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Notes From
the Editors
New Crusade: The
U.S. War on Terrorism
by Rahul Mahajan
Japan’s
Stagnationist Crises
by Joseph Halevi and Bill
Lucarelli
Antiwar
Movements, Then and Now
by Benjamin
Shepard
Also by this
Author:
Social Justice
and Globalization: Are they Compatible?
Rekindling
Socialist Imagination: Utopian Vision and Working-Class Capacities
|
The Daniel Singer Millennium Prize
Foundation was established last year for the purpose of building on the
late journalist and author’s agenda for a socialist future. To that end,
the foundation launched an annual essay contest. We’re pleased to publish
the contest’s inaugural prize-winning essay, chosen by an international
jury from entries representing ten states and five countries. Submissions for
the 2002 prize of $2500 should be no longer than 5000 words in any language and
should be sent to the Foundation at P.O. Box 334, Sherman CT, 06784, U.S.A.
Professor Sam Gindin is the Packer chair in Social Justice, Department of
Political Science at York University in Toronto.—The Editors
Introduction: If Small Changes are Impossible, Then …
Until recently, a pervasive sense of there-is-no-alternative left us with a
debilitating pessimism. Seattle was, arguably, the long-awaited antidote. Where
social democracy had seen the power of capital and was cowed by it, the Seattle
protesters recognized that building a decent world meant actively
resisting it. In this defiant understanding that resistance creates the
space for hope, the chain of protests initiated by Seattle fell in with a
tradition that saw realism in historic terms, rather than in a fetishism of the
present.
That tradition of an open future is, ironically, very much rooted in the
social revolutions that gave birth to the same capitalism that the
establishment was now deifying. Witnessing the transformation of what had, for
centuries, been considered the only way things might be, the French aristocrat
Alexis de Tocqueville observed how quickly “the evil suffered patiently as
inevitable [becomes] unendurable as soon as one conceives the idea of escaping
from it.”1 Shortly
after, John Stuart Mill echoed the same sentiment:
The entire history of social improvement has been a series of
transitions, by which one custom or institution after another, from being a
supposed primary necessity of social existence, has passed into the rank of a
universally stigmatized injustice and tyranny.2
The Seattle and post-Seattle protests had no ready-made alternatives. They
did not signal, as some prematurely assumed at the time, the labor
movement’s readiness to join, if not lead, a new internationalism. Nor was
the mobilizing capacity and sense of injustice they demonstrated directly
transferable to other crucial domestic issues. There has, for example,
been little evidence that the social movements that led to Seattle are as yet
either inclined to embrace, or capable of realizing, the larger task of
organizing sustained mass demonstrations within the United States against
American poverty, racial oppression, and the most aggressively anti-union
administrative practices in the developed world.
The importance of these protest-spectacles lay, rather, in their combining
the energy of direct action with the visionary potential of abstract thought.
If small changes were—as business, politicians, and editorial writers kept
reminding us—impossible, then maybe it was time again to start thinking
big. If social justice could no longer be discussed without addressing
globalization, Seattle declared that globalization could no longer be addressed
without addressing capitalism. And so, in the course of their resistance, a new
generation of protesters dared to name the system that hath no name.
By naming the previously unspoken social system behind globalization,
globalization was being politicized. Where “globalization” had become
a weapon brandished by business, politicians, and the media to explain what we
couldn’t do, placing capitalism itself up for discussion and
criticism was part of insisting that the limits we faced were socially
constructed, and could therefore be challenged, stretched, and one day
overcome. The protesters raised the stakes because enough of them didn’t
want in, but demanded something different. The term
“anti-capitalism” arrived on the public agenda.
While an identification with anti-capitalism in itself does not constitute
an alternative, it does point towards a new political project oriented to
discovering, articulating, and building an alternative. To demand, in echoes of
the sixties, the currently impossible, but to actually be realistic about this
rather than only utopian, means figuring out what
“anti-capitalism” means and where it leads. This entails speaking to
the limited nature of social justice inherent in liberal capitalism, to the
failed social democratic experiment at humanizing capitalism, to the
contradictions and opportunities pregnant in the present historical moment, and
to elaborating an alternative vision of social justice. This is what we
need to collectively contemplate as part of the exhilarating but intimidating
prospect of launching a new politics that can move beyond protest, and towards
closing the gap between what is and what might be.
Liberalism: Social Justice as Economic Freedom
Friedrich Hayek, Nobel laureate in Economics and a principal twentieth
century defender of liberal capitalism, once stated that “…nothing
has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as
the striving after this mirage of social justice.”3 We do not have to spend a
great deal of time on his jaundiced reading of the history of struggles for
social justice. What is, however, worth noting is his unequivocal
presumption that social justice and the freedoms we have under modern
capitalism are not only distinct from each other, but mutually
antagonistic.
What so many others have obscured and what Hayek to his credit confronts
directly, is that inequality is not an unfortunate aberration under capitalism,
but an inescapable outcome and an essential condition of its successful
economic functioning. Capitalism is—and this is surely as clear today as
it ever was—a social system based on class and competition. Such a society
guarantees not just inequality of result, but insofar as the results of
inequality are passed on through the institution of the family and the spatial
divisions of uneven capitalist development, the inequality is reproduced
inter-generationally and inter-regionally. This leads to a decisive inequality
of opportunity.
It is not surprising therefore that the most clear-minded defenders of
capitalism consequently seek to displace the terrain of debate over the
legitimacy of capitalism from distributive or equal-opportunity notions of
social justice, to notions of individual freedom and especially market
freedoms. The individual is placed at the center of a world in which the
concept of the community or the collective is confined to the
state—liberalism’s old nemesis. Liberalism then seeks to limit the
power of the state not only by the rule of law, freedom of expression and
association, and elected legislatures, but also and especially by the rights of
property, the inviolability of contract in market exchanges, and the protection
of private-family spaces to enjoy the fruits of property and labor.
There is no denying the powerful practical appeal of this structure. Both
civil and political rights and the historically unprecedented economic dynamism
and possibility of rising standards of living rested on it. Yet the reality of
class inequality behind this structure could not so easily be set aside. It is
only through class-tinged lenses that someone can describe as fully democratic
a society in which some people control the potential of others, control how
that potential develops over time, privately appropriate the surplus created in
social production, and apply that surplus to restructure work, communities, and
future opportunities.
The contradictions of liberal justice rest on the fact that a market
economy creates a market society, and that private property is
not and never was a relationship between people and things, but a relationship
between people. Historically, the creation of markets and private
property were not, as liberal mythology tends to present it, a matter of
getting the state to stand aside so natural human propensities could unfold.
Private property in particular emerged with the support of an absolutist state
controlled by landed interests who asserted unconditional rights over property
which had previously been constrained by traditional obligations. Those
interests, backed by the state, forcibly expropriated the commons—lands
formerly accessible to the community—for their exclusively private use.
The need to reproduce these kinds of private property rights and the privileges
they imply necessitated a permanently strong, active, and class-biased
state. Today, the drive to deepen and expand such rights takes the form of
neoliberal globalization.
Capitalism’s inequalities, it is crucial to emphasize, are not simply
about some getting more and others less, but rather that the economic freedom
capitalism embodies involves guaranteeing different kinds of freedoms
for different people. For a minority, economic freedom revolves around
the power to organize production and accumulate; for the rest, freedom to sell
one’s productive potential in a labor market and, on the basis of that, to
exercise some personal choice in consumer markets. What the minority is
accumulating as part of its freedom includes power over the labor of
others and therefore over their “individuality.” The freedom/power to
sell one’s productive potential and to exercise some choice in consumer
markets, in contrast, is founded on a dependency on those who provide the jobs
and the commodities available for consumption.
A recent magazine ad for Diesel jeans graphically demonstrates this
distinction at the heart of capitalist freedoms. Featured is a sleepy-eyed
model on a leather couch languidly holding a cool cocktail. “Think”
she coos to us, “of everything that’s wrong in the world. Then think
of shopping. That’s why,” she confides, “I like shopping.”
Yet while the message in the ad invites us to escape the troubling world,
the ambition of the corporation behind the ad is actively to engage and
restructure that world in terms of opening up new markets, allocating the
investment that shapes communities, and fashioning not just what we drink and
sit on and wear but the attitudes and values through which we are supposed to
define ourselves. What the ad, to no great surprise, does not stimulate us to
explore is either the corporation’s power or any sense that we might be
more than individual shoppers who seek to find escape from the common
grievances, alienation, and dashed hopes we share with others as we go about
addressing our daily lives, including how to get the money for the
things we need or think we need in such a world.
The Failure of Reform and the Counter-Attack
Capitalism’s moral limits and political vulnerability were visible from
the beginning and raised the issue of ameliorative responses. Montesquieu, the
French aristocrat writing in the mid 1700s, drew on earlier notions of social
responsibility and combined them with a sober awareness of the realities of
nascent capitalism to express a remarkably early argument for the welfare
state:
The state owes to every citizen an assured subsistence, proper
nourishment, suitable clothing, and a mode of life not incompatible with
health…whether it is to prevent the people from suffering, or whether it
be to prevent them from revolting.4
It nevertheless took the industrial and political organizing of the working
classes, two world wars, a great depression, and a golden age of economic
growth before the conditions could be created for modern social
democracy’s attempt to come to the moral rescue of capitalism through the
welfare state. But the gains in this period proved to be rather transitory, and
even at the time it was fairly clear that popular aspirations for democracy and
social justice—which were generally modest—were nevertheless
constricted.5 What was
not on the agenda in the golden age, certainly not from social democrats
looking to a humane capitalism, was much of an inclination to challenge the
limits of a democracy that didn’t look to democratize the institutions of
corporate power and of state bureaucracy. There was no longer any questioning
by social democracy of the social relations at the heart of the economy, of the
political division of society into those that led and those that followed, of
the divide embedded in a welfare state between those who planned and organized
social services and those who were dependent on them.
By the early seventies, in the context of intensified competition and
declining profits, the former concessions accepted by capitalism became
problematic; those concessions to social pressures came to be understood as
having undermined the requisite market discipline precisely because they
diverted too many resources to uncommodified and non-profitable uses. What were
recently measures of capitalism’s achievements were redefined as
responsible for the end of the golden age and as unaffordable barriers to
capital accumulation.
The neoliberal response set out to undo the historically-acquired social
limits that had redefined liberalism in practice in the postwar era.
Neoliberalism named a strategy that sought to place capitalism clearly back on
the track of its still incomplete development by accelerating the drive to
commodify, and therefore open every aspect of life to profits and the social
discipline imposed by profits. This was not just a matter of the extension of
markets spatially (“globalization”), but of deepening the domestic
penetration of markets into any social, personal, or cultural space that had
previously managed to escape subordination to a capitalistic calculus. Since
democracy tends to recreate protections against the anti-social logic of
markets, the implementation of neoliberalism also necessitated a decline, one
way or the other, in effective democracy.
The Contradictions of Neoliberal Success
For much of the left, the contradictions of neoliberalism lie in the
dynamics of its economic logic and their belief in the imminence of a breakdown
somewhat akin to the Great Depression. In contrast, I’d argue that the
potentials for building an effective counter-movement to capitalism, while
inseparable from capitalism’s material imperatives, lie not with its
impending collapse, but in the nature of its on-going success—that
is, in the nature of the neo-justice, neo-democracy, and neo-politics that came
with neoliberalism.
In reversing past popular gains in wages, benefits, and security, capitalism
was undoing the integrative role those previous concessions played. In
successfully consolidating its unilateral power to set the agenda, concerns
were triggered about the content of capitalist democracy. In bringing more and
more of life deeper into the cash nexus, the individualism capitalism offered
as the prize began to look more and more tawdry. In getting so much of what it
asked for, but not delivering on its promises, it raised challenges—still
very tentative, of course—about the authority of its agenda representing
the nation’s agenda. And related to this, as capitalism marched on
beyond its national domain, it gained new freedoms and powers vis-a-vis
domestic constraints but may have weakened its political base nationally.
Neoliberalism seems to fit so well with the no-alternative argument because
its very structure—the universalization of market dependence—tends to
de-politicize what happens. Markets, not social relations, seem the final
arbiter. “The market made us do it” becomes a national excuse. The
capitalism-with-a-human-face of the Keynesian era is replaced by a capitalism
with no face at all. But the project of deepening and expanding markets
requires the formal consolidation of property rights. And this, in the era of
globalization, has meant international treaties and international
administrative bodies: the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Free
Trade Area of the Americas, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade
Organization. This has led to two direct kinds of challenges to the new
economic order.
The constitutionalization of property rights in these treaties and
institutions placed—with a definitive push from the movements questioning
these treaties—the meaning of these changes onto the public agenda.
As the formerly invisible social reality behind market-making was made more
visible, the abstraction of the market was re-politicized. Capitalism had a
face again. At the same time, the international institutions that were to carry
out these agreements could not in the light of day readily defend what they
were doing. Such distant bodies simply do not have the cultural, historic, or
administrative authority to defend controversial messages. In extending its
reach with regards to international property rights, capitalism exposed that
reach, and we got a series of Seattles.
There is another dimension to this problem for capitalism in extending its
reach, and it relates to the decline of a distinctly national capitalist class.
Much attention has been paid to whether, in the context of the globalization of
production and capital flows, the nation-state is still relevant. This is, it
cannot be stressed too much, the wrong question. Strong states are not the
enemies of markets but an essential architectural partner. Only a strong state
could cross the geographic, social, personal, and biological borders demanded
by capitalism in its latest phase. What haschanged is the relationship
between corporations and what was formerly designated their home state.
Today each nation state represents a constellation of both domestic
and foreign capital and even the domestic capital is increasingly
internationally oriented. And so what has in fact been fading away is not the
existence of national states, but—with the possible exception of
the United States—the notion of a specifically national capitalist
class. In Canada, for example, by the measure of a specific commitment to
the development of Canadian communities and Canadian productive capacities,
there has been little evidence—especially since the free trade fight of
the mid-eighties—of anything particularly “Canadian” about
Canadian business. The most dynamic sections of business are either already
foreign-based or Canadian wannabees that are themselves increasingly
outward-focused.
The strategic question this raises is what happens if domestic movements to
challenge capitalism emerge at the same time as capital itself has no credible
national project. If a capitalist-worker-consumer alliance is no longer
in the cards nationally because there is no nationalist capitalist class, what
does this imply for the direction of such oppositional movements? Would their
isolation from any significant wing of domestic capital push them, out of
necessity even if not out of full conviction, towards more economically-radical
and inward-oriented domestic alternatives?
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Notes
- Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the
Revolution, Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 222.
- John Stuart Mill, quoted in Jonathan Wolff, An
Introduction to Political Philosophy, (New York: Oxford University Press),
196.
- Friedrich Hayek, Economic Freedom and
Representative Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
- Quoted in G. C. Morris, “Montesquieu and the
Varieties of Political Experience” in David Thompson (ed.), Political
Ideas (London: Penguin, 1990), 91.
- President Nixon captured a particular dimension of the
period’s limits. At that very moment in 1971 when the U.S. ended the
dollar’s convertability and signalled the end of the alleged golden age,
Nixon began his address by noting that “in the past forty years we have
only had two years of prosperity without war and without inflation.”
(Transcript, Address to Congress, in New York Times, September 10,
1971.)
- Naomi Klein, The Nation, March 19, 2001.
- Gerard Greenfield, “The Success of Being Dangerous,” Studies
in Political Economy, Spring 2001 (See also “A Different Kind of
Devastating: From Anti-corporate Populism to Anti-capitalist
Alternatives,” unpublished, available from author at gerardg@caw.ca).
- Andre Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason (London: Verso, 1989),
232-3
- Thomas More, Utopia(London: Penguin, 1965), 66-7.
- Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince and Other Writings (New York:
International Publishers, 1970),76.
- Richard Lewontin, Biology as Ideology (Concord, Ontario: Anansi,
1995), 95.
- David Harvey, Justice and the City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,
1977),97.
- Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York: International
Publishers, 1997), 43.
- Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Participatory Budgeting in Porto Alegre:
Towards a Redistributive Democracy,” Politics and Society, Dec.
1998, 461-510.
- Bertholt Brecht, Life of Galileo (New York: Arcade, 1994),79.
- Daniel Singer, Whose Millennium? Theirs or
Ours?(New York :Monthly Review, 1999).
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