Futures of Socialism

The Pandemic and the Post-Corbyn Era

Grace Blakeley

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781839761331
• eBook ISBN: 9781839761355
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

British politics is in an extraordinary place. Grace Blakeley introduces an indispensable collection of analysis and comment.

In Futures of Socialism, Sam Gindin and James Meadway reassess socialist strategy after the coronavirus; Dalia Gebrial and Si?n Errington debate austerity and precarity; Joshua Virasami and Simukai Chigudu explore anti-racism and the legacy of Empire; and Leo Panitch and Momentum co-founder James Schneider probe the limits of parliamentary socialism. Chris Saltmarsh assesses the prospects for an eco-socialist Green New Deal and Cat Hobbs argues for the ongoing centrality of public ownership to socialist policy.

Futures of Socialism takes an in-depth look at the reasons for Labour's 2019 election defeat, with Unite's Andrew Murray on Labour's Brexit position, Tom Mills on the British media, Gargi Bhattacharyya and Jeremy Gilbert on better ways to build a political project, and Keir Milburn on generation left. The anthology also compares the fortunes of the British left with socialist movements overseas, in despatches from Europe and America.

Blakeley draws on the talents of all sections of the post-Corbyn left to survey the prospects of 'a movement that has dominated the horizons of our lives'.

II. FUTURES

11

The Coronavirus and the
Crisis this Time

Sam Gindin

So many out-of-the way things had happened lately, that Alice has begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Crises – not regular downturns but major crises – are characterised by the uncertainty they bring. In the midst of these periodic calamities, we don’t know how or even whether we will stumble out of them, or what to expect if they do end. Crises are consequently moments of turmoil with openings for new political developments, good and bad.

Because each such crisis modifies the trajectory of history, the subsequent crisis occurs in a changed context and so has its own distinct features. The crisis of the 1970s, for example, involved a militant working class and a challenge to the US dollar; it brought a qualitative acceleration in the role of finance and of globalisation. The crisis of 2008–9, on the other hand, involved a largely defeated working class, confirmed the global supremacy of the dollar and generalised new ways of managing a uniquely finance-dependent economy. Though – like the previous crisis – it yielded more neoliberal financialisation, this time the upheaval, occurring alongside an acute disorientation of traditional political parties, opened the doors to both right-wing and left/centre-left parties.

This crisis is unique in an especially topsy-turvy way. The world, as Alice would say, is getting ‘curiouser and curiouser’. In past capitalist crises, the state intervened to try and get the economy going again. This time, states’ immediate focus was not how to revive the economy, but how to restrict it further. In introducing the language of ‘social distancing’ and ‘self-quarantine’ to cope with the emergency, governments suspended the social interactions that constitute a good part of the world of work and consumption.

This accent on the social, while putting the economic on the backburner, has brought a rather remarkable reversal in political discourse. A few short months before the pandemic the leader of France was the darling of business everywhere for spearheading the charge decisively to weaken the welfare state. Today Emmanuel Macron is gravely proclaiming that ‘free health care … and our welfare state are precious resources, indispensable advantages when destiny strikes’.

Macron was not alone in scrambling into reverse. Politicians of all stripes imposed measures to limit factory production to socially necessary products like ventilators, hospital beds, protective masks and gloves. Governments telling corporations what to produce became commonplace, with the UK’s Conservative prime minister, Boris Johnson, calling on auto companies to ‘switch from building cars to ventilators’, while President Donald Trump astonishingly went further by ‘ordering’ General Motors to make ventilators under the Defense Production Act.

At the same time, the crisis has graphically exposed the extreme fragility of working-class budgets. With so many people facing severe deprivation and the threat of social chaos, all levels of government are being pressed to address people’s basic health and survival needs. Republicans are now joining Democrats in proposing legislation to postpone mortgage payments, tighten rent controls and cancel interest payments on student debt. Their disagreements are generally not over whether to get more money to workers forced to stay at home, and to improve sick pay and unemployment insurance, but how significant these supports should be.

This is not to say that the ‘economic’ is being ignored, only that its traditional precedence is taking a back seat to the social, i.e. the health threat. There remains a deep concern to preserve enough of the economic infrastructure (production, services, trade, finance) to facilitate a return to some semblance of normality ‘later’. This is leading to massive bailouts, and this time – unlike the crisis of 2008–9 – the money is flowing not just to banks but also to the consumer services sector, including air travel companies, hotels and restaurants, and in particular to small and medium-sized businesses.

Governments everywhere have, as if by magic, found a way to pay for all kinds of programmes and supports that were previously written off as impossible. But – leaving aside the crucial issue of whether, after years of cutbacks in funds and skills, states have the capacity to carry out such plans fully (or even to effectively distribute funds) – can this all really be paid for simply by printing money?

The common critique is that, in economies at or near full employment, such massive injections of funds will be inflationary. But given the current reality of record idle capacity, this concern can be ignored (though there will be bottlenecks and possible inflation in certain sectors). And with every country being forced to take the same actions by the pandemic, the usual discipline of capital outflows is less binding: there are few places left to run to. Yet contradictions there are, albeit that they take a different form in our present circumstances.

First, there is in fact no free lunch. After the crisis is over, the emergency expenditures will have to be paid for. Once the economy is again operating at full tilt, meeting newly raised working-class expectations will no longer be possible through reviving the money presses. There are limited supplies of labour and natural resources, and choices will have to be made over who gets what; questions of inequality and redistribution will, given the history before and during the crisis, be intensified.

Second, as the crisis begins to fade, this rebalancing will happen unevenly. So the flow of capital may restart and, if it flows out of the countries still suffering, this will raise large questions about the morality of capital flows. The assumption that financial markets are untouchable may no longer hold: people may perhaps come to think, like Alice, that ‘very few things indeed [are] really impossible’. To the rebellion against the extent of inequality might be added a backlash calling for capital controls.

It’s true that the global status of the US dollar allows for a degree of American exceptionalism. In times of uncertainty there is generally an increased clamour for the dollar. But here too there is a limit. For one, the consequent rise in the US exchange rate can make US goods less competitive and further suppress manufacturing. But more important, international confidence in the dollar has rested not only on the strength of US financial markets but also on the US as a safe haven with an economically and politically pliant working class. If that working class were to rebel, the dollar’s special status would be compromised.

Openings to the left?

In such uncertain and anxious times, what most people likely crave is a quick return to normality, even if that would entail no shortage of great frustrations. Such inclinations come with a deference to authority to lead us through the calamity, something that has raised concerns about a new wave of state authoritarianism.

We should of course never underestimate the dangers from the right. But the contours of this crisis suggest a different possibility: a predisposition rather for greater openings and opportunities for the political left. Underlying the examples noted above is the reality that, at least for now, markets have been sidelined. The urgency over how we allocate labour, resources and equipment has overwhelmed considerations about competitiveness and maximising private profits, reorienting government priorities to focus instead on what is socially essential.

Moreover, as the financial system heads into uncharted territory again and looks to another boundless bailout from central banks and the state, a population watching history exasperatingly repeat itself may not remain as passive as it did a dozen years ago. People will no doubt again reluctantly accept their immediate obligation to save the banks, but politicians cannot help but worry about a popular backlash if this time there is no effective quid pro quo forced on the bankers.

And as well, a cultural change – still too indistinct to assess – may be afoot. The nature of the crisis and the social restrictions essential to overcoming it have made mutuality and solidarity – against individualism and neoliberal greed – the order of the day. An indelible image of this crisis sees quarantined yet inventive Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese congregating on their balconies, to sing, cheer and clap collective tributes to the courage of the health workers doing the most essential work on the front lines of the global war against the coronavirus, often for poverty wages.

All this opens up the prospect – but only the prospect – of a reorientation in social outlooks, as the crisis, and the state responses to it, unfold. What was once taken for granted as ‘natural’ may now be vulnerable to larger questions about how we should live and relate. For economic and political elites this clearly has its dangers. The trick, for them, is to make sure actions that are currently unavoidable are limited in scope and duration. Once the crisis is comfortably over, uncomfortable ideas and chancy measures must be put back in their box and the lid firmly shut. For popular forces, on the other hand, the challenge lies in keeping that box open.

The most obvious ideological shift brought on by the crisis has been in attitudes to healthcare. Opposition in the US to single-payer healthcare today looks all the more outlandish. Elsewhere, those tolerating healthcare for all but determined to impose cuts that left their systems far overstretched – along with those seeing healthcare as another commodity to be administered by emulating business practices rooted in profitability – are in awkward retreat. Their strategy has been exposed as having left us dangerously unprepared to deal with emergencies.

As we look to consolidate this new mood, we should not be content with the defensive game. This is a moment to think more ambitiously and insist on a far more comprehensive notion of what healthcare encompasses. This ranges across longstanding demands for public dental, drug and eye-care services. It raises the adequacy of long-term care facilities, particularly those that are private, but also those in public hands. It poses questions about the exclusion of personal care workers – who care for the sick, disabled and old – from the public health system, and accordingly from unions and safeguards. And, especially given the shortages of essential equipment we now confront, it poses the question of whether the entire chain of healthcare provision, including the manufacture of health equipment, should be in the public domain.

Thinking bigger extends to the connection between food and health, including restoring hot lunches in the school system; it extends to housing policy, and the contradiction of calling for social distancing given the persistence of crowded homeless shelters; it extends to making permanent the temporary sick days now on offer, and to the provision of childcare. It extends as well to taking ‘universality’ seriously enough to include the migrants who work our fields and the refugees who have been forced out of their communities.

The existential need for antidotes to avoid pandemics places a special responsibility on global drug companies. They have failed us. Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and no stranger to financial decision making, explained this failure in accounting terms, stating that pandemic products were not being developed because they are ‘extraordinarily high-risk investments’– a polite way of saying that corporations won’t adequately address the investments involved without massive government funding. The historian Adam Tooze put this more directly: when it comes to pharmaceutical companies prioritising the social over the profitable, ‘obscure coronaviruses don’t get the same attention as erectile dysfunction’.

The point is that the provision of medicines and vaccines is too important to leave to private companies with their private priorities. Since Big Pharma will only do the research on dangerous future vaccines if governments take the risk, subsidise and coordinate the distribution of the drugs and vaccines, an obvious question arises. Why don’t we cut out the self-serving middle-man? Why not place all this directly in the hands of the public as part of an integrated healthcare system?

The pandemic next time: the looming environmental catastrophe

The lack of preparedness for the coronavirus sends the clearest warning about the looming environmental crisis. As with this crisis, the longer we wait to address it, the more catastrophic it will be. But unlike the coronavirus, the environmental crisis is not only about ending a temporary health crisis, but about fixing the damage already done. As such, it demands transforming everything about how we live, work, travel, play and relate to each other. This will require maintaining and developing the productive capacities to carry out the necessary changes in our infrastructure, homes, factories and offices.

As conventional as the idea of conversion to renewable energy is now becoming, it is in fact a radical idea. The well-meaning slogan of a ‘just transition’ sounds reassuring but falls short. Those it is intended to win over understandably ask, ‘Who pays?’ The point is that restructuring the economy and prioritising the environment can’t happen without comprehensive planning. Such planning implies a challenge to the private property rights that corporations now enjoy.

At the very least, a National Conversion Agency should be established, with a mandate to ban the closing of facilities that could be recommissioned to serve environmental (and health) needs and to oversee that process. Workers could call on that agency to intervene if they think their workplace is preparing to make mass redundancies. The existence of such an institution would encourage workers to occupy closed workplaces as more than an act of protest; rather than appealing to a corporation that is no longer interested in the facility, their actions could ensure that the agency carries out its mandate.

Such a national agency would have to be supported by regional tech-conversion centres, employing hundreds if not thousands of young engineers enthusiastic to use their skills to address the existential challenge of the environment. Locally elected environmental boards would monitor community conditions, while locally elected job development boards would link community and environmental needs to jobs, workplace conversions and developing worker and plant capacities – all funded federally as part of a national plan, and all rooted in active neighbourhood committees and workplace committees.

The banks: once bitten, twice shy

Everything we hope to do in the way of significant change relies upon our ability to confront the dominance of private financial institutions over our lives. The financial system has all the hallmarks of a public utility: it greases the wheels of the economy, both production and consumption, mediates government policy and receives government funding whenever it finds itself in trouble. We currently have neither the political power nor the technical capacity to take control of finance and repurpose it. The challenge, therefore, is twofold. First, we must place the question on the public agenda – if we do not discuss it now, the moment will never be ripe for raising it. Second, we need to carve out specific spaces within the financial system both to achieve particular priorities and to develop the knowledge and skills for eventually running the financial system in our own interests.

A logical starting place is to establish two distinct government-owned banks: one to finance the infrastructural and housing demands that have been so badly neglected; the other to finance the Green New Deal and conversion. If these banks have to compete to get funds and earn the returns to pay off their loans, little will change. The commitment to establish these banks would have to include, as Scott Aquanno argues in a forthcoming paper, politically determined infusions of cash to make the kind of investments that private banks are reluctant to try: financing projects which have a high, if risky social return and low profits by conventional measures. That initial funding could come from a levy on all financial institutions – payback for the massive bailouts they received from the state.

Democratic planning: an oxymoron?

When the left speaks of democratic planning it is referencing a new kind of state – one that expresses the public will, encourages the widest popular involvement and actively develops the popular capacity to participate, as opposed to reducing people to commodified workers, data points or passive citizens.

‘Planning’ seems an inoffensive notion in itself: households plan, corporations plan and even neoliberal states plan. But introducing the kind of extensive planning we are proposing here calls forth familiar misgivings, fears and antagonisms. These cannot be dismissed by simply blaming corporate and media bias or the legacy of Cold War propaganda. The prejudices of powerful states have a material basis not only in failed experiments elsewhere, but also in their relations with socialist nations that may indeed be bureaucratic, arbitrary, wasteful and inflexible.

Adding the adjective ‘democratic’ doesn’t solve this dilemma. And though international examples may include suggestive policies and structures, the sober truth is that there are no fully convincing models on offer. This leaves us tirelessly repeating our critiques of capitalism – yet, essential as this is, it is not enough.

What we can do is start with an unambiguous commitment to assure others that we are not advocating an all-powerful state and that we value the liberal freedoms won historically: the expansion of the vote to all adults, free speech, the right to assembly, protection against arbitrary arrest, state transparency. We should insist that taking these principles seriously demands an extensive redistribution of income and wealth, so that everyone, in substance not just in formal status, has an equal chance to participate.

In emphasising the democratic side of planning, it is absolutely crucial to address specific mechanisms and institutions as a way to facilitate new levels of popular participation. These would include new central capacities, as well as a range of decentralised planning bodies such as those referenced earlier: regional research centres, locally elected environmental and job development boards, workplace and neighbourhood committees and sectoral councils.

The health crisis has notably highlighted the necessity for workplace control by those who do the work. Provisions to promote worker autonomy should extend to workers using their direct knowledge to act as guardians of the pub...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• I. Foundations
• II. Futures
• Contributors