From: New Liberation News Service <nlns@igc.apc.org>
Subject: NLNS: POST-LIBERALISM & 'CHANGE'
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: ?
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1992 17:37:12 GMT

/* Written  6:18 pm  Sep 29, 1992 by nlns in cdp:nlns.news */
/* ---------- "NLNS Packet 3.2 *** 9/28/92" ---------- */

Post-Liberalism And The Politics Of "Change"  
David Jarman and Jason W. Moore, NLNS

(NLNS)--Our economic decline has finally reached such precipitous 
slopes that everyone (well, almost) is now aware that something is 
quite wrong.  Even the most conservative analysts--Federal Reserve 
Chair Alan Greenspan, for example--acknowledge our disastrous 
state of affairs.  Across the political spectrum, there is widespread 
agreement that we are going nowhere fast, and President Bush has 
proved incapable of formulating any kind of economic strategy other 
than "Stay the course."
     Understandably, people have come to desire, if not quite demand, 
Change--something Bill Clinton (having learned from Ross Perot) has 
eagerly seized upon.  Ask a typical Clinton supporter how the 
candidate is a vehicle for Change and doubtless they will point to his 
economic plan:  "Jobs.  Investment.  Education.  Infrastructure.  
Research and development.  High-skill high-wage economy.  Bla bla 
bla."  Clinton's socalled New Covenant, if anything, pushes all the 
right buttons.
     Clintonomics does little more.  While addressing the effects of 
the economic crisis, Clinton's plan fails to address any of the 
structural causes.  It attempts to deal with the detritus of 12 years 
of supply-side economics in a way that may well bring about 
temporary success through cosmetic tinkering but leaves untouched 
the systemic problems which underpin the steady decline ongoing 
since the early 1970s.
     The problems of that decade--stagnation, unemployment, 
inflation, and a marked increase in speculation at the expense of 
productive "investment"--seem insignificant with the problems 
faced by the U.S.  heading into the 21st century.  For the most part, 
the differences are simply one of degree (even more real 
unemployment, homelessness, poverty, and social decay); the 
critical break with the past is in the development of a truly 
internationalized economy--economics and politics, in a 
qualitatively new way, are interconnected at a global scale.  For the 
U.S., this has meant, above all, loss of jobs to capital flight.
     The Clinton plan responds to the negative impacts of economic 
globalization, but fails to come to grips with its basic causes.  On 
the positive side, Clintonomics talks about improving the lives of 
working people through investments--bringing the U.S. workforce up 
to speed through increased expenditures in education, infrastructure 
and public works, and research and development.
     Indeed, all these proposals will stick nice bandages on the 
wounds inflicted on the U.S. by the internationalized economy--
education addresses ongoing de-skilling, R&D keeps us apace with 
the Japanese and Europeans in the technological race, public works 
projects deal (albeit inadequately) with the increasing numbers of 
unemployed resulting from capital flight and the middle class 
squeeze.  Yet, these proposals are oriented only towards the most 
visible effects of an economic process which is tearing the U.S. 
economy apart at the seams.
     The theoretical basis for Clintonomics emerges out of the work 
of such liberal academics as Harvard professor Robert Reich and 
former Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall.  Reich, in Work of Nations 
(1991), and Marshall, in Unheard Voices (1987), both argue for the 
need to pursue a cohesive national economic strategy which stresses 
the importance of job training and advanced technology--the so-
called "high-wage, high-skill, high-tech" strategy.  The strategy 
relies on a revitalized labor bureaucracy (neither are great admirers 
of shop floor militancy) and in general a revival of the state-
business-labor partnership strongest in the quarter-century after 
World War II.
     Marshall and Reich part ways, however, on the issue of trade and 
protectionism, although both reject traditional protective measures.  
Marshall's proposals remain vague, other than asserting that we 
would do well to emulate certain aspects of the Japanese or 
European labor relations and national-level economic planning 
mechanisms.  Marshall's most central argument is a half-demand, 
half-plea to all competing nations to bring up wage levels and 
democratic standards -- essentially creating a level playing field by 
calling for internationally-recognized standards for the protection 
of the environment, working people, and human rights.
     Basic to Marshall's understanding of the U.S. role in the global 
economy is a nationalism which succeeds in going beyond traditional 
protectionism and its simplistic focus on trade barriers.  In its 
place, he introduces idealistic notions of being able to encourage 
"upward harmonization," i.e. good behavior on the part of our foreign 
competitors, by using tariffs and import quotas as both carrot and 
stick.
     Marshall's real problem, however, is that the global misbehavior 
has, at its roots, the transnational corporations; foreign 
governments, like our own, are only guilty of complicity.  
Expectations of global morality on the part of increasingly powerful, 
and mobile, corporate entities driven entirely by the bottom line are, 
to say the least, fanciful.
     Reich's analysis of the international economy has much to say for 
itself.  He is astute in his understanding of the long-term 
ramifications of globalization.  In the economy of the future, 
deindustrialization, compounded by the growth of the "information 
economy," will continue to such an extent that industrial strength 
and economic competitiveness will be rendered virtually 
meaningless.  Only those nations with enough intellectually high-
skilled professionals--"symbolic analysts"--will be able to survive.  
The erosion of the modern nation-state, with its influence over 
social and economic processes at a national level, is giving way to 
the power of a new type of corporation -- the "global webs."
     The bottom three-quarters of any nominally "national" population, 
Reich correctly observes, will be consigned to the low-wage service 
sector.  We can already see this trend at work in the erosion of the 
middle class and the Reagan-era assault on redistributionary 
mechanisms, to the detriment of the working class and poor.  For 
Reich, there simply is no alternative to this rather grim future.
     Here the Marshall and Reich views overlap--both call for national 
economic planning and investment in education in order, supposedly, 
to transform the U.S. into a high-wage, high-skill paradise.  Really, 
they seek to carve as much of a niche as possible out of a global 
economy with room for only a small percentage of the global 
populace, all this in the hopes of guaranteeing the remnants of the 
U.S. middle class a certain degree of security (and thereby, continued 
political support for the Reich-Marshall-Clinton economic program).
     Predictably, this plan leaves untouched the rapid polarization of 
rich and poor nations, consigning those at capitalism's periphery to 
the very low-wage, low-skill oblivion Marshall and Reich so 
vigorously abhor.  This economic polarization at a global level, 
ironically, is mirrored within the U.S. and throughout the 
industrialized world, a development which they dutifully ignore in 
their obsession with the plight of the middle class.
     For example, this dual polarization will be accelerated by the 
impending finalization of the North American Free Trade Agreement 
(NAFTA), which Clinton hesitantly supports.  As Reich's analysis 
would indicate, U.S.-Mexican economic integration does not mean 
more jobs for anyone outside of the information economy.  For 
supporters of the Marshall view, the evidence seems to point 
towards "downward harmonization."  Corporations regularly flaunt 
even the flimsiest of environmental regulations, and labor and 
human rights violations are the rule, not the exception.  If anything, 
the behavior of U.S. business--those upon whom Marshall relies to 
press for a "level playing field"--indicates that it is basically 
incapable of the "good behavior" demanded of our Third World 
competitors.
     Clintonomics essentially takes up where Reich leaves off.  The 
centerpieces of his Plan are not oriented towards bringing economic 
empowerment to the working class and the poor, who, if one is to 
accept Reichian fatalism, are doomed anyway.  Clinton's proposals of 
education, high-tech research, high-tech infrastructure 
improvements, ad nauseam, are designed primarily to shore up the 
rotting timbers holding our continually shrinking middle class in 
place.
     Just as the Reagan Administration had its looney-tunes like 
James Watt who figured we could sell off all the national parks 
because the Rapture was nigh and our children wouldn't be around to 
enjoy them, the upcoming Clinton Administration seems to have its 
fatalistic visionaries in place, ready to write off three-quarters of 
the population simply because the inevitable New Economic Order 
has no room for them.  It is a view as callous as it is short-sighted, 
a short bit of economic thuggery which ought to be challenged for 
the millenarian dreck that it is.
     The overall trends toward globalization are inevitable; that much 
is true.  For all his correct diagnosis, Reich chooses not to deal with 
structural basis for the present crisis.  His, and Clintonomics', 
shortcut to prosperity will ultimately prove incapable of delivering 
the goods to the vast majority.  What, then, is a more pragmatic, and 
necessarily humane, strategy for a return to prosperity?
     The question is not how do we stop globalization, but how do we 
humanize it?  We can deal with the crisis in more productive ways 
than Clinton's demands that welfare mothers go find jobs which 
don't exist.  Only a social and economic program which confronts the 
ominous centralization of power and wealth, both at home and 
abroad, can create the basis for a return to prosperity.  The new 
social movements which emerge to challenge the disastrous future 
Reich envisions must take aim not at convincing capitalists to be 
good or else, or at winning power solely through the ballot box, but 
in working outside capitalism's economic, political, and cultural 
paradigms.  Pressure for a new society must come not from the 
upper reaches of power, where realizations like Reich's only lead to 
so many shoulder-shrugs, but in both the community and workplace, 
where everyone can play a part in ensuring his or her own well-being 
and, ultimately, their own survival.

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