Sam Gindin and Leo Panich
Canadian Dimension magazine, July/August 2008
http://canadiandimension.com/articles/2008/07/09/1907/
It is time to take stock. The centrality of the American economy to the capitalist world — which now literally does encompass the whole world — has spread the financial crisis that began in the U.S. housing market around the globe. And the emerging economic recession triggered in the U.S by that financial crisis now threatens to spread globally, as well.
Capitalism has had an incredible run — politically and culturally, as well as economically — since the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. The resolution of that crisis required, as economists put it at the time, “reducing expectations” of the kind nurtured by the trade-union militancy and welfare-state gains of the 1960s. This was accomplished via the defeats suffered by trade unionism and the welfare state since the 1980s at the hands of what might properly be called capitalist militancy. It was accompanied by dramatic technological change, massive industrial restructuring alongside labour-market flexibility, and the over–all discipline provided by “competitiveness.”
That discipline brought with it an enormous increase in economic inequality, the spread of permanent working-class insecurity and the privatization of various public functions and structures. But this did not mean capitalism was no longer able to integrate the bulk of the population. On the contrary, this was now achieved through the private pension funds that mobilized workers savings, on the one hand, and through the mortgage and credit markets that loaned them the money to sustain high levels of consumer spending, on the other. At the centre of this were the private banking institutions, which, following their collapse in the Great Depression, had been nurtured back to health during the postwar decades, thereafter to unleash the explosion of global financial innovation that has defined our era.
The question begged by the current crisis is whether capitalism’s capacity to integrate the mass of people through their incorporation in financial markets has run out of steam. That the fault line should have appeared in “sub-prime” mortgage loans to African-Americans is hardly surprising — this has always been the Achilles heel of working-class incorporation into the American capitalist dream. But an economic earthquake will actually only result if there is a devaluation of working-class assets in general through a collapse of housing prices and the stocks and bonds in which their retirement savings are invested.
The State and Financial Crises
We are by no means there, yet. The role being played by the Federal Reserve — very much acting as the world central bank in light of the global implications of a U.S. recession — to prevent exactly this scenario should once and for all dispel the illusion that capitalist markets thrive without state intervention. The Fed has repeatedly poured liquidity into its financial system at the first sign of trouble. The question is whether the capacity of the system to go on integrating ordinary Americans though the expansion of investor and credit markets in this way has reached its limit. This was indeed suggested by the Bush Administration’s sudden (non-military) Keynesian turn, with a $150-billion fiscal stimulus. That fiscal stimulus at the federal level may, however, be undone at the state level, especially with municipal government cutbacks, given their massive dependence on property taxes. The way financial institutions that specialized in selling risk insurance on municipal bonds were enveloped in the credit crisis has further compounded the problem. This indeed brings to mind the extent to which it was municipal governments that were on the front lines of the Great Depression.
But while the US may very well move into a recession, which even when it ends may mark the beginning of a new era of slower growth, this is very different from a depression. While there is no doubt that mortgages in Black communities and for the working poor more generally will be tightened, it seems most likely that banks, competing for markets, will continue to extend credit to working families more generally. We need to remember that the top twenty per cent and their families are extravagant consumers. While growing inequalities are grotesque, the Left has consistently underestimated the extent to which the rich can sustain overall spending. The “correction” in the dollar (alongside the strength of U.S. manufacturing in the higher-tech sectors) has already led to offsetting growth in markets abroad; U.S. exports have been growing at double-digit rates over the past few years.
Finally, the U.S. state may revive its capacities for substantive infrastructural spending, if only to stimulate the construction industry now that the housing boom is over. There is a long-neglected need to rebuild U.S. infrastructure — as the collapsed levies of New Orleans and the collapsed bridges of Minneapolis dramatically showed.
Finance and Neoliberalism
There is an understandable tendency on the Left to take hope in capitalism’s current dilemmas. The extreme liberalization of finance (and along with it the era of neoliberalism) seems discredited. Finance today appears as no more than high-flying speculation — absurdly wasteful and ultimately not sustainable. U.S. corporations remain profitable, but with the credit crunch, who will buy the goods? Discredited as well, it therefore appears, is the U.S.’s capacity to keep its own house in order, never mind lead the process of globalization. Yet, before we assume that the openings created by this crisis place us on the verge of a matching new oppositional politics, we need a more careful reading of our times. While the new openings provide the space for a new politics, we must soberly appreciate the problematic link between such openings and a radical response.
To begin with, as immoral and irrational as finance might seem, financialization has been absolutely essential to the making and reproduction of global capitalism. Second, the growing consensus that finance must be re-regulated is hardly an attack on finance or neoliberalism more generally. Rather, it is about the engineering of finance such that it can continue to be “innovative” in the service of both itself and non-financial capital. Third, whatever problems the U.S. currently faces, its dominance will not fade because of a crisis in housing or a lower exchange rate; it does us no good to underestimate the staying power of the American capitalist empire.
It is not only finance but capitalism in general that rests on speculation. Behind a new firm or a new product rests the “speculation” that it can be sold at a cost and price that generates profit. Behind the distinction between finance and the “productive sector” is therefore something else: the notion that finance speculates in pieces of paper, not in providing goods or real services; it is a parasitic drain on the economy, not a constructive addition to it.
The problem with this line of thinking is that it mistakes what is rational from the perspective of certain moral criteria with what is rational within capitalism. The financial system is necessary to capitalism’s functioning. The discipline finance has imposed in the neoliberal era on particular capitalists and workers has forced an increase in U.S. productivity rates by way of increased exploitation, the more efficient use of each unit of capital, and the reallocation of capital to sectors that are most promising — all from the standpoint of profits, of course.
The penetration by American finance of foreign countries and the inflow of foreign capital into the U.S. has given the U.S. access to global savings, shored up its role as the greatest global consumer and reinforced the U.S. state’s power and options. Especially important, financial markets have come to provide non-financial corporations with mechanisms for managing their risks and for comparing and evaluating diverse investment opportunities in a highly complex global economy. Absent this role, globalization — at least to the extent we have experienced it — would not have been possible. Finally, as emphasized earlier, the “democratization” of American finance has given workers access to finance as savers and debtors, thereby contributing to their integration into, and dependence upon, capitalism and finance.
This does not mean that the explosion of finance is not a highly contradictory process; highly volatile financial markets inevitably generate financial crises. Rather, it shifts the question from whether financialization is irrational to whether its contradictions can be managed insofar as the crises can be contained. What working classes do in this context will be crucial to answering this question.
The Dialectics of Regulation
Finance cannot exist without regulation, and the U.S. financial sector, even before the latest crisis, was the most heavily regulated of any section of the U.S. economy. In fact, the dynamics of finance cannot be understood apart from how regulation shapes financial competition, how banks and other financial institutions try to escape or reshape that regulation, and the state’s subsequent counter-responses. The current dilemma for American regulatory institutions lies in how to re-regulate finance, so as to overcome its costly and dangerous volatility, without undermining finance’s needed innovative capacity.
We need to be clear that this is about re-engineering finance to strengthen capital accumulation, not to control it in the name of a larger public interest. To place democratic regulation of finance on the agenda would require asking: “regulation for what purpose?” — and so would mean going far beyond finance itself. It would mean raising the fundamental question of social control over investment, and therefore get to the heart of power in a capitalist society.
In the context of the failed promises of the past quarter century and the current crisis, to see this issue go completely unmentioned in the Democratic primary debate may not be surprising, given the absence of even a trade-union campaign around this — but it bespeaks an impoverishment of American politics that in fact goes all the way back to the New Deal. The issue of economic democracy that had been placed on the political agenda alongside the New Deal’s public infrastructure projects was set aside for the remainder of the century after the FDR’s administration’s self-described “grand truce with capital” in the late 1930s.
It will not do, therefore, to resort to the abstractions and obfuscations of calling for “re-regulation” or a “new, new deal.” It is the undemocratic power of private control over investment that needs to be put on the agenda.
American Empire in Crisis?
Four particular aspects of the limited fall-out from the present crisis demand more serious reflection. First, the fact that the crisis surfaced in the context of strong profits and low debt loads in the non-financial sector is important, and this accounts for the limited damage thus far.
Second, it is notable that, despite the IMF calling this the most serious banking crisis since the Great Depression, we have not seen a series of bank failures. This is certainly linked to the interventions of the U.S. Fed, but it also speaks to the strength of private U.S. financial institutions. In no other country could such a crisis have unfolded without massive financial bankruptcies.
Third, it is especially worthy of note that no major state saw an opportunity in the crisis to challenge or undermine the American state. Rather, their integration into global capitalism meant that they identified this crisis as their crisis, as well. They effectively recognized the U.S.’s central bank as the world’s central bank and cooperated with it in coordinating internationally repeated provision of liquidity to the banks. As in the previous instances of financial crises during the 1980s and 1990s, this reproduced and extended the American state’s leading role in managing global capitalism.
The fourth and most important factor is the remarkable “imperial flexibility” the U.S. enjoys by virtue of the weakness of its working class. Had U.S. workers, for example, insisted upon higher wages to compensate for rising food and oil prices and the devaluation of their homes, and had they taken advantage of the competitive space offered by a falling dollar, the Fed would have had to cope with the fear of inflation, and this might have meant higher rather than lower interest rates. And that could very well have aggravated the crisis and risked a financial meltdown. But rather than the working class demanding more, in fact it showed restraint — or, in the case of the autoworkers, accepted the greatest concessions the union has ever made.
The more important question, therefore, is not the economics of crisis but its politics. How will the working class respond to the crisis? If credit continues but becomes more costly; if the loss of private pensions, negotiated health care and the devaluation of homes force people into having to reduce consumption to shore up their savings; if food and oil prices leave less discretionary spending — if this is the near-term future, will workers rebel? Or will workers once again tighten their belts to preserve what is left from their past gains? And if frustrations are expressed politically, will the politics be limited to a longing for the good-old days before the crisis or before Bush?
Absent what Alan Sears at the recent Great Lakes Political Economy Graduate Student Conference at York University called “an infrastructure of resistance,” any opposition that does surface is most likely to be localized and contained, rather than built upon. A coherent alternative is not just a set of economic policy proposals, but a political movement that can develop the popular appreciation and capacities for radical democratic control over investment. There should be no illusion that a recession, or even a depression, will necessarily bring the issue of economic democracy back onto the U.S. political agenda. It would require a transformation of American politics to do so — and that, like the current economic crisis, would also have global implications.
This article was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 and is filed under Canadian Dimension Magazine, Economy, USA Issues and Politics.
“Perspectives on the U.S. Financial Crisis”
Comment by:
Alan L. Maki,
writing from United States on July 13th, 2008 at 7:47 am:
“Perspectives on the U.S. Financial Crisis” by Sam Gindin and Leo Panich misses a very important point in concluding: “There should be no illusion that a recession, or even a depression, will necessarily bring the issue of economic democracy back onto the U.S. political agenda. It would require a transformation of American politics to do so — and that, like the current economic crisis, would also have global implications.”
The exact same thing should be noted of Canada and every other country in the world.
In fact, Gindin and Panich, along with most of the “left” have been content to be satisfied with the concept of “many Marxisms” in the name of promoting an image of “democratic” socialism… when what they really mean is they are “free” from Communist Parties.
The result has been very weak Communist Parties incapable of carrying out the role of uniting the national working classes into a powerful international working class movement capable of challenging capitalism in its most advanced and decadent stage—imperialism— with everything sacrificed on the alter of corporate profits controlled through the national corporate interests by state monopoly capitalism.
It is very apparent and obvious that the Canadian working class is light-years ahead in thinking compared to the U.S. working class. Because of very parochial, anti-communist party mind-sets on the part of many in the Canadian and U.S. left there is little if any cross-border contact between rank-and-file workers.
Unfortunately, the Communist Party USA is currently hobbled by a particularly pernicious strain of revisionist leadership which has rejected industrial concentration and thrown its lot in with the dumb donkeys of the Democratic Party instead of becoming engaged in rank-and-file and grass-roots organizing against big-capital.
With Gindin and Panich continuing to ignore the fact that building strong, vibrant Communist Parties as being an integral part of Marxist thinking, they don’t do anything to help resolve the mess they describe so well… for articulating the political problem Gindin and Panich have made an important contribution; however, without following through with a clear analysis on what needs to be done, we remain bogged down without much progress on the class struggle front.
If Gindin and Panich think the working class will make any advances without very larger, powerful and extremely influential Communist Parties, I would like to hear how they think this will be possible.
I would just close by noting that during the 1930’s, the period Gindin and Panich single out as being a period of tremendous working class advances… the Communist Party of Canada and the Communist Party USA were very powerful and influential… one need only look at the organization of the auto and steel industries to see how strong Communist Parties made the real difference in these struggles.
Now, after considering the importance that Karl Marx attached to having strong Communist Parties in every country, let us examine this statement, again, and notice what is missing: “There should be no illusion that a recession, or even a depression, will necessarily bring the issue of economic democracy back onto the U.S. political agenda. It would require a transformation of American politics to do so — and that, like the current economic crisis, would also have global implications.”
Today, where capital has become even more powerful than it was in the 1930’s; it will take even stronger Communist Parties initiating the organization of huge mass movements, working in close cooperation across borders and oceans, in order for the working classes to make any significant headway.
Gindin and Panich, in addition to their failure to acknowledge the important function and role of Communist Parties in their socialist thinking, they also fail to bring forward what Marx thought was most important and fundamental as workers struggle against capital… the property question which has left Gindin and Panich without any clear analysis or solutions to plant closures throwing millions of workers in Canada and the U.S. out into the streets. The time has come to consider public ownership of these plants… after all, the auto industries in Canada and the United States have been subsidized to the hilt by tax-payers in both countries… and workers have created all the wealth… it is only common sense that public ownership now be considered together with nationalizations of this important industry. Again, there needs to be cross-border working class unity and this probably isn’t going to happen without strong Communist Parties in Canada and the United States.
Then again, it s unfortunate that the New Democratic Party doesn’t have a companion party down here in the United States… the time has come for rank-and-file Canadian trade unionists to introduce their sisters and brothers to the benefits of a labor party… the health care issue might be the logical place to begin.
Let’s get delegations of rank-and-file trade unionists crossing the border to get acquainted with each others problems… a discovery might be made that there is much to share and learn from each other which will advance class consciousness in a way that will resolve the problem Gindin and Panich are concerned about.
Alan L. Maki,
Secretary-Treasurer,
Minnesota/Dakota District
Communist Party USA
