If we had a left-progressive political party in this country, what kind of economic policy should it be advocating? Most economists of the kind we assume would belong to such a party seem to think its focus should be public investment in the country’s infrastructure, with payment coming from some combination of borrowing and higher taxes on those who were the chief beneficiaries of the regressive tax reforms of the 1980s. The purpose would be to put an end to the recession and hasten the arrival of the next cyclical upswing. Many of these economists of course are in favor of long-term reforms of various kinds, but they seem to be unanimous in believing that now is not the time to divert attention from the urgent task of getting the economy going again.
We think this is a short-sighted and self-defeating position. If and when the economy starts expanding again, interest in any kind of reform will abate, and conservative warnings against rocking the boat will become more persuasive. The time to raise questions about the need for fundamental change is when things are going badly and people are receptive. This is not to argue against immediate measures to relieve the suffering inflicted on a growing section of the population by the continuation, and quite likely the deepening, of the current recession. The problem is to come up with a program calculated to relieve current suffering and to initiate a process of radical reform. The purpose here is to indicate one way this could be done.
We start with two propositions which in this day and age are hardly more than truisms: (1) in order to prosper, capitalist economies as they have evolved in modern times have to grow; (2) unlimited economic growth in a limited environment is a contradiction in terms and ultimately a recipe for disaster. This means that capitalism has to be either drastically reformed (which we think is impossible) or be replaced by a different system. There are those who believe “ultimately” means so far in the future, like the cooling of the sun, as to be for all practical purposes irrelevant. But serious students of ecology tell us that “ultimately” means in the next century or so, which by historical standards is a very short time indeed. If we care about the future of the human species, as a left-progressive party surely would, we had better listen to the ecologists and begin right away to initiate a process of radical reform.
How could this be done? Not by rebuilding the country’s infrastructure. That should be undertaken anyway, recession or not. And it should be paid for by dramatically cutting the military. A substitution of this kind would not and should not be an anti-recession program. It would simply be transforming sheer waste into useful and necessary public investment. The anti-recession program should be something new and specifically aimed at helping to reorient the economy toward an ecologically viable future. Here we have an extremely valuable historical precedent to draw on, namely, the WPA (Works Progress Administration) and related job programs of the mid-1930s. These were not “public works” programs. Their purpose was to provide employment for unemployed men and women in their communities and, so far as possible, in their accustomed occupations (including even artists, writers, and actors). To a certain extent these jobs were ecologically related; this was especially true of the Citizens Conservation Corps (CCC) which took young people out of the inner cities to work in the forests and woodlands of the country. Today when the environmental movement is so much bigger and stronger than it was half a century ago, it should be possible to get local communities and groups in every state and region to put together enough proposals for cleaning up and rebuilding their own environments to employ all those who need and want useful work for a long time to come. This would be a real anti-recession program and at the same time something new with a hopeful potential for even more radical reforms in the future.
We should of course be under no illusion that this approach to solving the country’s problems would be acceptable to our capitalist ruling class. Their predecessors during the Great Depression rightly sensed that the WPA had anticapitalist implications, and they got rid of it long before its potential had been realized. In today’s much more reactionary political climate, they would attack to kill any such program from the outset. But is that any reason why the left should not propose it? And fight for it? How else are people going to learn?
Comments are closed.