Paul Phillips wrote,
> ...[NAIRU, vertical phillips curve...] means you can not reduce
>unemployment through macro policy without first changing the
>institutions (destroying unions, capping wages, reducing minimum
>wages, UI payments, deregulating labour markets, etc., all the
>elements of the neo-con agenda.)
...
>... the rate of inflation acceptable to the capos which
>is also compable with the minimum rate of profits acceptable to the
>capos...
At the risk of blowing the discussion wide open, I have to challenge Paul's
one-sided listing of anti-working class institutional changes ("destroying
unions, capping wages," etc.) as if change were all bad. Strategically, the
heaviest burden for the left for the last 25 years has been the defence of
welfare state institutions, which, at best, were poorly designed and
unresponsive or, at worst, were actually intended to contain social unrest
and channel it away from political action (in which case they were not so
poorly designed, after all).
I've been called everything from a laissez-faire libertarian to a frothing
at the mouth right-winger for suggesting that some of those welfare state
institutions may not be worth defending at all. In fact, I maintain that it
is in the best interest of working people to dismantle some aspects of the
welfare state that are downright regressive. My advocacy is not based on a
hare-brained strategy to "make things worse so the masses will revolt" but
on an analysis of the political trade-offs contained in specific welfare
state policies.
Similarly, I think we miss a lot of the complexity if we insist that ruling
class policy goals are concerned _solely_ or even predominantly with
ensuring profits. Maintaining political hegemony is also high on the agenda
for the "capos" and that isn't always compatible with the most direct route
to profitability. Contra Mao and Chomsky, I'd have to argue (with Gramsci &
Aristotle) that political power comes neither from the barrel of a gun nor
from the ownership of the media. Persuasion still has something to do with it.
What the neo-liberals (I prefer this term to neo-con) have succeeded in
doing with their NAIRUs and their 'deregulation' is seize the platform as
proponents of a _possible_ future. They have only been able to monopolize
this stance because the left(s) have vacillated between being defenders of a
(illusory) comfortable recent past and advocates of an unlikely, apocalytic
vision.
Frankly, all of us, right and left, are a lot more bureaucratic and
conformist than any of us would care to admit. Thrust into political power,
we invariably peek into the file cabinets to see "how it's always been done."
To get back to Paul's comment about not being able to exercise "macro policy
without first changing the institutions" -- it's true in the most
fundamental sense. There is no macro policy exogenous to the institutions
that exercise it and on which it is exercised. The dispute between right and
left should not be about WHETHER to change institutions but about HOW to
change institutions.
Regards,
Tom Walker
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