“A government so small you can carry it with you everywhere. . .”

from http://www.bayofrage.com

All of the hallowed institutions of the British welfare state – ones that American leftists might hope to establish here – originate from this period: vast public housing projects, accessible universities, a comprehensive national health project. The welfare state is not, therefore, the opposite of the austerity state. These are simply the Janus-faces of an apparatus that has taken total control over social reproduction – over consumption levels, access to credit, access to health care and education – because these things can no longer be entrusted to the market alone. Austerity regimes are never <em>laissez-faire</em>. If money is taken away from social programs, it is returned to the economy through interventions in the money supply, bailouts for banks, credit programs and the like. If it is taken away from housing programs, it is returned as prison construction. In both regimes of austerity and welfare, the state is fulfilling its function as helpmeet to capital, ensuring that the right amounts and kinds of workers meet up with the right amounts of money and products in the workplaces and markets. Once the state has begun to manage these processes, the withdrawal of this or that mechanism or program is not the end of state intervention, only its calibration and adjustment to the changing needs of capital.

The false opposition between austerity and welfare may lead some anarchists and anti-state communists to prejudge the fight, to conclude that it is rigged from the start, locked within the horizon of the liberal-democratic state. But history is full of examples of people who think one thing and do another, who make revolution for reasons of simple necessity. And in any case, we can no more choose to fight on some other terms than we can choose to start breathing carbon dioxide. In the near term, struggles against austerity are what we have. As with Egypt and Greece, Madrid and Madison – we should expect to see more conflicts between “the people” and “the state.” We should also expect to see struggles over matters of government policy take on a near-revolutionary intensity. This is because, in the present period – when corporations and capitalists find such extreme constraints on profitability – states are unlikely to yield any ground except in the face of the fiercest opposition. Because states are themselves radicalized by the crisis, because they are at war with their population, we live in a time of tremendous radicalization.

Every strength is, from one angle, a weakness, and every weakness a strength. If the present movements against austerity exhibit a purely negative character, if they can say nothing about the world they want except what it is not, if they are largely confined to describing, in letters of fire and broken glass, the world they hate, this indicates at the same time their unwillingness to accept any of the simulacra which past movements hung under the name of communism and anarchy. But it also means that, until something inhabits the space left vacant by the old programs and parties, we are left forcing <em>reactions </em>by the state apparatus. We are a statism by proxy.

We do not need a program. But what we do need are rapidly reproducible practices that focus on our non-possession of the things we need to live – in other words, our reliance on money, on employment and the state. The only possible response to the antinomies of anti-austerity politics – which break down all too often into a fight between anti-tax and pro-welfare populisms – is to say that if we had direct, immediate access to such things, we would need neither state provision nor its powers of taxation. Only when capital is a natural, unsurpassable horizon does this appear as a real problem. This is why the truest response to a round of austerity measures is the looting of supermarkets and the jumping of subway turnstiles, tax evasion and debt default, the squatting of houses and the establishment of free communal gardens and kitchens.