It's a pity that Antonio Gramsci is not around today to take part in the endless television and radio debates which will take place on the Budget and to write a commentary on it for tomorrow's newspapers. He would bring a different perspective to the macro-economic and fiscal analysis and to the discussion on how the Budget will affect business confidence and how various categories of taxpayers and social welfare recipients will fare, writes Vincent Browne.
If Antonio were around, he might draw attention to the confines within which the debate was being framed. He would probably go on about "hegemony", his idea that social relations are determined not just by economic forces (as traditional Marxism insisted), but also, and more fundamentally, by a shared political, religious, social culture that shapes our attitudes and shapes debate. His view was that this common culture underpinned exploitation, domination and unequal social relations. A classic example of this (although, as far as I know, not used by Antonio) was the "culture" that justified slavery for centuries, also the culture that gave legitimacy to the annihilation of "native peoples" in the "newly-discovered" territories of the "New World".
But the relevance of Antonio to today's debate on the Budget is that the "culture" that underpins our society confines discussion on issues such as the Budget within rigid constraints.
Almost never are basic questions about fairness or equality raised in debates about Budgets and, when they are, they are dismissed as eccentric or irrelevant. That is that Gramsci's idea of hegemony explains how there is created an ideological underpinning for given social relations (in this instance, hugely unequal social relations) that explains these social relations as "common sense" or "natural" or "inevitable".
BUT what is natural or inevitable about a society, or how is it simple common sense for the top 14,000 earners to earn as much as the bottom quarter of a million earners? How could it be that these 14,000 earners deserve so much and a quarter of a million deserve so little? And, if it is not a question of who deserves what, how could it be natural that this be so?
(The figures on income come from the recently-published "Statistical Report 2001" of the Revenue Commissioners).
And how could all that flows from such huge income disparities and all that parallels it in terms of inequality be natural or inevitable or make common sense? I am talking about the huge disparities in opportunity, in health care, in education, in power (above all, power), in political influence, in access to the arts and the media.
Isn't this unfairness the major issue in Irish society and politics? And shouldn't all policies be directed towards undoing this unfairness? I am not urging strict egalitarianism, for people are motivated (I think) at least in part by income incentives, and therefore overall wellbeing, including the wellbeing of the poorest, is enhanced by some inequalities.
But the huge inequality that currently prevails - that which pervades all aspects of social relations - surely that is the issue?
No, it won't do to claim that job-creation is the best way of dealing with this. We have had job-creation for a decade now and inequality remains on a massive scale. Of course, the provision of jobs is important, but it is not enough. There have to be other radical redistributive mechanisms, and among these is the annual Budget.
The Budget is not all that it is cracked up to be and it is not deserving of the hoopla that surrounds it, but it is one of the instruments whereby social inequalities could be evened out, at least a bit. And shouldn't the primary benchmark for Budgets be how they succeed in evening out the huge inequalities that happen by chance in society, at least in the income sphere?
WHY should people on incomes of over, say, €75,000 per annum (that is, three times the average income) not be required to pay tax at, say, 70 per cent on incomes over that threshold? Now I know there are pragmatic answers to this question (one of them being that it would drive all the super-rich to Portugal or the Isle of Man, all pretending to be earning income from offshore companies). But, in principle, what is the objection to this? And, if there are no principled objections, can we see a way to dealing with the pragmatic obstacles?
Among the pragmatic obstacles would be the political opposition there would be to this measure from the €75,000-plus earners, along with their representatives in parliament and their surrogates in the media. This, too, is a problem, but doesn't this say a lot about the depth of inequality? That a small proportion (fewer than 70,000 earners out of a total of over 1,856,000, or just 3.7 per cent of all earners) should be able to exercise such political "clout", how this could be, and is that fair?
Today will be dominated by talk not about fairness and equity, but about balancing the books, growth rates, inflation, and the odd bit about social welfare increases, which will be "in line" or maybe a bit above, certainly nothing to disturb the "common sense" arrangements that prevail.
( Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist of the 1920s and 1930s who wrote his most celebrated works from prison - they are gathered in a volume entitled Prison Notebooks).
vbrowne@irish-times.ie