Neo-Liberalism, NAFTA, and the State of the North American Labour Movements

The consolidation of neo-liberalism since the 1980s has presented several challenges to unions in North America. Through the restructuring of the state and the promotion of globalization, neo-liberalism has made the terrain of struggle more daunting for unions. Changes in the organization of work are also implicated in the common threats to organized labour and workers more generally. These common pressures on labour in Canada, the United States and Mexico, however, have resulted in different outcomes for the three movements. Many have suggested that these common pressures should be met with an increased emphasis on transnational labour cooperation. It is argued here it is possible to build international solidarity without first building union capacities at the level of the local plant and at the level of the nation state

Postcapitalism: Alternatives or Detours?

The main political reference points in opposition to neoliberalism today – the constituent organizations of the Party of the European Left, the platforms associated with the left coalitional Iberian governments, the policy proposals that emerged from the British Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, and the Bernie Sanders candidacy in the Democratic Party presidential primaries – converge in a common rejection of social democracy's political cynicism and economic agenda seeking a return to one or another variant of competitive corporatism. The characteristic programme has been along the lines of the annual Euro-Memorandum: an anti-austerity, ‘Keynes-plus’ reversal of the economic policy regime of neoliberalism, recalling the alternative economic strategies of the 1970s, but now set within a far less ambitious transitional policy matrix. There is, however, deep-seated scepticism toward any of these agendas amongst many of the most militant opponents of neoliberalism, who have insisted on the importance of advancing a ‘postcapitalist’ future. For them, the necessary break from neoliberalism is too sharp, and the disintegration of the historical institutions of the left too severe, for a rehabilitation – at whatever scale of intervention – of a more egalitarian growth model that would recall the productivism and bureaucracy of postwar Fordism. Yet a more determined anti-capitalist seizure of power, occupation of the institutions of the state, and a programme of nationalization of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, is even less convincing for them. What is needed for renewing an emancipatory politic is thus quite different, and has been advanced in a variety of forms as projects for ‘postcapitalism’: in the construction of ‘real utopias’ offering new patterns of asset distribution and ownership ‘over work’; in the extension of practices of ‘commoning’ autonomous from the capitalist state and ‘apart from work’ as value production; and in the ‘acceleration’ of the pace of technological change toward ‘full automation’ to open up a ‘post-work’ social horizon. Such postcapitalist projects, it is argued, prefigure a more direct, participatory democratic order as well as a more direct, less state-dependent means of transcending value production. The question is, where exactly do these ‘real utopias’ of postcapitalism really take us? What openings do they suggest for the transformation of the economy and state necessary to sustain socialism as ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’? That is, do they actually point beyond capitalism or rather offer a series of detours toward the renewal of a ‘mixed economy’ inside capitalism

Socialist Register 2022 Preface

The preface introduces the theme of 'polarizations' and pays tribute to Leo Panitch -- the brilliant student of Socialist Register founder, Ralph Miliband, and editor of the Register from 1985 until his tragic death in December 2020 from Covid-19. With the word polarization now on the lips of commentators on the left as well as mainstream journalists everywhere, we feel it is the responsibility for the Register to undertake a deeper analysis of the current political and economic moment by addressing the underlying social contradictions that are producing these polarizations. It is one of the great ironies of our time that, just two decades after capitalism became the singular global mode of production, as capitalist accumulation and social relations finally penetrated every corner of the earth over 150 years after the Communist Manifesto predicted this, that polarizations of politics, income and wealth, gross consumption alongside abysmal poverty, of ecological destruction, are there for all to see. Our aim is that the essays will conceptually and analytically yield the kind of global survey that will help to uncover the generative mechanisms behind the multiplication of new and old “identities”, and not least nationalist and racial identities, as well as party and class polarizations amidst growing income and wealth inequalities, new forms of rural and urban divides, as well as of imperial and sub-imperial “rivalries”. A second year of the Covid-19 pandemic is adding to the polarities in its unequal impact on the global north and the global south, on the zones and classes with access to vaccines and those without, and on public health systems that have weathered decades of austerity with some remaining operational capacities and those on the brink of collapse. As well, the global lockdown to contain the virus brought about the deepest and most abrupt recession capitalism has experienced in decades, reinforcing pre-existing divisions in the world market. In this multi-dimensional crisis, the centre-right consensus that was struck around the neoliberal policy regime has been steadily splintering, with a phalanx of far right and neo-fascist groups inserting themselves into electoral politics and gaining prominence ‘in the streets’ (not least in motley demonstrations against pandemic measures of any kind, from lockdowns to masking). The volume also foregrounds the inter-connectedness of progressive struggles through the crises: the ‘new’ polarizations arising from the actual divisions of contemporary capitalism, understood in terms of the ‘old’ contradictions embedded in the class relations – in all their diversity – of capitalism. We hope such a perspective assists in understanding the forces of reaction that are mobilizing today and contribute to a socialist movement that is actively exploring alternatives in radical organization and democracy

Socialist Register 2021 Preface

Preparing the 2021 Socialist Register amidst the accelerating Coronavirus pandemic has been a considerable challenge. Our earlier decision that the time was ripe to explore ‘new ways of living’ in the twenty-first century through two successive volumes of the Register – under the rubric of ‘Beyond Market Dystopia’ for the 56th annual volume, and ‘Beyond Digital Capitalism’ for this 57th volume – was taken long before the greatest health crisis by far in over a century exploded, quite literally on a global scale, through the course of the first half of 2020. This crisis fully exposed for all to see the severe consequences of longstanding neoliberal state practices beholden to the blinkered competitive individualism of the proponents of pro-market ideology. And it drove them – however belatedly, confusedly, and temporarily – to undertake the types of massive social expenditures they had derided only months before. (‘There is such a thing as society’, Boris Johnson solemnly admonished the ghost of Margaret Thatcher in 10 Downing Street). But the pandemic also posed a new challenge for socialists, including for us as the editors as well as for all the contributors to this volume who we invited to analyze the nature of digital capitalism and its contradictions. Could we now do this in ways that also captured the significance of the pandemic and what it spoke to in terms of imagining, struggling for, and planning for, new ways of living? In addressing how far digital technology has become integral to the capitalist market dystopia of the first decades the twenty-first century we were deliberately seeking to counter so much facile futurist ‘cyber-utopian’ thinking that has proliferated through these decades. The proof of capitalism’s continued dynamism, even in the face of severe global economic crisis, lay in the most successful and most celebrated high-tech corporations of the new information sector which really were restructuring and refashioning not only our ways of communicating but of working and consuming, indeed ways of living. Yet precisely because this was taking place within the logics of capitalist accumulation and exploitation, and through the reproduction of capitalist social relations, this produced new contradictions and irrationalities. Perhaps none of these was greater than those revealed by the contrast between the investment, planning, and preparation that went into the interminable competitive race for ‘more speed’ by way of reducing latency in digital communications by so many milliseconds, on the one hand, and on the other the lack of investment, planning, and preparation that underlay the scandalous slowness of the responses to the spreading Covid-19 pandemic around the world

Socialist Register 2020 Preface

This 56th volume of the Socialist Register is motivated by wanting to look beyond – while still taking into account – the deep contradictions of neoliberal capitalism that have so far dominated political and economic life in the twenty-first century. These contradictions amount to something of a register of the dislocations and distortions of capitalist markets over the last several decades: the gross income and wealth inequalities of class and nation; the massive global credit expansion in volume and complexity underpinning economic growth; the intricate interconnections between financial markets and global value chains; the ever more limited capacities of states to control economic crises; the breaching of greenhouse gas emission targets under the relentless acceleration of the circulation and accumulation of capital still thoroughly dependent upon fossil fuel energy supplies; and the massive void that now exists between liberal democratic politics deploying policies of social inclusion and the material sources of social polarisation and class divisions. In the Preface to last year’s volume, A World Turned Upside Down?, we suggested that these developments ‘increasingly raise the stark question of whether we should once again be thinking of the options facing the world in terms of “socialism versus barbarism”… In a world overturning old certainties, soberly expressing the prospects for a way forward for the left requires setting out new left agendas for confronting the corporate powers of capital, and indentifying new hopeful organizational dynamics that could lead to state transformations.’ To look beyond the restricted horizons disciplining the range of acceptable political options today requires overcoming the current limits of vision as well as practice that would allow for other possible political choices. In the past years, we have seen a multiplication of writings on ‘alternatives’ speaking to ‘post-capitalism’ but most remain cast in terms of still working within – and most often accommodating – actually-existing capitalism. They too often reflect rather than transcend the contradictions entailed in, for instance, the promise of abundance from automation but also a severe intensification and degradation of work; or in the imperative to address ecological limits in a transformation of the socio-economic system but a seeming inability to reverse the waste economy or climate change; or the sickening overhousing of the few alongside a desperate need to address homelessness, social housing and the new global slums. By challenging our contributors to address what are the actual and possible ways of living in this century, we saw this as way of probing how to get beyond the deep contradictions of neoliberal capitalism. We did not want contributors to conceive their remit as future-oriented per se, but rather to see their mandate as locating utopic visions and struggles for alternate ways of living in the dystopic present. To this end, a number of the essays interrogate central dimensions of ‘how we live’ and ‘how we might live’ in terms of educating our children, housing and urbanism, accommodation of refugees and the displaced, and (to lean on that all too common phrase) the competitive time pressures for ‘work-life balance’