Flawed Capitalism

The Anglo-American Condition and its Resolution

David Coates

• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781911116332
• eBook ISBN: 9781788211338
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Drawing on over four decades of research and writing on the political economy of the UK and United States, David Coates offers a masterly account of the Anglo-American condition and the social and economic crisis besetting both countries.

Charting the rise and fall of the social settlements that have shaped and defined the postwar years, Coates traces the history of the two economies through first their New Deal and then their Reaganite periods – ones labelled differently in the UK, but similarly marked by the development first of a Keynesian welfare state and then a Thatcherite neoliberal one.

Coates exposes the failings and shortcomings of the Reagan/Thatcher years, showing how the underlying fragility of a settlement based on the weakening of organized labour and the extensive deregulation of business culminated in the financial crisis of 2008.

The legacies of that crisis haunt us still – a squeezed middle class, further embedded poverty, deepened racial divisions, an adverse work–life balance for two-income families, and a growing crisis of housing and employment for the young. Flawed Capitalism deals with each in turn, and makes the case for the creation of a new transatlantic social settlement – a less flawed capitalism – one based on greater degrees of income equality and social justice.

As members of the millennial generation come to their maturity on each side of the Atlantic, Flawed Capitalism offers the critical intellectual tools that they will need if they are ever to break decisively with the failed public policies of the past.

1

The Anglo-American Condition: Similarities and Differences

“We have always been kin: kin in blood, kin in religion, kin in representative government, kin in ideals, kin in just and lofty purposes; and now we are kin in sin, the harmony is complete, the blend is perfect, like Mr. Churchill himself, whom I now have the honor to present to you.”

Mark Twain, introducing Winston Churchill at a meeting on the Boer War at the Waldorf Astoria in New York in December 1900: showing his own distaste for British and American imperialism¹

“Anglo-American households are broke. Too many households have endured years of declining real incomes, bouts of unemployment, rising indebtedness and without sufficient savings: they are bearing the brunt of the economic downturn and are disproportionately paying for the costs of fiscal austerity without any evidence of a lasting recovery.”

Johnna Montgomerie²

There is nothing particularly forced or arbitrary about putting the words “Anglo” and “American” together in a single and hyphenated adjective. On the contrary, if only by dint of common usage, it is any opening moment of conceptual separation and doubt that requires some effort: a moment at which the apparent “naturalness” of the coupling between the two terms needs to be explored. But that exploration is necessary: because, as is immediately obvious whenever we stop to reflect upon it, the United Kingdom and the United States are very different places, and there is nothing preordained in the existence of any similarities between them. So, if we are going to study them together, as we are now – and particularly if we are going to make statements that encompass them both, as we definitely will – it behoves us first to justify the underlying design of the exercise upon which we are poised to embark.

Putting the two countries together and setting them apart

So why put the two countries together, separate them off from the rest, and seek out statements that encompass them both? Two different reasons initially spring to mind. The first is that we can undertake that exercise with some confidence because we are not moving into new territory – because there have been many occasions in the past on which governments in both countries have done something similar. They have acted together. They have separated themselves off from significant others; and they have made general statements about their shared conditions and interests. Putting “Anglo” and “American” together in a single hyphenated adjective captures verbally, therefore, the existence of something that is actually real, and something that on occasion has been extremely important in world history: namely a “special relationship” between the two countries, one firmly grounded in overlapping histories, similar institutions and shared languages and culture.

The second reason is this: that we can also put the two countries together because many other scholars have done so before us. In treating the two countries as a single and interconnected subject of analysis, we necessarily join an already existing large and rich literature on those interlinked histories, institutions and cultures.³ We also become a new player in a particular body of scholarship – in comparative political economy – within which it is now common to postulate the existence of an Anglo-American “model” of how to run a modern economy and society. This volume will contribute to that last body of work in particular: and in relation to it at least, the obligation of these opening pages will be less to justify talking about the two economies as similar than to justify characterizing them as being, because similar, equally flawed.

The United Kingdom and the United States go back together a long way in time. The 13 colonies that initially created the United States did so – as America annually celebrates – in rebellion against the British crown. What the fourth of July fireworks tend to illuminate less than the brave separation, however, is the extent to which the breakaway colonies, as just half of the 26 American and Caribbean colonies of the first British Empire, like the other 13 had been constructed internally under British direction. Each shared a language with the “mother country”. Each shared similar legal codes and judicial practices. Each shared similar commercial activities and constitutive social classes. And many of their leading citizens even shared – right to the very end of the colonial period – a common desire to be British: Benjamin Franklin in particular came to his own revolutionary break very reluctantly and very late in the day. For what linked the newly-independent United States most to the British Isles from which the former colonists or their forebears had once come, were the people who first populated particularly the northern-most set of the 13 breakaway states. After 1620, significant parts of the most progressive sections of the emerging British middle class ended up precisely there, freer in the new world than in the old to pursue their own religious predilections, and freer too to create a modern capitalist economy untrammelled by feudal legacies. They came for freedom, and most of them came as, and wanting to remain, British.

Yet in spite of all that, the relationship between the new nation and the old was understandably initially rather fraught – the two countries fought a brief second war, after all, between 1814 and 1816 – a war from which the United States then drew the imagery for the national anthem which it uses to this day. But thereafter, the linkage between the two grew. They grew in volume; they grew in regularity; and they grew in ease: as people continued to migrate from key parts of the United Kingdom to the United States (especially from Ireland); as UK technology and capital crossed the Atlantic in ever greater quantities to develop the post-Civil War American economy; and as the sharing of a common language between the British and the North Americans left each society particularly open to the exchange of intellectual products and to the creation of a shared cultural universe. As Jim Cronin rightly put it, “intercourse and exchange between Britain and the United States have been … constant and critical, and they have occurred at the very highest levels; and the two countries have chosen to be each other’s best ally in all the geopolitical conflicts that have dominated international relations in the [twentieth] century”.⁴

Throughout the nineteenth century, the United Kingdom was the senior partner in the emerging relationship between the two. Economically and militarily, the United States was the junior actor then – playing catch-up economically, and normally restricting itself globally only to interventions in its own self-appointed sphere, namely the Americas. That changed, of course, quickly after 1941. For by then, the US economy was already larger and more dynamic than the British – the economic imperative to “catch up” had already shifted across to the European side of the Atlantic long before the attack on Pearl Harbor – and by the end of the Second World War, the equivalent military shift had also followed. For by 1945, the decline of the British Empire was as visible to much of the rest of the world, if not always to key figures in the British political elite, as was the rise of its less formal but no less real American equivalent.

This resetting of leadership within the military and economic interplay between two great imperial powers was also reflected in a more subtle and nuanced shift in the interplay between the two socially and culturally: the thinning of the social and ideational relationship between them over time, with the emergence – especially in the United States – of social categories and localized histories that set the US and the UK apart. The two societies had never been totally similar, of course. The nineteenth century British one was heavily scarred (and the twentieth century one was still vestigially so) by a feudal past that America lacked, a feudal legacy that left a British aristocracy in place, if not a peasantry. From its inception, the United States was totally free of such feudal shadows, but it remains scarred to this day (and scarred even more severely than were the British by feudalism) by the legacies of the slavery it once consolidated in its southern states, and of the genocide it practiced on the native Americans who resisted the encroachment of European settlement on the lands they had occupied for millennia. The nineteenth-century British had their immigrants too – Irish immigrants fleeing famine in the 1840s just like the United States, and Eastern European Jews fleeing pogroms in the 1890s, again with American parallels – but the biggest difference between the two by then was the predominant composition of the labour forces filling the factories of the industrial economies that both societies were developing apace in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The nineteenth-century British drew their factory labour force, in the main, from their own urban and rural areas – at the end of a two-century period of conversion of an English and Scottish feudal peasantry into a wage-based agrarian (and then industrial) working class. The United States, by contrast, had neither a similar length of time within which to operate, nor the same internal sources of labour on which to draw. So instead, and on either side of the Civil War, its entrepreneurial class recruited to American factories the geographically-mobile sections of other countries’ displaced peasantries: taking labour first from Ireland, then from northern and eastern Europe, then from the Mediterranean basin, and always – on its west coast – from China as well. The eventual result was the emergence in North America of a society made up almost entirely of immigrants (both voluntary and involuntary in nature) and their descendants: a mosaic of peoples in the United States with their own non-British histories and cultures. It was a mosaic that pulled the two societies – the American and the British – increasingly apart over time: united for years in spite of the mosaic by the residual white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant character of America’s ruling groups, but increasingly pulled apart after 1945, as America’s ruling groups slowly lost much of their waspishness.

The cumulative result, politically, of this different pattern of nineteenth-century working-class formation was the emergence in the twentieth century of two societies divided by a common language. In the United States, the term “liberal”, for example, means someone who is willing to use the state for purposes of social justice, whereas in the United Kingdom, the term “liberal” often means just the reverse. It can mean progressive in an American sense, but it more normally carries the connotation of “neoliberalism” – more Adam Smith than John Maynard Keynes. From a British perspective, both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were liberals, the very thing that Americans know they were not! It can all be very confusing:* until we note the way in which the legacy of feudalism, and the weight of “class identity” in the UK case, has left the political centre of gravity in London further to the left – and in that sense, in a more commonly Western European position – than its American equivalent in Washington, DC. For the twentieth-century UK labour movement eventually shaped the way that British people still understand politics – and left a social democratic culture in place – to a degree not matched by the US labour movement, except in its brief New Deal moment of dominance. In consequence, current economic policy-choices are played out in the United States within a political framework heavily molded by libertarian ideas, and by mobilized religious conservatives, that have no easy UK equivalents; just as in the United Kingdom, those same economic policy-choices are now being settled by a minority Conservative Government, many of whose leading figures subscribe to an “one nation” Tory tradition that is simply not there in the modern American Republican Party. Barack Obama may have seemed far too progressive for many American conservatives, but ironically it is likely that he would have been politically comfortable in a UK context to have been simply a progressive Conservative.

These emerging differences between the two component elements of the Anglo-American world, that are so vital to the day-to-day story of politics in both, are not just “political and ideological”. They are also “political and institutional”. The United States is, after all, a very big country: whereas the United Kingdom, though smaller, is a European nation; and both size and geography matter here. The US political system is a federal one, with a written constitution and a well-established set of checks and balances. The UK political system has neither. Policy change at the national level is, in consequence, much more difficult to effect in Washington, DC than is policy change in the London-focused UK parliamentary system. But equally, the federal nature of the US political structure leaves a significant space for “state-led” initiatives that are far more difficult to orchestrate at the “local level” in the heavily-centralized UK equivalent. Political activists – both conservatives and progressives – if blocked at the national level, often turn down to exploit state-level opportunities in the United States, when their UK counterparts (pre-Brexit at least) would more likely turn out, to seek support in EU-based social legislation and development funding.* As we now watch these two economies struggle with a shared agenda of competitive difficulties, these variations of size and geography will ghost everything that follows. The United States is dealing with a globalized capitalism, from which it is separated by two great oceans. The United Kingdom is doing the same, separated from the rest of Western Europe only by the width of the English Channel.

The emergence of a similar economic model

The United States was, from its inception, a commercially-oriented society; and by the time it was created, so too was the Britain from which it broke. In fact, initially at least, Britain was the more commercially-developed of the two. The British aristocracy had long made their peace with an emerging capitalist class, converting the land it owned into commercial units worked by tenant farmers and wage-paid day labourers, while sustaining its own noncommercial style of life by increasing the rental income it drew from that farming. Aristocratic money sustained mercantile capitalism extensively in the years after the English Civil War, so that by the time of the American Revolution, British trade was a global force, British factory production was already on the rise, and British interest in the application of science to new forms of production was already evident. Indeed, in the mid/late eighteenth century Scottish Enlightenment that gave us Adam Smith and David Hume among others, Benjamin Franklin was also a major player: as commercially-minded and scientifically-curious middle classes emerged in both societies, divided by the Atlantic but linked by regular intellectual intercourse and intimate social networks.

The result in both cases was essentially the same: the emergence – first in the newly-named United Kingdom after 1801* and in the United States either side of its civil war – of an increasingly industrially-based capitalist economy led and owned by a new class of private entrepreneurs. This was not state-led industrial development. It was privately-initiated and middle-class owned economic change in industries as diverse as coal and textiles, iron ore and railways. Indeed, in both countries industrial development began primarily in textile factories relying on coal-driven steam power, only to be surpassed quickly by more broadly-based factory production driven by investments in iron and steel, railways and shipbuilding. In consequence, both societies had created a recognizably modern factory-based working class by the 1880s. Both by then had shed labour from agriculture, moved production from the countryside to the town, and sustained urban life by the development of commercial farming linked to its markets by railways and financed in its development by banks. And in all of this early industrial change, the state had played only a limited though essential role: disciplining labour, protecting property rights, and encouraging private investment and entrepreneurial activity without developing the strong capacity for leadership played by governments in economies that industrialized later such as Germany, Japan and eventually (in a different way) Russia.

The global economic leadership enjoyed by the British economy in the nineteenth century allowed its political class to develop an imperial role, and its leading financial institutions to act as a conduit between the British economy and the more developed parts of the global system it led. Aspiring industrial nations and companies came to London in the nineteenth century to borrow English money, to use that money to buy English-made goods, and to return home with those goods to develop industrial capacity of their own. The global leadership of the American economy after 1945 enabled its political class and its leading financial institutions to play a similar set of roles. In each case, that economic dominance lasted, at most, for one or two generations before the economies that had initially done the borrowing caught up with the technologies of the globally-dominant British or American firms, and then undercut that dominance with technological developments of their own.

But while the dominance lasted, similar patterns of institutional change bedded themselves in. Governments – first the British, later the American – opened overseas markets for their domestic producers by the force of their diplomacy, and where necessary by the force of their arms. To maintain that capacity to use force, each globally-dominant economy then developed its own military-industrial complex, and the preoccupations of government incrementally shifted from protecting the interests of all its producing sectors into one of protecting primarily those producing military equipment and financial advantage. For as foreign borrowers came first to London and then to New York, the size, importance and political weight of financial institutions grew within each globally-dominant economy in turn, and the major industrial companies in each looked increasingly outside the domestic economy for their resources, their markets and eventually even their production sites. The result in each case was the slow emergence of an economy – first in the United Kingdom and then in the United States – dominated by large financial institutions and globally-oriented transnational corporations, an economy in possession of a large and state-supervised engineering sector geared to military production, and a domestically-focused civilian economy that was increasingly vulnerable to foreign competition in both its overseas and its domestic markets.

When the Cold War was at its height, the relevant academic literature on types of modern economies tended to treat all capitalist ones as basically similar, and as necessarily superior to their state-socialist alternative. But when that superiority was underscored by the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, and with it the disappearance of the Cold War, a new body of academic literature emerged – one focused on the relative strengths of different types of capitalist economy. In that new literature on comparative political economy, it has become conventional to treat the US and UK economies that we have just described here as broadly similar in kind, and to label them as “liberal market economies” (as “LMEs”, with the term “liberal” being us...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Also by David Coates and published by Agenda Publishing
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Anglo-American Condition: Similarities and Differences
• PART I: FLAWED ECONOMIES
• PART II: DIVIDED SOCIETIES
• PART III: INADEQUATE POLITICS
• PART IV: CONCLUSION
• Endnotes