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Perhaps this millennial and presidential election year will provide a moment of opportunity for the Left. One notes at least some evidence of change. The "Washington consensus" on globalization is under attack from the Left in the name of wage and environmental standards, and from the Right as a threat to national sovereignty. Even Alan Greenspan now admits that growth without inflation is possible, though he continues to raise interest rates in anticipation of the dread disease. John Sweeney moves labor solidly if slowly ahead, while the events in Seattle provide a promising beginning for sustained Left activism against the "global free market" and its worst effects.
As an interdependent global system, capitalism currently has three big problems. First, there is the underlying contradiction of global overproduction of goods and services that most of the world-workers in underdeveloped and developing nations and the poor in rich countries-cannot afford to buy. Second, unregulated capital flows have produced too many disasters over two decades: the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s; the Mexican monetary crisis of 1994; the Southeast Asian, Brazilian, and Russian investment debacle of 1998; and the near bankruptcy of Long-Term Capital Management.1 Another disaster awaits with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Banks and investment houses will merge, while their ratio of reserve funds to capital outlay-currently 27 to 1 for investment firms and 14 to 1 for commercial banks-will escalate.2
Third, the world economy is askew, with America on one side of the balance and most of the rest of the globe on the other. Japan and China are depressed-the former for a decade, the latter for two years-with no end in sight. Europe, despite the Euro, still suffers from economic stagnation and high unemployment. Russia is falling apart. Latin America, save for southern Brazil and Argentina, is going downhill. Most of the Near East remains economically backward and rent by political-religious tensions. And sub-Saharan Africa is a casebook study of debt, extreme poverty, epidemic disease, and political and social anarchy. There are, in short, many people for whom globalization American-style is no particular blessing, and, if somehow they could be united for progressive change, the world might indeed become a different place.
A good moment, then, to focus on the new capitalist system, and to use this analysis to deepen and hone the Left's message and strategies. For me, Seattle signified that the Left and labor were responding to the threat of contemporary capitalism at the same levels-national and global-where capitalists concentrate their energies. It is also my view, elaborated below, that while grassroots activism is a useful, if minimally successful, strategy, overemphasizing it can lead to Left irrelevancy.
Most of the world, not without reason, regards America as a hegemonic power willing to disrupt the economy of the entire globe in order to maintain its own economic and financial supremacy. Our economic and technological primacy is belied by our social and moral backwardness, evidenced by our fast-disappearing welfare state and weak labor movement. And we have created and seek to export an economic and social system that not only is inegalitarian, but maintains itself by disordering all aspects of human life-the economy, society, government, and culture. I call it disorganized capitalism, because its principle of organization is, paradoxically, disorganization. It disorders everything it encounters both to perpetuate itself, and, conversely, to weaken the sources of human solidarity and transcendence found in government, community, family, religion, culture, and ideals of civilized human development (what the Germans call Bildung).3 Its strength derives from its capacity for segmentation, mystification, and destruction; and the more it wreaks havoc on society, the more its power, often veiled but real, grows.
The system we want to export worldwide began as a response to the capitalist crisis of the early 1970s. Keeping this crisis in view is important because it is still what capitalists fear and what they will do anything to avoid.
This crisis had four aspects, all reflected in a mysterious ailment-"stagflation"-that combined stagnant growth with high rates of inflation. Once Japan and Western Europe had recovered from World War II, the advanced industrial world became an arena of intense competition and saturated markets, threatening corporate profitability. Third World and postcolonial producers of raw materials and energy (OPEC) made First World capitalism vulnerable to commodity price inflation. All the advanced industrial nations were welfare states-along a spectrum from the weak American variety to the strong Swedish model-with extensive redistributive and regulatory agendas that required high and progressive taxation, additional business costs, and entailed either inflation (if business passed costs to consumers) or falling rates of profit (if, because of cutthroat competition, this was impossible). Lastly, corporations in America and Europe had to deal with populations-workers and consumers-deemed "ungovernable" because they had high expectations, scant patience, and growing disrespect for hierarchy and authority that sanctioned class, gender, and racial inequities.4
Because its weak welfare state presented less of an obstacle to ruthless restructuring, America took the lead in slowly but deliberately constructing a new capitalist system, one that would deal with the symptoms of the 1970s crisis and also manage both growth and inflation. The indispensable tool of this new system was technology-computers, software, new modes of digital telecommunications, and eventually the Internet. Note well, however, that the new technologies neither caused nor resolved the crisis. Rather, they acted as facilitators for the new system that achieved these objectives, and they continue today in their essential facilitating function.
The crisis was "solved" via the following combined and mutually reinforcing six strategies:
1. Corporate "Permanent Reconstruction." This term refers to the endless shakeup of corporate and workplace structure-using familiar strategies such as mergers, downsizing, contracting out, the export of production, and the search for emerging markets-that allows corporations to stay afloat in the whitewater of global competition, while keeping workers in a constant state of anxiety.
2. Uneven Development. The new capitalism practices an extreme form of uneven development: instantaneous movement to where high profits seem likely, and instantaneous disinvestment when problems arise or profits fall. This approach helps to maintain investor and corporate profitability, but precludes stable economic development in newly-developing nations (NDCs) and creates spatial patterns of inequity in urbanized regions worldwide. Extreme uneven development was behind the rapid investment and subsequent disinvestment that caused the Asian crisis of 1998; it is the source of the vast economic and social gap between North and South; and it is embodied in urban space through ghettoization and "redlining," squatter towns (in NDC megacities), suburban sprawl, and metropolitan inequites in education, transportation, public services, and housing.
3. Government Dissolution. The new capitalist system gains freedom, flexibility, and power when it discredits or weakens the countervailing authority of government. The first line of assault, therefore, is an ideological barrage aimed at discrediting government regulatory and redistributive agendas as impediments to progress, prosperity, and freedom-mystifications such as "getting government off the people's back," opening markets to "entrepreneurship," and moving "lazy and shiftless people from welfare to work." Next comes an agenda for government "reinvention," which entails massive reductions in the federal workforce; devolution of federal authority to much less powerful state and local jurisdictions; deregulation that abrogates rules and standards imposed for the public interest; and finally, budget cutting, which limits spending for welfare, health, education, training, and infrastructure.
4. Economic Stabilization and Free Trade. Government doesn't close down, but its power, in addition to national security functions, is targeted to economic stabilization and the promotion of free trade, policies that work in tandem because the one keeps the economy on track while the other helps expand it. Though good for the system, both policies affect workers adversely and force NDCs to pursue policies that inhibit their freedom and contradict their best interests.
Economic stabilization entails the use of
monetary policy to limit or expand the money supply and lower or raise interest rates to monitor growth and employment and control inflation. The suppression of inflation keeps workers' wages from rising (or depresses them); it reassures bondholders who finance our huge trade and current account deficits; and it comforts investors in the stock market who look to Federal Reserve monetary policy either to keep the market from "overheating" or to provide a safe landing in case the bubble bursts.
Free trade allows American corporations
to penetrate NDCs, transform them into "emerging markets," and at the same time discipline their behavior in accordance with the rules of the "global free market." Free trade promotes the export of production, and the availability of cheap NDC labor depresses wages worldwide. NDCs are subject to trade and investment rules-fiscal austerity and opening domestic markets to foreign exports-favoring rich nations, particularly America. In one sense, America takes a hit, because free trade results in our immense and growing trade deficit. But even this ultimately works to the system's advantage because foreigners-Europeans, Japanese, global capitalists from troubled NDCs-finance our deficit, permitting Americans to continue overconsuming while thriving on the distress of others.
5. The New Finance Industry. The finance industry is new, because since the 1980s it has created 100 or more financial instruments which help maintain the system while making it seem democratic. Fifty million Americans participate in an industry valued at six trillion dollars; capital flows have increased in the past two decades from trillions of transactions annually to trillions daily. Investment is now easier, more popular, and, at least in the short-term, less risky, because all kinds of debts and losses can be securitized, mutual fund investment tends to be diversified, and instantaneous communication allows investors to move easily in and out of the market. But what makes investment easier and faster also makes it more volatile: uneven development, vast and unregulated capital flows, and the new finance industry are, in short, all part of the same highly speculative, yet mutually reinforcing, practice.
The stock market has benefited most from
the new finance industry. Millions of new investors mean soaring stock values, and the wealth effect from soaring stocks has provided the wherewithal for an economic boom in which proliferating luxury goods are frontrunners.
But the conspicuous consumption of the
rich, though formidable, still cannot provide sufficient demand for overall economic growth, even at a slow pace of 2 percent, much less the recent pace of 4 percent, annually.5 Until 1998 workers' wages were stuck, so besides overtime, extra jobs, or two- and three-breadwinner families, the best means to promote consumption was the ubiquitous credit card. Credit expansion, of course, is part of the new finance industry and represents its most important contribution to the consumption end of the economy. The result is an America where families are less havens in a heartless world than debt-generating machines. Last year families spent 100.7 percent of their incomes after taxes, making household savings negative, and consumer bankruptcies are so numerous that Congress seeks to tighten bankruptcy laws.6
6. Consumerism and the New Culture Industry. Expanded credit provides the wherewithal for consumption, but it is the new culture industry that transforms consumption into a self-affirming and hedonistic experience. The culture industry helps maintain the new capitalist system by stimulating demand and simultaneously destabilizes life by commodifying things of value-the old critical culture, politics, religion, transcendent ideals of identity (Bildung), the subversive aspects of sexuality-and reducing them to fashion, celebrity, and entertainment. Through pop culture everything that once stood outside the system, and in critical relation to it, is now emptied of meaning and becomes grist-not the medium but the diluted message-for the system.
The culture industry is a strange amalgam
of businesses-telecommunications, media, entertainment, fashion, information, computers and software, advertising, and tourism-that are beginning to operate as one, and mergers of all kinds are daily events.
7. Like finance, the culture industry is one of our most high-tech industries, accounting for 15 percent to 20 percent of all new fixed investment in technology over the past decade.
8. The culture industry is also one of our fastest-growing industries and may well prove as important to twenty-first-century capitalism as railroads, steel, autos, electricity, and chemicals were to earlier phases.
But how, precisely, does the new culture
industry stimulate consumption? The fundamental answer is that it diffuses what Gramsci called the dominant ideology, which under contemporary capitalism is a paradoxical ideology that simultaneously promotes Calvinist values of character and disciplined individualism, as well as hedonistic permissiveness and narcissism. Reference to Daniel Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism will help explain the paradox. Bell perceived a possibly fatal contradiction in contemporary capitalism, which had produced the antithesis of its own work ethic in the hedonistic ethic of the 1960s counter-culture.
9. At present, however, we may forget Bell's contradiction, because his antitheses are now two complementary aspects of a dominant ideology that maintains, rather than undermines, the system. One ideological facet directs us to work as hard and as long as we can, because work provides discipline and character and-perhaps more important-a credit rating. The other facet exhorts us to indulge ourselves, via the credit card, with the things necessary to the good life-a persona (an easily changed identity, put on and taken off, like a designer suit of clothes), lots of things (Madonna's "material girl"), and as much sex, virtual or real, as we can get.
Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg typify the
moral and disciplined aspect of the equation. Many of Spielberg's films-Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, and The Color Purple-affirm an old form of American character, namely moral individualism and inner direction. And Hanks is the current movie star who most clearly exhibits "character," whether as a person dying of AIDS, as Forrest Gump, as an Apollo astronaut, or as the squadron leader in Saving Private Ryan. The hedonistic side of the equation is found everywhere-in advertising; in pop music, where "hot" clothes and hot sex conflate; in independent films, where hedonism and mild rebelliousness go together; in teen films, which focus on the creation of a persona and on consumption's contribution to popularity and success; and on TV sitcoms that endlessly address the theme of happiness and its material accouterments. Rarely does this sea of popular culture ever concern itself with politics, and even the best films stop short of overtly suggesting that our personal and familial miseries have a social and political context.
10. Indeed, most films, magazines, books, and TV programs are considered entertaining precisely because they focus exclusively on the self.
The more the culture industry directs us
toward the self and away from a common political life, the more the atomized, privatized self seeks satisfaction in consumption.
11. And the more consumption fuels the economy, the more the economy booms and sustains the system. The circle-vicious or virtuous, depending on one's politics-is closed.
There are several conclusions one might draw from the preceding analysis. The first is that global, and especially American, capitalism has managed to create a new and well-articulated social system that serves its need for power and capital accumulation, and that appears durable and capable of self-maintenance, despite-or, paradoxically, precisely because of-its underlying contradictions and the burden it imposes on all those, in NDCs and in advanced economies, who are neither global elites nor their professional minions. Indeed, perhaps capitalism has done so good a job of managing the crisis that still haunts it-the "stagflation" and "governability" crisis of the 1970s-that the Left can do little but tinker around the edges of the system, in local communities, to alleviate the system's worst effects.
This second conclusion is not one I would draw, nor is it a strategy I endorse. In the past thirty years the energies of the Left have been devoted to local action, and it is not uncommon for Left intellectuals to verge on religious piety when referring to "grassroots activism." It is in fact a truism of the Left in this society that nothing good is achieved that does not start at the grassroots, in contact with people in the places where they live, patiently and democratically building coalitions from the bottom up.
What explains this emphasis on local action? Grassroots proponents would argue that race, class, and gender hierarchies are primarily spatial; poor people and minorities experience classism and racism through ghettoization and through metropolitan inequities in public education, job access, transportation, and housing. The best way to reach minorities and women may not be at conventional worksites, because some may be unemployed and some may be part-time workers or "illegals." Often they are more accessible in their neighborhoods, where community issues are more important than workplace issues. Recruitment of minorities and women, therefore, must begin in the neighborhood and deal with fundamental local problems such as spatial segregation, metropolitan inequities, and street safety.
A more skeptical view might attribute the Left's enthusiasm for grassroots advocacy to an erroneous idea of democracy, traceable to the 1960s, that values the form of democracy-bottom-up coalitions-more than its substance, namely, programs and policies, wherever devised and enacted, that better people's lives and provide ideological direction to progressive movements. Or it may be that leftists feel depressed because capital appears to control the globe and have governments in its pocket. Depression may lead to a kind of populist romanticism that confuses immediacy with real and long-term efficacy. In a world where the Left is weak, only community action-getting close to people, winning hearts and minds one by one, creating political actors out of the passive and depoliticized subjects of the culture industry-seems effective, makes a difference, and provides personal and moral satisfaction. A still less salutary view of local activism might see its partisans as having wittingly or unwittingly bought into the communitarian movement, which, whether parsed from Left or Right, is still an essential aspect of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism.
12. Whatever the reasons, the results of grassroots activism are not spectacular. Failures are frequent, and victories, though often cited, slim.
13. Community-based organizations (CBOs) in this country are numerous, have many members, and are well funded by members' dues, governments (local, state, and federal), and foundations. What they have produced so far is a few million units of affordable housing, minimal economic development such as strip shopping centers and some credit unions, perhaps better police protection, and occasional public investment (in such things as a small-business incubator, a rerouted bus line, or a renovated school).
The regionalist movement, which proposes that inner cities and suburbs cooperate to solve regional problems (e.g., pollution, and sprawl, metropolitan inequities), either through regional governance or through the next best thing, regional tax sharing, has fared no better. The problem is that regionalism works well to create environmental coalitions that save pine barrens and wetlands or even limit sprawl. But the idea that suburbanites care about metropolitan inequities is unproven, and except for wealthy and enlightened communities (e.g., Montgomery County, Maryland) or places with eccentric politics like Minnesota, regionalism's impact on metropolitan inequity is confined to some good books, many articles, and discussions at urban planning conventions.
14. Otherwise, the sad statistics tell the story: class (economic) and racist ghettoization is increasing in all American metropolitan areas. Using the 1990 census as a basis, out of 318 metropolitan areas of varying sizes, there are 2,688 census tracts categorized as "high-poverty" or "concentrated poverty" neighborhoods (40 percent of residents below the poverty line). And almost 50 percent of these ghettos are black, 12 percent are Hispanic, 14 percent are white, and the rest are mixed poverty neighborhoods.
15. Community-based activism has neither solved the problems nor impeded the deterioration of our cities.
The prodigious efforts of community activists fail to produce equivalent results because local problems are no longer local in origin and cannot be managed at the community or regional level. The uneven spatial investment patterns of global and national capital are what cause suburban sprawl and metropolitan inequity. Most large real-estate developers, the guys who actually define the spatial contours of our metropolitan regions, operate with international financing at the global and national level.
16. And most local governments so desperately need jobs and investment that they will do anything to retain a global corporation, or entice one to settle somewhere near the locality.
Moreover, there is a national and global ordering of cities that has nothing to do with, and will not yield to, local action. Old industrial cities have, for the most part, been left to rot-in spite of all the publicity about the downtown revitalization of places like Cleveland and Baltimore-because we have transformed ourselves into a society where urban manufacturing is rare, where manufacturing jobs and enterprises are on the wane, and where valuable metropolitan space is used for high-end and high-tech services. New Sunbelt cities that boarded the metropolitan train when the service economy began to outstrip manufacturing are for the moment doing reasonably well. Global cities like New York and Los Angeles-not incidentally, world capitals of the finance and culture industries-sit atop the global metropolitan hierarchy, despite suffering from extremes of wealth and poverty. Such places do well because their wealth is legion, poverty is relative, and, by virtue of the opportunities they offer, they attract and are blessed with massive immigration. One reason community activism has been more successful in New York than elsewhere, for example, is that with the Koch administration's active assistance, with the glare of national media (three Presidents, for different reasons, paid "photo-op" visits to the Bronx), with the abundance of immigrants, and with the immense wealth (global foundations) on tap, even places like the South Bronx can be revitalized. But New York is the exception that proves the rule.
Finally, local action yields only minimal results because our cities and metropolitan regions have changed a good deal from what they were in 1900. Localities are fragmented and segregated in a manner that people rarely understand or discuss. Even fortunate places like New York have three separate but functioning political economies.
The first political economy is peopled by global elites and their professional minions. Global elites are distinctly not civic elites. They focus on their global concerns and on people in their own world who share those concerns. They live and work in the city but are not really of it; they often have their own private security forces and "improvement districts"; and everyone, particularly political officials, understands that in order for them to exercise their essential global functions, they must be served, accommodated, and provided, via gentrification, with an appropriate environment in which to do their job. Which means they live and work in luxurious isolation, even though their island is almost all of Manhattan. And it also means that local community activists have lost the dialectical relation of cooperation and conflict that was so important to past reform eras like Progressivism, because local elites are either a dying or an already extinct breed.
17. The second political economy is the real local economy, and consists mostly of small and moderate-size businesses that serve both the elites and the general population. These people are too preoccupied with their own particular fates (if they live off the elites they do well; if they live off the general population, their chances vary) to get involved in local politics. Many of them reside by choice in the suburbs. And if they are immigrants, the dual task of achieving integration into American society and attaining social mobility is what they focus on. They expect little of political officials except the normal public services-sanitation, police and fire protection, and perhaps public transportation-and they will get involved in politics only if the immediate interests of their businesses and families are threatened. Here community activism comes up against the lack of integrating institutions for immigrants and ordinary people-not only settlement houses and churches, which sometimes still play a role today, but particularly urban political machines that provided real coherence to communities and, most important, brought city hall to every street corner. Community activists in 1900 might have alternately feuded and worked with the local ward heeler, but they also profited, as contemporary activists cannot, from his capacity to politicize the community and from his and the machine's real relation to it.
The third political economy-the informal economy of drugs, gangs, crime, and sweatshops-functions illegally and is largely isolated from the other two economies. Global elites may occasionally make a slumming expedition onto the turf of the informal economy to buy cocaine or some other after-dinner treat. Licit small businessmen may have a sideline that entails running sweatshops and importing illegal labor. But the fact that community activism is by and large concentrated in the third political economy-the one in which police protection turns into police surveillance and brutality, local political officials shamefully neglect and cordon off to protect the other two economies, and the one from which everybody who can leave, does leave, creating neighborhoods of concentrated poverty-guarantees the minimal efficacy of grassroots community activism.
Where does labor fit in the context of a discussion focused, at one end, on the new structure of American and global capitalism, and, at the other end, on the inadequacy of Left activism at the grassroots level? I juxtaposed the two-to paraphrase Pascal, the vast infinity of the capitalist universe to the mite-like insignificance of community activism-to demonstrate how incongruent they are and how little the latter affects the former.
But labor, its local organizing efforts, and its role in relation to American and global capitalism are an entirely different matter. It would be preposterous, particularly after the deep losses of rank-and-file membership during the Meany and Kirkland eras, even to suggest that local organizing is anything but crucially important. Historically, labor has always organized from the bottom up, particularly in workplaces, but doubtless also in neighborhoods, pool halls, churches, and anywhere else where American workers could be found. Local strikes must continue to be run locally. And there is no way that labor can deal, industry by industry, with capital if it does not have the membership clout and dues to make such negotiations, or perhaps battles, possible.
One should, however, differentiate community-based recruitment from labor's need or obligation to consider community issues and organizing either as ends in themselves or as matters of primary concern, so as to relate to the "real" needs and interests of its actual or potential membership. I am not sure that the "new" working class consists primarily of women and minorities. That is, if present inegalitarian trends continue, and if labor does its job right, in the twenty-first century many underpaid and overworked white male professionals may join its ranks. But even if women and minorities are now the new working-class majority, the inefficacy of grassroots activism indicates that labor's ability to gain access to these groups, to improve their lives, and to promote radical change should not necessarily or principally entail following a grassroots path in alliance with community groups.
I believe labor has a lot more important fish to fry than this. Specifically, it needs to do three things that relate to its historic mission and that will also abet its long-run rank-and-file recruitment more than anything it might achieve bogged down in alliance with community activists.
First, it must develop and establish its voice-by which I mean its vision, its public ideology-and not merely its position on a few redistributive issues of particular interest to its members. And it must attempt to use every variety of public forum-this is, after all, the era of the culture industry-to express that voice loudly and clearly, so that it competes with, answers, debates, and hopefully trounces the mystifications and dominant ideology of capitalism at every turn. "Ideas," as Keynes said, "have consequences." If Labor's ideas are big enough, if they grasp the connection between current realities and future possibilities, and if they are at once critical, tough, prescient, and hopeful, they will catalyze a movement and help bring forth its political leaders. Let labor not forget its own larger history, which encompasses prophecy as well as practicality: to wit, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Eugene Debs, Leon Blum, Jean Jaures, Walt Whitman, John Dewey, Herbert Croly, W. E. B. Dubois, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Once it has found its voice, labor must work internationally to establish its global credentials and status. Earlier I mentioned many people and nations whose distress was directly attributable to the new capitalism, and who were therefore the natural allies of the American Left and American labor if-and this is a big if-we are ready to be their allies. A recent article in Foreign Affairs informs us that "the labor movement is deeply committed to the construction of a new internationalism" and that "unions have to reach across borders to forge the same kind of international links among workers and their allies that corporations have formed in shaping the new economy."
18. This is a good programmatic statement of intention, implying that Davos man will soon have a labor analog.
But how deep and broad is this commitment to internationalism? Does it include taking a hit in order to help nations and workers in Africa prosper, which doesn't necessarily mean allowing capitalists to pay African workers absurdly low wages, but may mean allowing some parts of our textile industry to be exported there as our workers are retrained for more value-added tasks? One would hope it entails coordinating policy and practices with West European, Scandinavian, and Canadian unions to do more than merely help each other win some battles with our respective employers. That is, I envision American and West European labor unions working together to develop a First World agenda that (1) devises strategies to strengthen the labor movement in each country-since many of them suffer from labor disunity; and are, like us, weak and hollowed out; and face capitalists and governments that disdain labor and constrain its activities; ( 2) proposes and implements a common policy toward the nations of the Second and Third Worlds, with an understanding that sacrifices might be in order to work against uneven development; and (3) sets forth not only core labor, social, environmental, and human rights standards, but the essential political demands for workers' participation in power-in corporate decisions and in public life-that will transform empty or rhetorical standards into realities. I am suggesting, in short, nothing less than a new Labor International.
The Left and labor must think ahead far into the twenty-first century, and also, with an eye to history, avoid the past century's mistakes. A major error of the twentieth century occurred when labor movements throughout Europe abandoned their belief in international unity and succumbed to nationalist ideologies. In lectures delivered at Oxford in 1929, the great French historian Elie Halevy brilliantly captured the ambiguity and tragedy of a pre-war Europe poised between socialist revolution and nationalist war. For him, the murder of Jean Jaures, that great tribune of French and international labor, on July 31, 1914, was an event equivalent to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Both led to the guns of August and from there, with inexorable logic, to the Century of Total War.19
At the beginning of a the twenty-first century, we, too, are poised between the promise of international socialism and a world of competing national capitalisms or supranational capitalist blocs that, if they prevail, will ultimately lead the world to disasters yet unknown. The nation-state is not waning; it is only, at the moment, in the wrong hands. Perhaps, as Mike Kazin suggests, the Left and labor will never control it. But we need more than a (supporting) seat at the table. We need a share of the action, and the right to help determine the rules by which the game is played, so that we can move the nation-state toward peace, justice, and equality. This will come only when international labor unity provides the clout that obliges national governments to recognize us as a force on par with international capital.
The route I propose here may appear to community activists as one far afield of minority communities, yet left and Labor action at the national and international level may be the best means of realizing their aims-the abolition of racial and class hierarchies and the egalitarian revitalization of the metropolis. There are many paths to the New Jerusalem, but perhaps the Greenpeace slogan, "Think globally, but act locally," needs to be reversed. In a global world, the local may remain our first concern, but the national and the global-the arenas of power-are where the action is.
Notes:
1. The best treatment of the dangers of unregulated capital flows is Robert A. Blecker, Taming Global Finance: A Better Architecture for Growth and Equity (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 1999). Blecker shows how the liberalization of capital flows is most harmful to newly developing nations, whose economies they both unsettle and constrain. The Long Term Capital Management (LCTM) bailout was probably the most spectacular of all, considering the fact that it involved the big names in global finance-Goldman Sachs, Chase Manhattan, J. P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter-who would have gone down with LCTM, posing what the head of the New York Fed called "unacceptable risks to the American economy." For the best piece on the entire scandal, see John Cassidy, "Time Bomb," The New Yorker (July 5, 1999), pp. 28-32.
2. Cassidy, "Time Bomb," p. 31.
3. The German concept of Bildung is an ideal of cultivated self-development that proposes a well-rounded human being who is educated to hone the mind and the body, who is required to experience different levels of society and move easily through different social classes, and who moves from self-interest to concern for ever-larger spheres of social and political concern. An aristocratic ideal, best expressed in Goethe's, Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister, Bildung is also an ideal that found its way into broadly generalized notions of "the gentleman" (as found, for example, in the novels of E. M. Forster) as well as into ideals of nonalienated labor espoused by Hegel and the early Marx. Bildung and a humane civilization are mutually reinforcing ideas, and they represent the total antithesis of the conceptions of personality and the self promoted in the contemporary culture industry's products.
4. The notion that populations in the advanced industrial nations were "ungovernable" in the late 1970s originated with the Trilateral Commission and was succinctly set forth in a widely discussed volume by three distinguished international scholars; see Michael J. Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975). The idea of "ungovernability" also worked its way into Jimmy Carter's thinking and was probably what he meant in his famous speech about "malaise." The best treatment of the subject can be found in M. Patricia Marchak, The Integrated Circus: The New Right and the Restructuring of Global Markets (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 93-118.
5. The growth rate of the American economy was 3.4 percent in 1996, 3.9 percent in 1997 and 1998, and more than 5 percent in 1999, for an average of approximately 4 percent. See Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, Growing Prosperity: The Battle for Growth with Equity in the 21st Century (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), pp. 2-3.
6. See Doug Henwood, "Booming, Borrowing, and Consuming: The U.S. Economy in 1999," Monthly Review 51, no. 3 (July-August 1999): 126-127.
7. For a thorough analysis of how the culture industry developed and of how it is becoming the property of a few moguls, see Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). For more popular accounts, see Michael J. Wolf, The Entertainment Economy: How Megamedia Forces Are Transforming Our Lives (New York: Times Books, 1999); Ken Auletta, The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Superhighway (New York: Random House, 1997); and Neal Gabler, Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality (New York: Knopf, 1998).
8. See Henwood, "Booming, Borrowing, and Consuming," pp. 125-126, for information about technological investment in the finance industry. For similar information with respect to the culture industry, see Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 277-311.
9. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976). My argument directly contradicts Bell's entire thesis. He sees what he calls the techno-economic aspect of postindustrial society as distinct from its cultural aspects, and he denies the existence of a "system." My argument is that the two aspects-techno-economic and cultural-are only apparently contradictory, but in fact serve to maintain a single system, or what some political economists call a "social structure of accumulation."
10. Warren Beatty's Bulworth was a lousy film, but it received good reviews because the political focus made it seem original. Much more interesting films such as Magnolia, American Beauty, and Happiness spend a great deal of time and effort examining the fury, madness, and distress that exist within the American family, without ever connecting private dysfunction to societal or political dysfunction. Another recent film, Fight Club, attempts to make a connection between the tribulations of masculinity in contemporary society and our inegalitarian and corrupt economy and politics, but it does so crudely, unconvincingly, and jejunely. The one authentically political recent film, Election, a satirical account of an ambitious young woman who will do anything-provide sex, steal, lie, and possibly murder-to get elected president of her high school student council is the exception that proves the rule, and it is, at any rate, a teenybopper film. There is a highly popular magazine aimed at young professionals, entitled Self.
11. The Internet is a prime medium for the privatization of self and consumption. Recent studies have indicated that Internet surfers spend as much as five or six hours a day on the Internet, and they report that their contact with friends, family, and even wives and lovers is declining as a result. And, of course, the Internet is a great stimulation to consumption. It has already increased consumption by hundreds of billions of dollars and is expected to do much more in the future-which is why, because of their potential for enhancing consumption and sustaining an economic boom, all those "dot.com" Internet companies that are now either profitless or losing money nonetheless have high valuations on the NASDAQ index. And once the Internet has more "content"-films, pop music, DVDs, TV programming, news analysis-it will provide constant, various, and immediately accessible entertainment. This is why, to inaugurate the millennium in true capitalist style, AOL recently bought Time-Warner.
12. A perfect example of unwitting acquiescence in neoliberal communitarianism is Harry C. Boyte, Commonwealth: A Return to Citizen Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989). Boyte talks a great deal about the accomplishments of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in San Antonio (COPS) and Baltimore (BUILD). The IAF is good at publicity, but low on achievement. For example, Baltimore's BUILD has not improved public education in that city one whit, despite a highly publicized campaign; and their living wage actions have not transformed Baltimore's ghettoes, which continue to deteriorate into deeper poverty (concentrations as high as 70 percent to 80 percent).
13. What I have in mind is the continued use of a few anecdotal examples-UNITE in Greensboro, Eric Mann's Labor/Community Alliance and Bus Rider's Union (BRU) in Los Angeles, and BUILD in Baltimore-to indicate victory. But these victories are never set in context so as to show their real impact; failures of achievement, as opposed to organizational triumphs, are never mentioned; and overall statistics are conveniently omitted. For example, Eric Mann has done lots of good work in Los Angeles, but his great achievement, forcing General Motors to keep its Van Ness plant open, was short-lived, since the plant shut down a few years later and the GM operation moved away.
14. David Rusk's Inside Game, Outside Game: Winning Strategies for Saving Urban America (Washington, D.C., Brookings Institution Press, 1999) is symptomatic of the regionalist movement's failings. Rusk, along with Myron Orfield, a lawyer and local politician in Minnesota, is the principal ideologist and proponent of a regional strategy that connects suburban sprawl to metropolitan inequities and that attempts to remedy these problems with regional governance or regional tax sharing. Rusk makes a strong case against community activism targeted to inner-city ghettos ("the inside game"); he shows graphically how little success the whole community development corporation (CDC) movement has had. But he makes a very weak case trying to affirm his own regionalist perspective ("the outside game"). through anecdotal, localized examples rather than statistics. There is no mention whatsoever of the global character of real-estate development and the connection of suburban sprawl and metropolitan inequity to global patterns of uneven development-this, in spite of the fact that scholarly studies of the subject emphasize the connection between globalization and metropolitan sprawl. See, for example Edward W. Soja, Post-Modern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989). Besides early twentieth-century work by Lewis Mumford, the best contemporary discussion of regionalism as a mode of subnational planning at the metropolitan level can be found in two classic works: Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place (New York: Knopf, 1990), and Robert Yaro and Tony Hiss, A Region at Risk: The Third Regional Plan for the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut Metropolitan Area (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996).
15. See Paul Jargowsky, Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios, and the American City (New York: Russell Sage, 1997), pp. 38-41.
16. For a complete discussion of this important question, see Susan S. Fainstein, The City Builders: Property, Politics, and Planning in London and New York (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), esp. pp. 2-33.
17. The New York City Central Labor Council worked hand-in-hand with local elites of the New York City Chamber of Commerce to establish Greater New York in 1898 and also to begin construction of the first New York City subway, the IRT, in 1900. The civic activities of elites in New York in 1900 are analyzed in David C. Hammack, Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1982).
18. See Jay Mazur, "Labor's New Internationalism," Foreign Affairs 79, no. 1 (January-February 2000), pp. 79-93. The citation is found on p. 86.
19. Ironically, for a humanist who believed that the "fanaticism of humanity" (human rights) had to prevail over the "fanaticism of nationality," Halevy was in England in 1929 to deliver the Rhodes Memorial Lectures, named after and endowed by the great English imperialist and jingoist Cecil Rhodes. Halevy understood that nationalist feelings were stronger in prewar Europe than socialist or revolutionary sentiments, and that is why a Europe poised between socialist revolution and nationalist war opted for the latter. See Elie Halevy, "The World Crisis of 1914-18: An Interpretation," in. The Era of Tyrannies, trans. R. K. Webb (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1965), pp. 209-48.
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