Labor And The Politics Of Structural Adjustment In Australia And Indonesia

The labour forces of Australia and Indonesia are compared for the period from the late 1960s to the 1990s. The position of labour in a global economy is also considered. It is determined that the outlook for organised labour is bleak, however its position is also contingent upon national circumstance

The crisis and economic alternatives

As in other major turning points in the history of capitalism, powerful forces for restructuring the state and the economy have been set in motion. From both sides of the political spectrum, governments have been falling like dominos. In Italy and Greece, ‘technocratic governments’ were struck while in others something like a ‘common front’ formed between centre-right and social democratic parties to back the bailouts of the financial system and secure long-term policies of ‘fiscal consolidation’ (read austerity). This has kept even more interventionist economic policies within the parameters of ‘exceptional monetarism’ (along the lines advocated by Ben Bernanke of the US Federal Reserve), thereby seeking a balance between fiscal austerity and the ‘quantitative easing’ of monetary policy and debt consolidation to stabilize the financial system. This has allowed governments to attempt to reconstruct their broader neoliberal policy frameworks and power structures on a new foundation. At the same time the politics of the crisis has renewed the critique of neoliberalism, and even capitalism, and opened up new spaces of political opposition. Critics of the neoliberal rescue and exit strategies have become more numerous and more vocal as the crisis has worn on. This paper will survey a range of responses to the crisis -- from Keynesian analyses and Social Democratic policies to radical left alternatives. For many on the left, only the most minimal programme of financial re-regulation and Keynesian reflation are ‘feasible’. For others, every demonstration of resistance against existing powers is another rupture as the ‘multitude’ forms itself into an emergent anti-power. Both these approaches have long served as an excuse to leave key strategic questions to the side – these questions no longer matter, as the answers are already known. Tactics with respect to existing parliamentary forces or organizing the next demonstration take precedence. Yet what is really needed to move forward past defensive struggles and begin to think seriously about alternative strategies in the long battle against the austerity we now confront is the kind of socialist thinking, inspired by visions of possible futures, and developing strategies of critique and proposal as guides for realizing them. This is to insist on the primacy of politics – rather than letting the mechanics of falling profit rates and credit crises work out a strategy and programme – in establishing intermediate objectives and conjunctural tactics and proposals. The left is beginning to chart important new directions. Socialist strategies need to set an ambitious course – programmes that serve as a guide to action, an education about alternative ways of living and a practice through which people and movements themselves can develop the capacities to challenge and transcend capitalist power

Neoliberalism And The Discontented

It was Gramsci who noted that in a crisis the 'ruling class, which has numerous trained cadres, changes men and programmes and, with greater speed than is achieved by the subordinate classes, reabsorbs the control that was slipping from its grasp. Perhaps it may make sacrifices, and expose itself to an uncertain future by demagogic promises; but it retains power, reinforces it for the time being, and uses it to crush its adversary and disperse his leading cadres'. Neoliberalism has entailed just such changes of cadres and programmes, demagogic promises and exercises of power. It continues to register an astonishing political resilience in the centres of political and economic power; it has become institutionalized in the apparatuses of the state; it forms the economic calculus of financial and industrial capitalists; and it has also become internalized in the behavioural norms and strategic responses of unions and civil society organizations. The programme of neoliberalism may well be discredited and the numbers of discontented growing. But, as far as the balance of political power is concerned, this has not yet shifted in a way that allows anyone--least of all political militants--to speak honestly about a period 'after neoliberalism'

The Old and New Economics of Imperialism

Recent theorisations of the world economic order have at least cleared away the fog created by the 'globalization debate', with its talk of an equalizing world market and nascent cosmopolitan democracy. Attention has been refocused on material interests and the economic processes underlying the hierarchical arrangements of the world market. But they have left unresolved the opposition between these alternative interpretations of the trajectory of US power and the juxtaposition of rivalry and unity that characterises the new imperialism. As a result the persistent underlying contradictions of the world capitalist economy, and the US role in these contradictions, continue to be taken as signs of either the terminal decline of US power, or its opposite. In reality, however, economic internationalisation during this period of neoliberalism has been marked both by continuing competitive rivalry among the leading capitalist powers, and by growing economic interpenetration among capitalist firms and political interdependence between capitalist states. Contemporary imperialism, then, is an expression of the expansionist tendencies of capital to internationalize and constitute a world market for its valorization, while simultaneously differentiating itself into units located in states where class power and the production of value are materialized. There can be neither capital accumulation nor imperialism without states, or without the uneven development and relations of domination between states within the world market. Capitalist imperialism, on this reading, inherently involves contradictions between conflict and co-operation --what Harry Magdoff referred to in the 1990s as the 'centrifugal and centripetal forces--at the very core of the capitalist process'--and between competitive economic rivalry and interdependency in the world market

A World Market of Opportunities? Capitalist Obstacles and Left Economic Policy

This essay will, first, briefly recall the instabilities that still reside at the centre of the world economy and the limitations of neoliberal adjustment measures. It will then question the claims made by social democratic economic policy advocates that only specific constraints need to be overcome to re-establish stability, concluding that Miliband's first proposition on the obstacles that capitalism poses as a system cannot be relinquished. Finally, an outline of emerging alternative principles for socialist economic policy to confront these obstacles and constraints will be presented. Rather than a world economy being a new opportunity, contemporary internationalisation of markets is a contradictory 'space of flows' between the 'spaces of places of production' that are constituted by the specific territorially-embedded conflictual social property relations of capitalism. The economic programme of the Left cannot, following Miliband's second proposition, put to the side questions of market disengagement and the democratic organisational forms that will permit the transition to a more fundamentally egalitarian and co-operative economy

'Competitive Austerity' and the Impasse of Capitalist Employment Policy

Keynes closed his General Theory with the warning that 'it is certain that the world will not much longer tolerate the unemployment which, apart from brief intervals of excitement, is associated - and, in my opinion, inevitably associated - with present-day capitalistic individualism'. Despite Keynes's conviction that 'a right analysis of the problem [would] cure the disease', present-day capitalism is again associated with mass unemployment. This represents a remarkable reversal of the postwar 'golden age' of high growth and low unemployment. In the period from 1966-73 a state of virtual full employment was reached, with unemployment falling below 3 per cent in many states, with Germany and Japan even suffering serious labour shortages. From the oil shock of 1973 to the 1981-82 Volcker recession, mass unemployment spread across the OECD area, accompanied by accelerating inflation, giving rise to the awkward, if descriptive, term stagflation. Despite the recovery of the mid-80s and the squashing of inflation, the majority of the advanced capitalist bloc continues to be characterized by low-productivity increases, 'jobless growth' and steadily mounting unemployment. Even in the case of what often has been misleadingly referred to as the 'great North American jobs machine' unemployment has failed to drop back to pre-crisis levels

La vieja y la nueva economía del imperialismo

Hace cuarenta años, en el primer volumen del Socialist Register, Hamza Alavi señalaba que era necesario comenzar a analizar un "nuevo imperialismo", porque el "final del dominio colonial directo ... no [había] precipitado aún esa crisis terminal que marcaría el fin del capitalismo monopólico y anunciaría la era del socialismo". El autor insistía en que las teorías clásicas del imperialismo, con su énfasis en la expansión territorial tendiente a buscar nuevos mercados, ya no capturaban la dinámica clave en la economía mundial, y concluía que: "el propósito principal del ... nuevo imperialismo no es la exportación de capital como medio de explotar la fuerza de trabajo barata en el exterior. Se trata más bien de concentrar inversiones internas destinadas a expandir la producción en el país metropolitano y de buscar dominar los mercados mundiales a través de diversos medios...

The Limits of Eco-Localism: Scale, Strategy, Socialism

As neoliberalism has come to dominate the global market and regulatory framework its institutionalization and logic has fuelled developments in agriculture that drive rural people into urban slums, while at the same time fostering inter-local competition to reduce wages and environmental regulation. This also means, however, especially when we remember that most urban life on the planet bears no resemblance whatever to Richard Florida's image of yuppified city centres for the 'creative class', that the burden that 'the local' carries in strategies for a pro-sustainability, anti-neoliberal (and even an anti-capitalist) agenda is enormous. If 'place' and 'local space' are where the 'tangible solidarities' necessary to build an alternate way of life, and an anti-neoliberal politics, must form, then we cannot avoid confronting the systematic obstacles that have to be overcome in realizing such a project. Claims that sustainable local ecologies can serve as the foundation for political action and social alternatives at least require careful scrutiny