The annual budget statement is a bourgeois matter. It is the obligation
of communists to highlight the latter rather than getting exclusively
immersed in its details. No matter how popularly appealing a budget
appears it can never serve the class interests of workers. Sections of
the Left relate to state budgets as if they are pliable and can
consequently meet workers' needs. In this way they seek to delude the
working class and thereby promote capitalism. The state budget cannot,
by its very nature, transcend the limits of capitalism. No government
can transcend these limits through the medium of the budget.
It is not a subjective matter. It is an objective matter determined by
the laws of capital. Conservative bourgeois governments do not introduce
annual budgets that fail to meet the needs of the working class because
of their immoral nature. Capitalist constraints prevent this just as
the law of gravity and the second law of thermodynamics impose objective
constraints on the physical world. The nature of budgets is not a moral
question.
Consequently arguments made by the radical Left as to how adverse the
substance of a particular budget is amounts to no more than mere
political rhetoric designed to obstruct the development of class
consciousness. Such delusional rhetoric is designed to suggest that
capitalism is a progressively rational system capable of serving working
class needs. It falsely suggests too that bourgeois governments fail to
meet the needs of workers for morally subjective reasons. This assumes
that such governments consist of "bad people".
In the light of the foregoing it is clear that it is not the obligation
of communists to evaluate budget details in themselves. To do so is to
base a budget on the false assumption that it can serve the interests of
workers. At most the content of a budget must be discussed as evidence
of the inherent inability of budgets to meet the needs of workers.
Having said this I am not claiming that all budgets, although bourgeois,
are of equal value. Some budgets may more adequately serve the class
interests of capitalists than others. Analogously some bourgeois
governments are better than others at representing the interests of
capitalism. Bourgeois governments can vary in competence.