Neo-Liberalism, NAFTA, and the State of the North American Labour Movements

The consolidation of neo-liberalism since the 1980s has presented several challenges to unions in North America. Through the restructuring of the state and the promotion of globalization, neo-liberalism has made the terrain of struggle more daunting for unions. Changes in the organization of work are also implicated in the common threats to organized labour and workers more generally. These common pressures on labour in Canada, the United States and Mexico, however, have resulted in different outcomes for the three movements. Many have suggested that these common pressures should be met with an increased emphasis on transnational labour cooperation. It is argued here it is possible to build international solidarity without first building union capacities at the level of the local plant and at the level of the nation state

Postcapitalism: Alternatives or Detours?

The main political reference points in opposition to neoliberalism today – the constituent organizations of the Party of the European Left, the platforms associated with the left coalitional Iberian governments, the policy proposals that emerged from the British Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, and the Bernie Sanders candidacy in the Democratic Party presidential primaries – converge in a common rejection of social democracy's political cynicism and economic agenda seeking a return to one or another variant of competitive corporatism. The characteristic programme has been along the lines of the annual Euro-Memorandum: an anti-austerity, ‘Keynes-plus’ reversal of the economic policy regime of neoliberalism, recalling the alternative economic strategies of the 1970s, but now set within a far less ambitious transitional policy matrix. There is, however, deep-seated scepticism toward any of these agendas amongst many of the most militant opponents of neoliberalism, who have insisted on the importance of advancing a ‘postcapitalist’ future. For them, the necessary break from neoliberalism is too sharp, and the disintegration of the historical institutions of the left too severe, for a rehabilitation – at whatever scale of intervention – of a more egalitarian growth model that would recall the productivism and bureaucracy of postwar Fordism. Yet a more determined anti-capitalist seizure of power, occupation of the institutions of the state, and a programme of nationalization of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, is even less convincing for them. What is needed for renewing an emancipatory politic is thus quite different, and has been advanced in a variety of forms as projects for ‘postcapitalism’: in the construction of ‘real utopias’ offering new patterns of asset distribution and ownership ‘over work’; in the extension of practices of ‘commoning’ autonomous from the capitalist state and ‘apart from work’ as value production; and in the ‘acceleration’ of the pace of technological change toward ‘full automation’ to open up a ‘post-work’ social horizon. Such postcapitalist projects, it is argued, prefigure a more direct, participatory democratic order as well as a more direct, less state-dependent means of transcending value production. The question is, where exactly do these ‘real utopias’ of postcapitalism really take us? What openings do they suggest for the transformation of the economy and state necessary to sustain socialism as ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’? That is, do they actually point beyond capitalism or rather offer a series of detours toward the renewal of a ‘mixed economy’ inside capitalism

Socialist Register 2022 Preface

The preface introduces the theme of 'polarizations' and pays tribute to Leo Panitch -- the brilliant student of Socialist Register founder, Ralph Miliband, and editor of the Register from 1985 until his tragic death in December 2020 from Covid-19. With the word polarization now on the lips of commentators on the left as well as mainstream journalists everywhere, we feel it is the responsibility for the Register to undertake a deeper analysis of the current political and economic moment by addressing the underlying social contradictions that are producing these polarizations. It is one of the great ironies of our time that, just two decades after capitalism became the singular global mode of production, as capitalist accumulation and social relations finally penetrated every corner of the earth over 150 years after the Communist Manifesto predicted this, that polarizations of politics, income and wealth, gross consumption alongside abysmal poverty, of ecological destruction, are there for all to see. Our aim is that the essays will conceptually and analytically yield the kind of global survey that will help to uncover the generative mechanisms behind the multiplication of new and old “identities”, and not least nationalist and racial identities, as well as party and class polarizations amidst growing income and wealth inequalities, new forms of rural and urban divides, as well as of imperial and sub-imperial “rivalries”. A second year of the Covid-19 pandemic is adding to the polarities in its unequal impact on the global north and the global south, on the zones and classes with access to vaccines and those without, and on public health systems that have weathered decades of austerity with some remaining operational capacities and those on the brink of collapse. As well, the global lockdown to contain the virus brought about the deepest and most abrupt recession capitalism has experienced in decades, reinforcing pre-existing divisions in the world market. In this multi-dimensional crisis, the centre-right consensus that was struck around the neoliberal policy regime has been steadily splintering, with a phalanx of far right and neo-fascist groups inserting themselves into electoral politics and gaining prominence ‘in the streets’ (not least in motley demonstrations against pandemic measures of any kind, from lockdowns to masking). The volume also foregrounds the inter-connectedness of progressive struggles through the crises: the ‘new’ polarizations arising from the actual divisions of contemporary capitalism, understood in terms of the ‘old’ contradictions embedded in the class relations – in all their diversity – of capitalism. We hope such a perspective assists in understanding the forces of reaction that are mobilizing today and contribute to a socialist movement that is actively exploring alternatives in radical organization and democracy