Dealing with the issue of debt as revolutionary leftists...

[GPDP]

At the risk of sounding like one of those liberal policy wonks RadioRaheem loves to talk about (no offense bro, it's just kinda funny how they always pop up in your posts :D), is there anything we can do about it? Like, how do we address the issue? Should we even address it, considering it's but a structural crisis pretty much inherent within capitalism?

Obviously we want to fight back against the cuts, I know that. Yet the debt in and of itself seems to be a major concern for many working class people. Do we tell them framing the issue in such a manner misses the point (it's capitalism, stupid)? Or is there anything we can say that's more relevant to their concerns?

[Jimmie Higgins]

At the risk of sounding like one of those liberal policy wonks RadioRaheem loves to talk about (no offense bro, it's just kinda funny how they always pop up in your posts :D), is there anything we can do about it? Like, how do we address the issue? Should we even address it, considering it's but a structural crisis pretty much inherent within capitalism?

Obviously we want to fight back against the cuts, I know that. Yet the debt in and of itself seems to be a major concern for many working class people. Do we tell them framing the issue in such a manner misses the point (it's capitalism, stupid)? Or is there anything we can say that's more relevant to their concerns?

Well short of the "it's capitalism stupid" argument (which needs to be made) there is an argument that can be made for the short-term reforms: chop from the top and tax the rich. The budget crisis can't really be understood outside of class politics: cutting programs for the poor, demanding union concessions, blaming pensioners and public workers for the crisis, while also refusing to raise taxes on the rich and increasing police and prison spending... is class warfare against working people. So we can argue that in the short term, we can battle for different priorities if workers fight-back and refuse to accept austerity and concessions. Then when the government says, "oh we are broke, we are living beyond our means, we need shared sacrifice" we can say: if you are worried about deficits and debt, then you need to tax the rich because you aren't paying for it on our backs, we won't let you.

[ZeroNowhere]

Given that recent research by Andrew Kliman suggests that a major problem is in fact an excessively low rate of profit, I'm not sure that that would necessarily function as intended.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Well short of the "it's capitalism stupid" argument (which needs to be made) there is an argument that can be made for the short-term reforms: chop from the top and tax the rich. The budget crisis can't really be understood outside of class politics: cutting programs for the poor, demanding union concessions, blaming pensioners and public workers for the crisis, while also refusing to raise taxes on the rich and increasing police and prison spending... is class warfare against working people. So we can argue that in the short term, we can battle for different priorities if workers fight-back and refuse to accept austerity and concessions. Then when the government says, "oh we are broke, we are living beyond our means, we need shared sacrifice" we can say: if you are worried about deficits and debt, then you need to tax the rich because you aren't paying for it on our backs, we won't let you.

I'm not sure that, even short of the capitalism argument, it's enough anymore to "chop from the top and tax the rich."

L. Randall Wray wrote a mock article on the election of Dennis Kucinich to the US presidency on November 7, 2017 in which he enacted a public-employer-of-last-resort program plus joined the chorus of some global debt "Jubilee" movement. That latter movement for directing abrogating at least public debts - and perhaps even a good portion of business and consumer debts - is what "solves" the debt problem.