Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives
* Book: In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives, by Greg Albo, Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch (available on aaaaarg.org).
Review
Brian Holmes:
"The authors all live in Canada, but they focus on the US banking system. Their writing is concise and lucid, without the hasty diagnostics and predictions of decline that plague so many Marxists. Two ideas inform the discussion of recent events. The first is that despite incessant proclamations, the corporate makeover of American society since the age of Reagan has not involved deregulation and the downsizing of big government. Instead it’s been all about re-regulating the economic game in favor of the largest players, and shifting both tax revenues and borrowed funds to serve new priorities (such as bailing out the banks whenever there’s a crisis). The second key idea is that the astronomical sums of computerized finance are not simply “speculative” or “fictitious” capital, as critics on the conservative Right and radical Left often say. Instead they are directive forces, shaping global urban and industrial development through the allocation of credit, offering nearly irrresistible incentives for certain kinds of avaricious behavior and exerting powerful disciplinary effects on companies, local governments and individuals. What we face in today’s society is not just “speculation gone wild,” but an increasingly integrated system of management whose leading institutions, the investment banks, now appear to have been strengthened rather than weakened by the crisis. As the authors observe, “financialization gives rise to such financial volatility that crises actually become one of the developmental features of neoliberalism, and this reinforces rather than undermines the central position of financial interests in capitalist power structures.” The point is that despite radical dreams of one great big apocalyptic blowout, such a finely tuned system of national and planetary management is not going to disappear in an eyeblink. It can only be confronted and beaten back over the course of the upcoming years and decades, by social forces which are presently dormant or have yet to be developed.
Albo, Gindin and Panitch are basically unionists. They devote much of their effort to understanding how the egalitarian politics of organized labor has been neutralized by the enlistment of workers as unwilling participants in the competition between firms and nations. What results, under the threat of layoffs and joblessness, is a downward spiral of concessions that leaves workers individually poorer and collectively short on resources for the development of cultures of solidarity and progressive social transformation. Under these conditions, no one could blame the three authors if they focus on the needed changes in organized labor, which in their view would include moving beyond traditional collective bargaining, toward broad community campaigns that involve people outside a single sector or place of employment. There are a lot of good ideas in this book, and its lucidity inspires lots of respect for serious socialist organizers. Still I ended up feeling restless, particularly when reading that the sharp declines in union membership “reflect, in part, the difficulty of organizing the service sector, where about 80 percent of employment is now found.” After the recent GM bankruptcy, surely we need to look beyond the likes of the UAW? As a freelance writer and translator with academic degrees gathering dust on a wall, I feel much closer to that amorphous “service sector” than to assembly lines and shop stewards. For personal, economic and cultural reasons, my main man in this summer’s quest for class consciousness has not been a union organizer or even a direct actionist from a group like “Take Back the Land.” Instead it’s been a critic of the contemporary knowledge factories." (http://occupyeverything.com/features/come-on-cognitarians/)