It is interesting to see the capitalists suggesting the state is too expensive, and attempting to pay less money towards it. This would be the idea of Elon Musk, the white South African billionaire, also the world’s richest man; that the state is wasting money, and its expenditures need to be cut drastically.
I guess we have to look at what is owned by the state. We have a passenger railroad industry, Amtrak, the Post Office, and waste pickup among others.
The railroad is owned by the state, and usually loses money. But every other industrialized nation has passenger railways, with Western Europe having high speed railroads, and advanced locomotives that have their own tracks, that go in the mountains and such.
They serve the practical purpose of connecting people between large cities, from downtown regions to other downtown regions. It’s like going between downtown Chicago and Milwaukee, you don’t always want to drive your car as you encounter traffic , and even if it did not slow you down (which is ridiculous), driving to downtown Chicago can be a real adventure.
Even if you fly 150 km south, which uses large amounts of energy compared to Amtrak, you still have to ride the L or rent a car to get from O’hare to downtown. It is about a 45 minute ride between the train station to O’Hare on the L, making flying down there kind of rough.
So the bourgeoisie rises to the occasion, and even though Amtrak does not make a profit, passenger rail is seen as needed, and paid for by a subdivision of taxes from the profit.
Perhaps to remind us that the capitalist state does good things too, Musk will try to cut railroad money. He owns a luxury car company; I guess he must be in favor of auto travel.
But selling it to anyone who has had to commute downtown, and drive it, is a hard sell.
Perhaps gutting the Post Office would be a source of savings. They committed the sin of moving the mail in ballots we all use to vote, when we were losing the drop boxes the Republican bourgeoisie have come to detest.
But the bills from the electricity and gas monopoly come in the mail. They get the money from the bank automatically, but send a receipt showing your energy usage. Paper receipts are essential in a failure, such as crashed computers.
So no real help there. Taxes are also sent by mail; every year it comes time to pay the taxman, and it goes in checks by mail.
This system seems to be working. There is also mail that has to leave the country. Ever tried to use United Parcel Service, UPS, to send something outside the country? Try Canada, it’s like 10 times more expensive to send a letter UPS than the mail. Need to send a package? Milwaukee to near Toronto Canada, about 900 miles, our package would have cost 217 dollars for Worldwide Express plus (same day), $166 for the end of the day. It costs $153 for worldwide expedited, and for standard (5 days or less), about $44. The package was less than a pound.
Perhaps the fact recycling is now being done with Waste Management instead of the city sorter would be some savings. Considering the city sorter burned down, it is now Waste Management that is sorting recyclables.
But it certainly looks like using the city to get started recycling was effective. We always said it would save money to recycle, now it is profitable. Recycling proved to be a real success. I guess the only question is if you really want to tamper with a working system of city garbage pickup. It is one of the few remaining parts of our recycling program still not privatized. It may fall, but the fact remains recycling was accomplished without surplus value as a goal of the movement. And the city pickup created no surplus value, it was not the reason for recycling, we were concerned about what disposable society was doing to the ecology. It is an example of the state giving in ot the desires of workers to do something that the profit motive was neglecting,, helping ecology. So they can give in sometimes, but once it could be done with a profit Waste Management commenced doing the recycling.
They look an awful lot like a monopoly, or a trust. They seem to be handling most of Milwaukee’s recycling, doing the sorting. Whether they own the recyclables is a more difficult question. Capitalists often prefer monopoly to state ownership, like NASA and Elon Musk. He now has a monopoly on what NASA used to do, launch men to the space station. He gets government contracts to do this. All this has done is move capital from the state to Musk’s pocketbook, from industry that was functioning just fine before capitalists decided they wanted a private company to do the launches.
So here we have 3 or 4 of the things the state owns, and it doesn’t look possible to remove the money being used to keep this industry productive and working.
Maybe instate college tuition? That is huge. But it is a subsidy to the petty bourgeoisie and the middle class, who vote and support the Republicans. It would be very surprising to see this gravy train come to a halt. Our bourgeois political economists Ivory Towers are connected to this; good luck getting that through Congress.
So we are really left to ponder, where will these massive savings Musk wants will come from? Cutting off welfare, Social Security payments, could keep them from having to spend their sacred profits on senior citizens pensions. But that is not popular with their following either, many of whom are retired or going to retire soon.
Given any industry that can make a profit is made to do so, through privatization of nationalized assets, what could be unnationalized? School systems? There are capitalists who may be supportive of religion in schools, but their beloved Constitution divides Church and State very directly. They have been promoting using state money for religious schools, they call them charter schools. But they have shown no real promise of providing a better education than the state schools they are meant to replace. And the right to an education is a thing all of us value, it is not socially acceptable to have children labouring instead of in school.
Basically the state really cannot be removed more than it already is without causing a social crisis for capitalists. The industry the state controls is only this way as it is needed but cannot create a profit. Are we to believe Musk can make the Post Office create a surplus this year? Welcome back to planet Earth Elon. It hasn’t created a surplus in decades, and unless something big really changes, expect it to remain a government institution paid for by the state.
It is sort of amusing to see the same institution, the state, which is used to hold down the proletariat, shrinking. In this respect it is hard to take Musk and Donald Trump seriously. We all remember the movement to pay less money to the riot police, defunding the police became a rallying call for the bourgeois. No savings there either.
The more you look at it, the more foolish it looks. It would seem to be an empty threat, from a rich man and his puppet. It remains to be seen if doctrinaire experiments will follow.
Nicholas Jay Boyes
Milwaukee Wisconsin
American Democratic Republic
Ecological Era 