Who's Progressive?
William Greider
Occasionally, I provoke audiences of the left-liberal persuasion by posing
this question: who are the true progressives of this era? And who are the
reactionaries? Commerce and finance, after all, now claim the revolutionary
banner and are constructing a dynamic new social reality for the rest of us--a
reorganized world of globalized production, marketing, investing, business
structures, and labor markets. The left, meanwhile, is pinned down in rearguard
actions defending past accomplishments.
I restate the question because Andrew Glyn's essay may lend comfort to those
on the left (still numerous, it seems) who think globalization is a buzzword
largely irrelevant to their own goals. The widespread belief endures that
equable social relations, not to mention economic equality, can still be achieved
if only the correct policies are restored at home, nation-by-nation, regardless
of globalization. This is nostalgic, I think, and ultimately not very progressive.
Glyn does not quite say, of course, that globalization doesn't matter, only
that the domestic barriers to economic justice are much more formidable and
deserve primary attention. The analysis rests upon the usual conceit of formal
economics: political economy can be divided into two distinct realms--domestic
and international--and addressed independently. Thus, we may focus on the
domestic policy questions that seem familiar because they were already answered
long ago: how to achieve full employment, progressive taxation, a robust welfare
state.
The yearning to defend hearth and home first is natural enough--and more
appealing to people in every nation--but does it really address present circumstances
or the future that is unfolding? I think it invites a narrow-mindedness that
genuine progressives do not share.
Analytical distinctions notwithstanding, the world at large is now operating
on a different understanding of economic cause-and-effect, especially among
the governing elites who control decision-making on both ends of the global
system. Economic policies (and therefore social policies) are held hostage
by the dizzying cross-roughs of capital markets and multinational corporations,
the hardball politics of market-access dealing and manic investing.
I won't belabor the economic point because it gets made nearly every day
in business and financial news, most recently by the deflationary collapse
of Asian financial markets that, one way or another, will be "exported" to
supposedly "sound" economies like ours. Globalized finance has neocolonial
aspects as well as 24-hour interconnectedness. The veto over policies of leading
governments belongs to what I call the "rentier regime," an international
fraternity of wealth holders, investors, firms, and markets with these shared
objectives: hard money, inflated financial returns, and slow growth in advanced
economies.
The wage question is routinely decided by the labor arbitrage that companies
practice between high- and low-wage labor markets, moving the jobs to the
cheap workers or threatening to do so. The fierce price-cost competition among
firms has induced major industrial sectors to accumulate dangerous levels
of productive over-capacity worldwide--too many factories chasing scarce buyers.
And that feeds back into the deflationary pressures on wages and profits.
All these global influences and some others might be dismissed as marginal
or non-existent, as many orthodox economists do. But, in order to act unilaterally
on a domestic economic agenda, one is going to have to persuade political
and business elites that the global reality they confront every day is mere
illusion. A long list of nations, from Mitterand's France in 1982 to Mahathir's
Malaysia in 1997, has paid dearly for assuming global market forces are secondary
to domestic concerns. So have numerous labor unions, companies, and communities.
The larger point I want to make is political: if progressives are ever to
regain their spirit and influence, they will begin by renewing an expansive
progressive vision for the world, not by hunkering down behind national borders.
This means acknowledging what commerce and finance have already wrought and
recognizing that its effects are both destructive and potentially liberating
for people. The emerging global interconnectedness offers a grand new opportunity
for human relationships if humane social values can be imposed on the reckless,
amoral marketplace.
The question of coherent policies and political goals for the global system
is awesomely difficult, for sure, and will require a generation or more of
imagination and action. But this new world begins, I think, with a fairly
simple insight that progressives have always grasped: we are all in this together
now. Advanced nations cannot find shelter from the storm by throwing poor
people over the side. Our own social values are now expressed in the misery
and abuses we tolerate for those distant others who make the things we buy.
Our own prosperity will be eroded--or enhanced--by what happens to labor wages
and economic justice on the other end of the system.
The good news for progressives, I think, is that altruism is converging with
economic self-interest. The global system faces grave perils that will not
be resolved by market forces but might actually be ameliorated by doing the
right thing. All that remains to be done is to convince people that this is
so.
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