This post was largely written before the latest initiative of the EU, which has been hailed by Government parties as a major breakthrough for Ireland although we can be confident there will be no slacking in the austerity programme.

The devil in these deals is always in the detail, or so the cliché goes, but this is only partially correct.  The deal will also do little to reverse the austerity agenda in Europe, which is the big picture, and without this the crisis in the Eurozone will not be resolved.

The plan appears to involve the funds in the European Stability Mechanism going straight to the banks instead of the National State beforehand, thus avoiding the immediate burden on the State through increased sovereign debt and pressure on interest rates.  This was demanded by Spain and Italy and Germany has backed down.

The Irish now hope to piggy-back on this to get similar treatment, except this approach would have to be applied retrospectively as the EU demanded exactly the opposite in the Irish deal.  Since the Irish State owns the banks the debts of the banks are the debts of the State, which workers are expected to pay.  Michael Noonan has claimed that when the EU takes over lending to the Irish banks it will take over the asset side of the banks as well, in other words it will own them.  Whether this would involve the EU owning the shipwreck that is Anglo-Irish and Irish Nationwide is an open question and the deal may mean no more than extending the repayments and a little lower interest rate.

In any case socialists must exploit any concession to demand more, as the post below argues, and should draw attention to the concern in the EU statement about the sustainability of the Irish debt to demand that it be repudiated.  The post below is mostly about the tactical way this may be put forward and is therefore timely.

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So what should socialists demand now?  Should we demand repudiation of all the debt even that incurred before the economic crash?  What would be the rationale for this?  Should this include the debt currently being piled up to pay for day to day expenditure on public services?  Should we limit our call to repudiation of that part of the debt that is a result of the bank bailout, or add to this the pension savings wasted on buying the banks?  Who do we take this latter money from since it involves an arbitrary decision on who the state would otherwise have borrowed from instead of using the pension reserve?  In other words default on a sum of money that wasn’t actually borrowed!

It might be that some socialists believe that it is a betrayal of the working class if we do not always demand repudiation of all the debt, although these socialists would still be ignoring costs of bailing out the banks that didn’t result in debt creation while including repudiation of debt that had nothing to do with the banks.

But this brings us back to our point about socialists more or less ignoring the private debts bearing down on workers while not demanding that they be defaulted on. Is this a betrayal of the working class also?  One possible answer to such a charge is that to seek this as well would be to conflate two questions, that of the burden of debt generally and of the specific austerity drive resulting from the explosion of State debt in particular.  This would seem to me to be a valid argument.   It has to be recognised however that in making this argument we are making a political judgement.  It is not primarily about the absolute effect of debt on workers.  It is not a moral argument.

It should therefore be accepted that it may also be permissible to demand repudiation of the bankers’ debt while not believing that it is politically best at all times and in all places to call for rejection of all the debt.  This might be because doing so might no longer allow particular emphasis to be placed on the argument about acceptance of the bankers’ debt.  While it may be claimed that the huge deficits incurred, and to be incurred over the next number of years, are more or less a direct result of the bankers and developers crash we would be obliged, if we accepted this logic, to still accept payment of the debt that was not the result of the financial crisis.

In the end however the left must accept that whatever the advantages of propaganda in opposition to the debt of the bankers, or specifically on the promissory notes, this can really only be a matter of presentation for propaganda or educational purposes.  It cannot represent a deeper policy or strategy.  If successful this approach would anyway have to recede and give way to stronger arguments if it proved successful in winning workers to reject paying the debt.

To agree that the debt created by the budget deficits are simply an indirect result of the banking crash, if not the direct result of assuming banks’ gambling debts, means not explaining what has just happened.  This crisis is not ultimately the result of gambling debts but an abnormally large crisis of overproduction which is a form of crisis that is anything but abnormal in capitalism.  In other words the deficits are the result of a capitalist crisis and socialists should not be diverting workers from this fundamental truth by claiming it is the result of individual bankers or individual banks.

This is also true of the direct debts of the banks themselves that the left has prioritised.  In the last analysis the irrationality of the behaviour of Anglo-Irish and Nationwide banks etc is simply an expression of the irrationality of the system as a whole and it is this we want workers to learn.  The obvious greed, recklessness and stupidity of the individuals and banks involved must be held up as typical examples of the whole rotten and bankrupt system not particularly egregious exceptions.

So if we highlight the direct debt of the banks as the centre of a campaign to repudiate the debt this in no way means acceptance that workers have a duty to pay any of it, any more than we think workers should take responsibility for any other result of a capitalist economic crisis.  It is a matter of what we think are the political demands that will allow workers to come to an understanding of the causes of the crisis and mobilise in their own defence.  This is the decisive criteria for determining the demands that socialist should raise in respect of the debt. It is a tactical decision how we raise the question of debt repudiation, although it’s only a question of tactics if we reject responsibility for any of it.  It is rather like prioritising resistance against some particular item of austerity while not thereby accepting any of it.

We are not at the point where we can realistically hope to build a movement on the basis that workers do not accept any responsibility for the actions of the Irish State.  Identification with this state is derived in no small way from nationalist and bourgeois illusions in its legitimacy.  So the point is to break these illusions, not engage in political projects that assume they have already been erased.

If we believe that the debt is still so large after repudiation or amelioration of the bankers’ debts that the austerity demanded to repay it, or to narrow the State’s budget deficit, will still cripple workers then it would be wrong to accept this debt.  In this case it might be necessary to use the fight over the bankers’ debt as only one step to challenging payment of any of the debt.  (This might be the opportunity provided by the latest putative deal)  We would then be making clear that workers face a choice – acceptance of the legitimacy of the state’s demands or the legitimacy of their own needs.

Arguments around the origin of some of the debt arising from the banks would then play a subsidiary role to the contention that we simply can’t afford to pay these debts and will not pay them.  These arguments however might greatly assist this larger purpose.

This is the situation we are now in.  The level of debt is simply not supportable and the word restructuring will be applied where the word default would be more accurate.  When this happens it should be exploited to discredit the whole exercise, especially the bank bailout, and to push forward the demand for further debt repudiation.

This brings us to what the status of this demand is: why do we demand it and what role does it play in our socialist alternative?  After all, repudiation of the debt is not in itself a socialist demand.  Two of the most recent defaults have been by Argentina and Russia and neither of these were part of a socialist project but rather part of a policy that inflicted deep suffering on millions of workers.

We demand repudiation because of the suffering it inflicts and because if it is accepted workers cannot be in a position to create their own alternative.  We demand it because it puts the needs of workers before the demands of the capitalist system.  We demand it to give workers the opportunity to break with their illusions in ‘their’ State, whether derived from nationalist beliefs in the legitimacy of the nation state or illusions that the state is democratic and legitimate.  If this can best be approached today by putting to the fore the debts being paid on behalf of the banks then this is legitimate and appropriate.