The Austerity Lie

The wolf is in the house

Austerity is capitalism is austerity

Our owners pulled a fast one on us. They have been deconstructing the post-war social democratic privilege machine that was built on the backs of people in the global south and kidding us there is no money while their wealth doubles again and again. We’re told that austerity is necessary. It’s taken a long time to do this, the entitled baby boomers had to start dying off and then their children had to start believing the individualist nonsense about there being no alternative. The right wingers block or wreck things that might benefit the majority, the ones that claim to be left wing say there is no alternative.

Well, capitalism was always what it is. The brief post-war period up until the beginning of the 1980s is the anomaly. Capitalism is austerity and the thought that there is somehow a gentler capitalism without the constant drive to super-exploit the worker class is naive and was only true for certain parts of the world at certain times. It doesn’t fit the facts or the driving forces of capitalism.

There was a brief window, in some parts of the world, where worker class people managed to gain something like the upper hand and our owners had to give us a few crumbs from their table, preferably by stealing those crumbs from poor…