words without comment:

  There is no other solution for this country but to pursue a policy of austerity. To want an immediate reflation without first curing the economy and while the international situation is against us would only delay the reckoning and in a year oblige us to in the end take even more severe austerity measures. There will be no reactivation of the economy in Spain without wage moderation, without refloating enterprises and without giving priority to controlling inflation.

  Our priority is not to increase internal demand since we would only succeed in upsetting our balance of payments as the example of France has shown. We must first of all relaunch investment. then exports, and there is only one way to achieve this: the profits resulting from the increase in productivity must remain in the hands of the heads of enterprises so that they decide to invest. The workers, to begin with, will have to be satisfied with the maintaining of their purchasing power at its present level.

Unfair cops

Home Secretary Whitelaw and Metropolitan Police Commissioner Newman are supposed to be organising a police force to prevent public disorder so it is very embarrassing for them when a group of policemen irresponsibly shoot a man in the street. It is of course even more embarrassing for the policemen who fired the shots who may have been expecting the usual commendation for bravery for approaching a highly dangerous criminal if they had shot the “right" man.

The event has strengthened a number of dark suspicions, that the police in London are issued with guns too easily, which conditions them to use them too freely. The uproar which followed the shooting promises to rumble on for a long time. A number of prominent public figures are striving, in the name of our safety, to wring some advantage from it all. When it is over there may be some minor changes in some obscure regulations, which will be presented to us in triumph, as an insurance against it ever happening again.

So far, then, the debate has been off target. There have been demands for the police to be more efficient in catching criminals so that they gain more public confidence and therefore do their job even better. There have been, again, calls for the police to be more “accountable”. One Tory MP made himself unpopular by saying that the people attacked by the police were associated with crime, implying that perhaps it was all right to try to kill them after all.

The basic facts of the true function and role of the police have been passed over. They are there to protect the rights of private property; the man they set out to catch that day was wanted by them because, they said, he has committed some determined robberies and is, therefore, a personified threat to property rights.

In this job the police, as well as the other arms of the coercive state machine, will be as ruthless and as efficient as they need to be and are able to be. If this means that they must roam the streets with guns, then that is what they will do.

It is nonsense to demand that an organisation like that should be accountable to the very people they are in business to repress. Property rights need not be protected against the ruling class, since they possess them already; it is the dispossessed working class who must be resisted.

It is members of the working class who commit the vast majority of offences against property; it is members of the working class too who arrest the offenders and, when they are punished, it is workers who carry out the court's orders.

That situation exists by virtue of workers' acquiescence; they are accountable to themselves for their degraded position in society and the repression and violence which they wreak on themselves.

OPEC not OK

For almost ten years the oil states in OPEC have been cast as the world's villains, responsible for starting the present recession. It was in 1973 that the international price of oil surged upwards, as the cartel clamped on restrictive production quotas.

This gave the Heath government a convenient explanation for the economic crisis — one which fitted in with an established tradition that such difficulties are the fault of avaricious, untrustworthy foreigners. It was in that tradition that the Labour Party blamed the crash of the 30s, which swept them from power, on to a foreign bankers' ramp. After the war, the Attlee government grumbled that most of their worries were due to the dominance of the American economy. Harold Wilson’s dramatic plans for prosperity through technological progress were, we were darkly told, laid waste by the gnomes of Zurich.

An essential part of the tradition is that the villains, like plump vultures, are themselves invulnerably prosperous and secure. No gnomes arc expected to be seen, begging in the streets of Switzerland. No oil sheik is reported to be down to his last desperate million.

Well, whether OPEC triggered off the slump or not (the real explanation of the cause is a lot more fundamental) they are now themselves suffering in it. One result of the recession is that the oil market is glutted. This has severely damaged the unity on which OPEC relies to make itself felt, as member states cut their prices below the agreed levels or produce above their set quota.

This disorderly behaviour is threatening the very existence of the cartel. The process is being aggravated by the oil producing states outside OPEC — notably Britain and Mexico — who are carefully keeping their export prices “competitive”.

Combines like OPEC are attempts to introduce a permanently profitable order into the chaos of capitalist production and commerce. OPEC could operate for as long as conditions allowed but it cannot escape the fact that oil is a commodity and that it will not be produced unless it is profitable to do so. It cannot avoid the reality that capitalism passes from boom to slump and back again in an uncontrollable cycle which takes no account of any assumptions that it can be brought to order.

Saviour for civilisation

Workers who worry their way along the dole queue about whether the pound is worth what it used to be will be comforted that the new governor of the Bank of England, Robin Leigh-Pemberton (which is the sort of name not usually to be found in a dole queue) regards ". . . sound money as fundamental to civilisation”.

Of course Leigh-Pcmberton is bound to have some ideas about money because he has a fair bit of it himself. He had an expensive schooling at Eton and then, like a lot of pubescent members of the ruling class, he became an officer in a fashionable Guards regiment.

He is sometimes known as a farmer, which doesn't actually mean that he gets up in the small hours to milk the cows or comes home tired and smelly after a day with the muck-spreader but that he owns a couple of thousand acres in the lush county of Kent.

Leigh-Pemberton has been getting £78,000 a year for being chairman of Westminster Bank and it seems that his new job might mean a wage cut of about £3,000 a year but, if he is typical of most members of his class, he will regard that as a worthy sacrifice in the cause of sound money and civilisation.

So we should all be grateful, even if we are trying to survive on the dole, to have such a man at the top in Threadneedle Street. From the heights of his privileged origins, his inherited wealth, his effortlessly accumulated positions of power. Leigh-Pemberton will be able to lecture the lower orders about the profligate living habits they acquire through their lifetime of being exploited.

Workers who are scraping by on their wages, watching their livelihood run through their fingers like sand, or those who are barely existing on what are called state “benefits" may be willing to heed his words in the cause of sound money.

Others who are more sensitive, more aware, will know that such issues are of no account to them and will feel themselves insulted as well as exploited.