Michael Perelman recently noted that Germany used to be the model for the progressive wing of the Clinton administration but that Germany is now moving rightward in its social and economic policies. He wanted to know what mistakes Germany made and whether an alternative strategy could have helped avoid the country falling into "the neo-liberal whirlpool." In part that question was motivated by his interest in figuring out what activists should be advocating in this country. I would like to discuss the implications of the German experience from a different angle in order to try and put the question in a different context. One of the assumptions guiding progressives who looked to Germany (or Sweden or Japan) as a kind of model for a humane capitalism, was that it was possible to reform capitalism in the interests of both workers and capitalists. In other words, progressives viewed Germany as having a superior form of capitalism in the double sense that it was more efficient than US capitalism and that it gained its competitive advantage by offering a more human work environment and social security system. One implication of this was that US progressives could accept mainstream arguments that competitiveness was the basic standard by which to judge the superiority of a social system but then argue that the best way to achieve the highest level of competitiveness was through state intervention and refashioned work relations, not free market policies. Progressives could also see themselves on the side of the workers since, seen from this perspective, workers would also be made better off by reforms to improve the competitiveness of capitalism. In fact, according to this view, progressives did not have to worry about organizing and mobilizing workers to fight for improvements because these German style reforms were also seen as being in capitalist interests as well. Not surprisingly then many progressives (working in and outside of the state) focused their efforts at trying to convince capitalists that they would be better off adopting social democratic reforms. Their goal thus became one of improving the productivity of capitalism, with the implied assumption that workers would be better off as a result of the realization of this goal. Sadly, this kind of thinking leads to a political dead end. Instead of fighting to get workers to see the contradictions in capitalism, the contradictions disappear. Instead of fighting to help workers build a vision of a post-capitalist world, the vision is narrowed to a better capitalism. Not surprisingly, we now see that German capitalists, because of global competition, find themselves able to breakdown the limits on their operation that past working class struggles had erected. German capitalism is thus coming to look more and more like US capitalism. Progressives who pinned their hopes for change on finding a superior capitalism as a model for change in the US are now in real trouble. They either give up their hope for reform of capitalism or they continue to follow the logic of their past thinking and move their vision of a reformed capitalism rightward with reality. Where does this all lead us? First, it is not a question of where the Germans went wrong. German capital and the German state were always interested in advancing capitalist interests. Those interests are not the same as that of German workers. In this historical era, German capitalists and state planners have decided to part ways with the German trade union movement because it is in their interest to do so. What went wrong is perhaps that German workers thought that they had a superior form of capitalism that would always work in concert with their needs. For us, the conclusion is that we need to fight to build an anti- capitalist consciousness, that we should engage in policy debates with that in mind, not with the expectation that we can or should try and reform capitalism. To do otherwise is to paint a false picture of what capitalism is capable of and to disempower the movement we need to build to go beyond a continually rightward moving capitalism. Marty Hart-Landsberg A point of information: Paul Burkett and I discuss this important issue of progressives and their search for a better capitalism in a chapter in the soon to be published Socialist Register 1996. The entire volume is organized around the theme of building alternatives.
