American empire and the relative autonomy of European capitalism

Abstract This article examines the relationship between European states and the informal American empire following the Second World War. Building on neo-Marxist theory, it argues that any attempt to understand the political response to the ongoing euro crisis has to consider the deeper determinations of the trajectories of the states of North America and Western Europe through the course of the making of global capitalism since 1945. This involves, in particular, taking seriously the leading responsibility that the American state has had, and still has, for securing the conditions for capital accumulation internationally, even while other capitalist states retain their 'relative autonomy' within the informal American empire

Turning Points and Starting Points: Brenner, Left Turbulence and Class Politics

Robert Brenner's recent attempt to get a handle on the 'global turbulence' of capitalism's past half-century was soon followed by a more localized turbulence: a highly agitated response from the Marxist left. The hype injected by Brenner's editors at New Left Review ('Marx's enterprise has certainly found its successor') may carry some responsibility for the reaction, but great blurbs have rarely aroused Marxists. Brenner's amply justified reputation, and his impressive integration of a mass of economic data, no doubt contributed to the intense interest in his essay but this too falls short of explaining the tempest. His central argument, that the key to the 'turning point' in post-war profits is to be found in the relationship amongst capitalists rather than in the class conflict between capital and labour, is certainly controversial but in itself only resurrects a discussion that seemed to have exhausted itself in the seventies.3 And his addition to that earlier debate-that the high fixed costs of incumbent firms limited their exit from the world market, leading to excess capacity and pressures on profits-is, as others have emphasized, not entirely novel nor convincing. Why then such attention to, and controversy around, this essay

American Workers and the Left after Trump: Polarized Options

The widespread alienation of Americans from politics, which Donald Trump so handily exploited in his 2016 presidential election run, arose out of the uneven class and regional impacts of neoliberal globalization in the previous three to four decades. By the 2020 election, his success in polarizing the country through a politics of hate had reversed falling electoral engagement and brought record voter turnout, a majority of whom showed up at the polls to vote Trump out. Does the arrival of Joe Biden to the presidency signal the restoration of the legitimacy of American institutions? Does it even, as some on the left hope, suggest that the US is on the verge of a historic turn in the left’s favour? Or will we see a further resurgence of the right as voters become disillusioned with Biden? There is ample space for reform in American capitalism given high profits, the stunning scale that inequalities have reached, the comparatively modest levels of social provisioning, and the massive military budgets. But a radical turn to the left is quite another thing. Its likelihood doesn’t rest on Biden, but on organized pressures from below, and here it is the labour movement – or rather the possibilities for a new kind of labour movement – that is pivotal. What scope is there for socialists to directly engage workers and contribute to the birth of a coherent working class with the vision, confidence, and strategic and organizational capacities to lead a struggle for social transformation

Rethinking unions, registering socialism

After three decades of the waning of trade unions as a social force, their generally anaemic response to the Great Financial Crisis cannot but be registered. With the failure to build on the golden opportunity offered up by Occupy’s demonstration that audacious action can touch a populist nerve – punctuated by the eventual defeat of Wisconsin labour’s recall electoral strategy over a year after its exemplary occupation of the state assembly (which predated Occupy Wall Street by six months) – the left today confronts a more discomfiting question: does the rejuvenation of unions still really remain possible, or are unions now exhausted as an effective historical form through which working people organize themselves? To be clear, the issue is not whether unions and union-led struggles are about to disappear. Unions will stagger on, sometimes very heroically. They will carry on organizing, bargaining and filing grievances. And they will continue to strike, march, demonstrate and on occasion remind us of working-class potentials. But trade unions as they now exist no longer appear capable of adequately responding to the scale of the problems working classes face – whether the arena of struggle is the workplace, the bargaining table, the community, electoral politics or ideological debate. Although a recent symposium on unions in developed capitalist countries concluded that ‘the declining trend is visible everywhere’, this essay will focus on the impasse in US labour. The last time the US working class faced a comparable economic and internal crisis, during the 1930s, industrial unionism came to the fore. What new form of working-class organization might explode onto the agenda this time? Then, communists and socialists were vital to the formation and orientation of unions, at a time when radical organizers were inspired by the notion that workers could become the historical agents of a new society and unions might become schools for socialism. Is it still credible, in light of recent history, to believe that working people might one day be at the centre of radical social transformations

Socialism with Sober Senses: Developing Worker's Capacities

Recent waves of protests, encompassing a broad range of countries and led by the working class, seem to suggest that there is a new basis for socialist renewal. And yet to see in these developments the seeds of a socialist reawakening is to express a hope, not an argument. Socialists have played a role in this revival of militancy, but that role has been based on their credibility as individual militants rather than as socialists (even if, over the years, it was their socialism that inspired and sustained that militancy). As exciting and crucial as the new level of resistance is, there is still nothing in its scope which convincingly suggests that the working class will go beyond resistance to transform capitalism. The best we can argue is that the resistance which capitalism engenders leaves the door ajar to the possibility of socialism