Over the past week, I have already indicated that a major climate activist event was…
The dislocation between the PMC and the rest of the working class – Part 1
A while ago, I caught up with an old friend who I was close to during our postgraduate studies. We hadn’t seen each other for some years as a result of pursuing different paths in different parts of the world and it was great to exchange notes. At one stage during the conversation, she said to me that I had become one of the ‘super elites’, a term that evaded definition but could be sort of teased out by referring to lifestyle choices etc. The most obvious manifestation was the fact that she was visiting my new home in an experimental sustainable housing estate, which apparently marked one demarcation between being an ordinary citizen and one of the ‘super elites’. That group also apparently doesn’t have any power in society like the real elites – the old and new money gang – but is privileged nonetheless. I understand the notion even if it somewhat amorphous. I was reflecting on that conversation as I have been trying to understand why the US voters chose Donald Trump over the seemingly more progressive and decent candidate Kamala Harris. I use that description of Harris guardedly, because if one digs below the surface, even just a bit, it becomes clear that the Democrats were not particularly progressive or decent (Gaza!) at all but more interested in lecturing people they look down on as to how they should behave and look. All that stuff about restoring joy – was really what ‘super elites’ think about and is far removed from the aspirations of the voters who went for Trump. Here are some additional thoughts on that topic.
When my friend brought up the ‘super elite’ categorisation (yes, she admitted membership of the SE club too), I started looking around the cultural studies literature as a way of teasing out the concept and understanding how it might fit with my other work on the political failure of the progressive Left over the last decades.
That is apparently what the ‘super elites’ do – take time to do research and reflect given their jobs typically afford them flexibility and discretion that is denied to other workers by the demands of the profit-seeking capital machine.
In my 2017 book with journalist Thomas Fazi – Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (Pluto Books, September 2017) – I started fleshing out that research agenda, which sought to explain the demise of social democracy, particularly in terms of the role that the Left played itself when it adopted the fictions of mainstream macroeconomics.
My subsequent work is seeking to extend those ideas to articulate a progressive pathway to rebuild communities, protect the planet, de-link poor nations from the colonial yoke, define a feasible degrowth strategy, and do something about the obscene inequality that has worsened over the neoliberal years.
The question that I have been grappling with relates to the role of the educated class in leading social change.
How do the concerns and interests of that class provide a communication bridge to the less educated people in society?
While neoliberalism has been slowly but surely hollowing out the middle class, where many of the educated locate, it hasn’t been entirely successful in that quest.
The polarisation that has been occurring in society has pushed the lower ends of the middle class (in income terms) down, while the upper end have largely been able to maintain their material living standards, albeit with increased personal debt burdens.
Neoliberalism though has been extremely damaging to the lower income groups in our societies who have lost full-time career work, even if the previous career path was relatively narrow and short (for example, assembly line worker to leading hand).
The workers who enjoyed security in the post WW2 manufacturing boom in the more advanced nations like the UK, the US, Australia, etc – where well-paid jobs supported by high productivity plants – have seen those jobs vanish and been replaced by casualised jobs with low pay in the service sector.
The neoliberal obsession with privatisation and outsourcing killed millions of well-paid jobs but has also seen the same workers disadvantaged as consumers as utilities have become more expensive and less reliable and privatised companies have reaped massive profits.
Screwed both ways.
Neoliberalism has attacked the foundations of material security for the low income families.
It has degraded public services, dismantled the trade union power which helped these workers gain some semblance of a stake in the capitalist system, it opened the doors for the ridiculous expansion of the financial sector, which has led to massive household debt burdens and lined the pockets of the super rich.
All the promises that ‘freeing up’ the market and getting the state out of our lives would deliver increased prospects of wealth for all has been proven to be an elaborate scam to cover the tracks of those who have been extracting benefits way beyond their contribution on the back of the bulk of the working class.
The educated segment of the working class – the professional and managerial class – have largely been insulated from these ravages for various reasons.
Not completely but mostly.
And their response, has been to develop ‘intellectual plans’, particularly those with a progressive bent, which articulate new visions for society that befit the challenges they define to be important (for themselves and their construction of society).
The problem is that these visions have not been aligned with the aspirations of the less educated workers and the ‘construction of society’ does resonate with that group of workers who are up against an entirely different set of constraints.
I recall that during the first time I went to university as an undergraduate, the world was still coming to terms with the student revolts around the world in the late 1960s, and in Australia, the momentum was maintained somewhat by Australia’s disgraceful involvement in the Vietnam War and the compulsory conscription that the federal government forced onto 20-years old.
At that time, the progressive student movements (ranging from barely progressive to full-blown Marxist revolutionary movements) created what became known as the – Worker Student Alliance – which had the avowed aim of ‘smashing US imperialism’.
Everything was about smashing something in those days – the state, US imperialism, ourselves, whatever.
The WSA arose out of the massive industrial action of 1969 where the co-founder of the Australian Communist Party and senior union official for the – Australian Tramway and Motor Omnibus Employees’ Association – Clarrie O’Shea – was jailed by an industrial court for failing to pay fines that had been imposed on his union for pursuing what were clearly reasonable union actions to defend the conditions of the membership.
The Industrial Judge who imprisoned O’Shea later was appointed (extraordinarily) by the new Labor government in 1972 as the Governor-General of Australia (a colonial relic given we are not a republic) and then sacked that government in 1975 as part of a CIA-led putsch against the progressive Left in Australia.
It was extraordinary because it demonstrated the complete lack of understanding of that government, which had become full of educated lawyers etc parading as progressive politicians.
They were all members of the emerging Professional and Managerial Class (PMC) rather than workers who had come up through the trade union movement and were committed to public service, which had been the traditional path for Labor politicians to take.
That Labor government marked the beginning of the ‘new labour’ social democrats who have dominated such parties ever since and represent the problem I am discussing here.
The O’Shea imprisonment led to a massive strike by the Left unions, which the main body of the union movement rejected (the peak bodies at state and national level).
I was still at high school but I remember the huge protests outside the Pentridge Prison where O’Shea was taken.
This period thus saw the emergence of the WSA which was in full swing by the time I went to university.
The mainstream press called the organisation the first ‘terrorist’ group in Australia, although that really just meant that it was part of the Communist bloc.
There were lots of protests and demonstrations etc, particularly as part of the anti-War movement.
But the thing I recall the most is the disjuncture between the university students in the WSA and the workers who we were meant to have solidarity with.
At this time, there were still many large manufacturing plants in Australia and surrounding Monash University, where I started out at, was a concentration of those plants, producing cars, tractors, white goods, trucks, etc.
The WSA would regularly stage ‘rallies’ outside the factories demanding better working conditions and pay.
But the workers generally were not so enamoured by these ‘long-haired, dishevelled’ characters breaking down fences and doing all manner of destructive acts in their name.
I wondered at the time what this ‘Alliance’ actually meant and I recall conversations in the ‘Caf’, which was a meeting point in the student union for the activists (a cafe where you could buy the best toasted cheese sandwiches) where we would reflect on the habits and attitudes of the workers that we were meant to be in an Alliance with.
We mused that a shift to socialism would ‘cure’ these workers of their racist, misogynist, and xenophobic tendencies.
We were completely blithe to how disassociated our futures would be to the reality of our Alliance members.
The UK Guardian article (November 10, 2024) – Cosplaying social justice is the new elitist way of elbowing out the working class – touches on these themes.
In discussing a new book by Musa al-Gharbi – We Have Never Been Woke – the article recounts an anecdote from the book:
Four years later, many of these same students joined Black Lives Matter protests. Al-Gharbi watched as they demonstrated on Broadway in New York’s Upper West Side, oblivious to the “homeless Black men who didn’t even have shoes” sharing the same space. The protesters “were crowding the benches that homeless people were using”, insisting that “Black Lives Matter”, but apparently not “the Black guys right in front of them”.
That reminded me of the tensions within the WSA.
Everybody had good intentions at the time.
It is just that the planes on which they were operating did not intersect.
And in trying to represent a ‘vision’ for the workers, the educated classes just became offensive.
And, of course, many of the activists soon cleaned up their appearances, bought some nice suits (both male and female), once they graduated and went into the workplace as part of the PMC.
Some became politicians and started to mouth the platitudes that we now call ‘wokeness’, although I am never sure where that tendency begins and ends.
The political voice of the PMC have redefined progressiveness away from ‘smashing the state’ towards what it has deemed more acceptable aspirations.
First, it conceded the macroeconomic debate and adopted the fictions of mainstream economists about the government and its finances.
We now have these social democratic politicians raving on about ‘black holes’, and ‘responsible fiscal surpluses’ and all the accompanying metaphors and nomenclature that reinforce the fictions.
The Right, of course, doesn’t trade in those fictions when it suits them to bale out a bankster that has allowed their greed to get ahead of their acumen or when some military supplying corporation wants a massive procurement contract to build weapons to slaughter children in Gaza.
Second, to fill the gap left by the concession to the macroeconomic fictions and the long-standing aim to ‘smash the state’ and unite the working class, the educated Left, which now dominates the social democratic polities around the world, started promoting identity issues and more recently climate issues.
Don’t get me wrong, these issues are critical.
But the concept of economic class was largely abandoned and the educated left felt that had more in common with a female boss who was repressing the workers than the males worker being repressed.
Further these ‘educated aspirations’ are voiced as top-down dictates or judgements on workers then a disconnect emerges.
The PMC have sustainable houses and EVs and then lecture the ‘masses’ about the need for sustainability.
Meanwhile, the PMC looks down on the masses who still pursue housing dreams through the purchase of shoddy homes that have been built by greedy developers and eaten up valuable ‘green’ space.
Or they look down on workers who drive old ‘bangers’ which pump polluting exhaust emissions into atmosphere and who couldn’t afford an EV anyway.
The PMC also tell the workers that gender issues are at the top of the policy pursuits because human dignity is worthy of protection (and I agree with that last aspiration by the way).
The PMC political representatives talk about restoring ‘joy’ when at the same time the workers are struggling to make ends meet as inflation, driven by capitalist price gouging, which lines the pockets of the high income cohorts, and withdrawal of public services, make the lives of these casualised and low paid workers even more of a misery.
So those outside the PMC class might say: ‘Who cares if a ‘man’, who has declared they are a ‘woman’, wins a local ‘womens” running race down at some athletic club when the bulk of workers are abandoning dental care because they can no longer feed their kids properly or face eviction for failing to keep pace with the penurious mortgage schedules imposed by the banksters’.
And some others might say: ‘Who would ever vote for a politician that tells people that Israel has a right to defend itself, when that defense, which in practical terms is not defense at all but genocide and killing family members of the voters the politicians is seeking support from?’
This is the problem.
Conclusion
One book I found really interesting as I try to untangle all this stuff was written by the US cultural theorist – Catherine Liu – and is a brutal critique of the professional-managerial class, a class which the ‘super elite’ typically are part of.
In Part 2 (next week), I will discuss what I learned from that reading plus some more.
That is enough for today!
(c) Copyright 2024 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.
Larry Elliott, ‘economics’ editor for the Guardian has a new article titled: ‘From Thatcher To Trump And Brexit: My Seven Lessons Learned After 28 Years As Guardian Economics Editor.’
His first lesson is no revelation:
The free market experiment has failed, free trade is out, and populism is rife but it can be defeated if the left can galvanise ideas into a credible plan.
In what sounds like a self-authored obituary, Elliot writes that “… one of the joys of working for the Guardian is that it encourages – indeed welcomes – challenges to the orthodoxy.”
His challenges to orthodoxy are pretty much a non-event; he remains an apologist for the economic status quo, and makes no mention of MMT.
Still serving his masters.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/nov/10/from-thatcher-to-trump-and-brexit-my-seven-lessons-learned-after-28-years-as-guardian-economics-editor
So my final lesson from the past 36 years is this: it is always worth questioning the status quo.
With the Democrats, it’s looking like they are learning the worst lessons from this. Instead of going with Bernie Sanders style economic populism they decide to throw gay, trans and Latino people under the bus.
Abandoning Gay and trans to appeal to Republicans even though they’ll never vote for Dems when Trump or someone like him is right there. Wokeness or whatever isn’t the problem with Democrats, it’s the lack of policy other than “joy”.
And with Latino people for voting for Trump. It’s ridiculous how conditional Dems are. They are willing to call ICE on family members of people who voted Trump.
Bill you have synced to two of my favourite social commentators; Chris Hedges and Catherine Liu. You three (four including Anne Pettifore) are amongst the most on-point socio/economic truth tellers going.
An example of what Bill was writing about was the Voice referendum in Australia,although a worthy ambition it did not capture the interest of most working people
It’s not clear if you are agreeing with this view or criticizing it. In any case, I don’t think the quotation expresses a defensible way of thinking about the problem, for two reasons:
Two problems can exist simultaneously, the existence of one does not render the other meaningless.
Not all sports events are amateur affairs, some involve prize money, even large amounts of prize money; if people are allowed to enter in categories for which they are not eligible, they are taking money that would have gone to other competitors. So there is also an economic aspect that is not acknowledged. It is possible make a distinction between amateur and pro events, but that distinction does not emerge in the quote.
@ Sidharth
Some people who voted for Biden in 2020 did not vote for Harris in 2024. These were not die-hard
Republicans. Acknowledging sex differences in sport is not throwing gay people under a bus. The group being targeted is women. Just possibly, the under-performance of Harris in this demographic is an indicator that some voters recognized this fact.
@Graeme D Larry Elliott (and others) remind me of the Lord of the Rings. On occasions he writes as though he still retains an independent spirit, though too many years in the company of the Guardian trying to appeal to educated liberals, and Treasury type people, has turned him. He isn’t completely wraithlike – perhaps a retirement from the Guardian may revive him. The Guardian writers still worth reading seem to a) have origins at a distance from the UK class system i.e. of recent immigrant stock, but not of the Sunak/Badenoch variety i.e. aligned with their imperial masters, and b) submit their articles as freelancers from afar (away from the gaze and mind-bending power of the Dark Lord).
The wests propensity of keeping its private sector fantasies of financing government at the forefront, under a stars n stripes warlord, induces neoliberalism to control the masses. You know, those believers of so called democracy between a polarised left and right of social policies. Well, the two major parties are just right wing variants.
The left wing no longer exists.
The politicians beholden to their party are clearly beholden to their donors, with cash for comments and policy direction.
Independents are just a mere sideshow, but the main show must go on, as it already gets orchestrated through legislated adjustments, and an obedient MSM to parrot the official narrative that controls the public discourse.
This shambles is now on full display as the prostituted politicians scramble to tighten the public discourse by throwing out more insane narratives that go against the global based rules that they created after WW2.
Western supply chains will NEVER become more efficient than China, in cost, production, and delivery.
As China progresses at a rapid pace, it is NOT bogged down by a polarised population, or policies that get a country in trouble going to war to appease its donors.
China just keeps on growing.
Even the anti China narratives are silly.
The west is going backwards and has no answers. Its current form of democracy cannot deliver. Unless you think meddling, coups, wars, is delivering.
Prosperity is clearly only for the elites, regardless of realism in security hegemony or liberal democracy forced on others for a better world.
The US has failed the west, why continue bowing to it? My guess, the majority have become just as greedy as the elites.
@dnm
“Two problems can exist simultaneously, the existence of one does not render the other meaningless.”
Wrong at the Human scale of the individual. You know… the individual – the one who actually makes decisions every day on what actually gets done about problems. For example, decides on who to vote.
Whilst it is true that two or more problems can and indeed do often exist simultaneously, it is plainly obvious as well that a truth so self evident to be almost a truism must be followed its logical conclusion in the real Human world we live in at the scale of Human individual: i.e. not all problems are born equal, there is e very real prioritization of problems and therefore a hierarchy of problems for the individual and groups of individuals.
The yellow vest protestors in France, when faced with the “green taxes” which were going to cause price gauging of the fuels they depend upon for their very real, palpable, current various jobs to de-incentivize CO2 emissions which will affect them in very real and palpable ways but in future said quite clearly: “The elites talk about the end of the world, but we worry about the end of the month.”
The PMC are indoctrinated not educated.
@dnm
” Acknowledging sex differences in sport is not throwing gay people under a bus. The group being targeted is women. Just possibly, the under-performance of Harris in this demographic is an indicator that some voters recognized this fact.”
That’ll definitely get Dems the votes next time. It is the same thing as the border ‘issue’, people would rather vote for Republicans who have always been talking about the ‘illegals’ than vote for Dems. Dems must focus on economic issues first rather than fall further into the right wing culture war trap.
Here is the Republican Governor of Utah talking about trans children in high school sports. Sure, he is the exception in the GOP but he describes it accurately:
https://archive.is/72tNN
Can’t think of any unorthodox challenge Larry Elliot, the economics editor of the Guardian, ever made. Richard Murphy on his blog tells us he and Larry are good friends but Larry never made any serious arguments why his friend Richard’s MMT beliefs were wrong. To that extent Larry was in the same camp as other UK media economic editors shilling for the rich.
Super elites is clearly wrong, but it is clear what is meant.
Professional/managerial class is closer, but is still incomplete.
The super elites are the monopolists, the bureaucrats, the banksters.
Their advisors and allies are the professors, the lawyers, the consultants, the “experts” of various this or that.
And it is utterly disingenuous to say that the above are “somewhat insulated” from the problems faced by everyone else.
Immigration is a fine example where said elites are actively hurting working class interests. Elites benefit from cheaper nannies, cheaper labor for businesses, cheaper lawnmowers and Amazon/food delivery. Their livelihoods are largely immune due to the barriers erected against all competitors: credentials and what not. They largely own their homes so are insulated from rent increases due to tens of millions of more illegal people needing a place to live.
As such, it is the elites which are at best complicit, at least benefiting from and most likely promulgating – policies which hurt the working class.
@ Bill Mitchell,
Your friend is expressing in a different way a concept which is not exactly new. First time I saw it was in articles from Thomas Pikety, he would probably classify you as Brahmin Leftist.
Now, after reading it all, I don’t embark in particular enthusiasm cheerleading Pikety’s writing however I do recognize in him a few interesting observations about modern capitalism.
His observation of R>G most of the time is valuable, I was really interested to learn how the Human economy prior to capitalism was basically in a state of residual growth and 0 inflation.
This recent attempt by Pikety to argue that left and right have had fundamental changes (Brahmin Left Vs Merchant Right) I don’t quite follow.
However, his characterization of the formation ascendancy of a Brahmin Left as part of a generalized decadence of Marxism in the West after the triumph of Neo-liberalism achieving intellectual hegemony in the Gramscian sense of the word is, I think, a somewhat valid observation.
Dear Lowlander (at 2024/11/13 at 11:03 am)
Thanks for your comment.
You concluded that:
I don’t think that is correct.
The Brahmin Leftists are, for example, the progressive liberals who are educated but who urged people to vote Democrats in the recent US Presidential Election or voted British Labour in their national election.
My friend’s use of the term ‘super elite’ did not include those characters.
It includes people who are highly educated but hate the established institutions and would never vote for the Democrats or British Labour.
They are so horrified by what is happening in Gaza that they reject any future with, say, a Democrat Presidency (if they were in the US).
In the Australian context, they dislike the Australian Labor Party as much as they dislike the so-called conservative Liberal-National Coalition.
So there is quite a difference between being part of the super elite and being the standard Brahmin Leftist that Picketty describes.
best wishes
bill
A properly functioning democracy depends upon an ability of voters to recognise “false pretence rulers” those who present phoney arguments to justify exercising power over others. Unfortunately, we are at a stage where many voters can’t recognise phoney arguments on important issues. In other words poor education on these issues is the problem.
@ Bill Mitchell
With respect, I think you are differentiating factions within the broad category of the Brahmin Left, as defined by Pikety. His point is that throughout the XX century, the left, such as it used to be broadly defined in its various currents (anarchist- sindicalist to social democratic) at the start of XX century, has become mostly prevalent and supported by the educated segments of society rather than the non-diferentiated working class, whilst the right such as it was stopped being mostly prevalent amongst the educated classes to become the domain of the petit-burgeoise, such as they are nowadays.
I don’t disagree with your characterizations of the factions.
Regards
Dear Lowlander (at 2024/11/14 at 12:00 am)
The point is that the category is meaningless if all it describes are educated people with progressive values.
The distinction I am making is that the ‘super elites’ in my terminology describes those educated people who have transcended into middle class (or were there from the start) but have retained or developed an affinity with the working class and maintain that economic class is the most important organising framework, within which other identity issues are then understood.
Further, they have what are termed by mathematicians, lexiographic preferences, which means that they cannot be ‘bought off’ with the ‘everything has a price’ rule.
A good example is the Middle East situation.
A person with a lexiographic preference function will never say – “Oh Kamala is bad but Trump is worse, therefore, even though Kamala is supporting the slaughter of children, we should vote for her because Trump would kill more. And, a vote for Jill Stein in protest over Gaza is a vote for Trump’.
For them the Gaza horror is absolute and a ‘compromise’ to elect Harris over Trump because she appeals to other ‘progressive’ ideas was simply unacceptable.
Most people do not have such preference functions and will be prepared to let go of a particular position when the costs of maintaining it rise relative to the outcomes of another position.
It is the difference between what I consider to be a ‘preference’ and a ‘principle’.
The ‘super elites’ in my terminology consider a ‘principle’ to be inviolate no matter what the cost of maintaining it might be, whereas a ‘preference’ can be varied depending on the relative cost of holding it.
Most in the PMC do not have lexiographic preferences and that is why the Left has waned. The fact is that the PMC through its education could be a powerful force to give voice to change but has been ‘bought off’ by the neoliberals and encouraged to pursue issues that don’t threaten the hegemony of capital.
The super elites are different, they are still swinging!
best wishes
bill
I reckon the progressive super elite should go and get themselves low paid hospo jobs and remind themselves what a really hard day’s work is. Feel the physical exhaustion, the mental strain of smiling all day at people who often see you as unworthy and then try to read Piketty and further progressive politics in their spare time. Not enough lived experience is the problem.
Catherine Liu is a superb cultural theorist. Her critiques of postmodernism and identity politics are well worth a read https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKn3kEtpGTE&t=161s
Vic Trades Hall doesn’t mention their leadership’s opposition to O’Shea’s and the Trammies’ actions in their official history!
https://www.weareunion.org.au/all-the-way-with-clarrie-oshea
Dear Nicholas (at 2024/11/19 at 2:09 pm)
Are you surprised by that?
Both the VTH and the ACTU were against the strike action and failed to provide leadership to a unionist who was jailed for defending the interests of the membership he represented.
All the best
bill
I’ve got news for you Michael Dalrymple – in terms of labour hours and material and energy use per unit of output China is less efficient than most of the West. You are making the mistake of believing efficiency is measured in terms of the monetary cost per unit of output. Why is the latter lower in China than the West? Because Chinese workers are paid poorly and don’t have the same level of workplace protections as workers in the West. Nor do Chinese producers have the same compliance costs from having to meet the higher environmental standards and regulations in the West.
When restrictions in the international movement of capital were loosened (and were further loosened) following Nixon’s 1971 decision to cease conversion of the US dollar to gold at $35 per ounce, international trade and the desirable ‘production location’ was no longer governed by the principle of comparative advantage. It was, and still is, governed by the principle of absolute advantage. ‘Internationalisation’ gave way to ‘globalisation’ and transnational corporations began shifting their operations to low-cost (but rarely more efficient) production locations, like China.
In what is yet another mainstream economics con-trick, you are never told in a mainstream economics textbook that the principle of comparative advantage rests on the assumption of immobile capital. Once capital is mobile, it no longer holds. Globalisation is a degenerative race-to-the-bottom. The fear of losing industries to countries with low wages and weak environmental standards has played no small part in suppressing real wage rises in the West and discouraging Western governments from imposing much stricter environmental standards (i.e., standards tough enough to make a genuine and lasting difference). Globalisation allows transnational corporations to bypass regulations – via relocation – that are introduced to serve particular social and/or environmental purposes. In the West, these regulations have been introduced in the past because of social pressure and have been expressed at the ballot box – something that Chinese people are not able to do (they don’t get to vote and get locked up for protesting). The West is far from perfect, but don’t give praise to a system that keeps production costs down by depriving people of the freedoms and privileges you probably enjoy.
You are taught about the benefits of trade – on the assumption that capital is immobile – very early on in an economics textbook and then to never question anything that promotes international trade. If some international trade is good, then more must be better. If international trade with some national government intervention is good, then international trade with no national government intervention must be better.
The Bretton Woods System was introduced to serve a community of nations. It now serves transnational corporations. International trade can benefit the people of the world if it is based on an internationalist model. That requires restrictions on the international mobility of capital (so that comparative advantage is returned as the principle governing international trade). In addition, the WTO should be an international institution that assesses ‘green tariff’ applications designed to close cost gaps caused by lower wages and weaker environmental standards, not cost gaps reflecting genuine efficiency disparities. Whilst it would make it harder for poor countries to export to rich countries, exports are costs, plus the rich minority in poor countries would then be forced to make profits from producing stuff that meets the needs of their fellow citizens instead of the trivial wants of people like you and me. And to sell the stuff produced for their own citizens, they would start showing some interest in their spending power, which they can currently ignore in a globalisation scenario. Everyone would have to perform to succeed, and poor nations would start pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps (if their dictatorial governments were willing to give them the chance). The PMC in the West could no longer bludge off the sweat and toil of Third World workers and enjoy clear skies whilst the people of New Delhi and Lahore choke to death.
Well I’m not ‘shocked’, but I am a little bit surprised, because I was under the impression the union leadership were more bolshie back then (I was born in the 80s). The union I’m intimately involved with is a massive disappointment as well. Since I wrote my earlier comment, I have explored union history a bit more, and I came across something that outlined how trade union leadership suppressed worker power in England and France in the 1920s and 30s.
So I shouldn’t be surprised!
I and other socialists just try to doggedly push for influence within the union power structure, and we’re the ones most engaged with the next generation of left wing activists; supporting them to become competent in the political/procedural nuances of the organisation’s structure.
Being realistic, it is just a holding pattern. But it’s worth the effort, even though it does cause us a lot of stress.
MMT-competent economists like yourself are a big inspiration for me to keep going.
Because of MMT I know that in the technical sense, socialism is possible – and no amount of moral philosophy ever provided the ‘how’, only the ‘why’ and ‘what’. Why we want workers to take control of the state and what we want a worker-led society to look like is very important, but HOW we can successfully run an economy is crucial knowledge that socialists haven’t really had in any coherent way (at least in the West) until the last decade. Of course a revolutionary shift will not happen in the West because we are 50% petty bourgoisie by population. So there’s just no drive for radical change.
If understood by the activist segment of the working class, an understanding of MMT will, I hope, in the case of the next inevitable major economic crisis in capitalism, at least give the plodders in the Tame Left in Australia the confidence not to fearfully latch back onto neoliberal economic axioms that make things worse for working class people. For all their faults I think Rudd and Shorten were at least prepared not to give in to obviously flawed thinking around ‘how do we pay for it’.
I remember when they launched the NDIS, Shorten’s media talking points included that ‘well we can always find money for the military, let’s value people with disabilities’ personal autonomy as much as we do other public services’. The NDIS has become the biggest federally-funded jobs program in my lifetime. Clearly they want to do these things, they’re not totally demoralised, so a good understanding of MMT can hopefully get them a little further at least to Danish-level thinking about active labour market intervention or something like that.
I can tell you that those of us on the left with lexiographic principles do not get promoted into management either. When you defend a fellow union member, refuse to enact practices that are unsafe, even in the public sector: you are marked as a troublemaker.
One thing I have learnt the hard way during my working life is that managers in corporate structures are chosen and promoted based on loyalty only. Never competence. That is a lexiographic principle of the ruling class and their high-level managers (CEOs and equivalents: the true petty bjwz) and they almost never violate it! If only we had such firm principles.