Dublin Opinion

Capitalism has had an incredible run — politically and culturally as well as economically — since the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. The resolution of that crisis required, as economists put it at the time, “reducing expectations” of the kind nurtured by the trade union militancy and welfare state gains of the 1960s. This was accomplished via the defeats suffered by trade unionism and the welfare state since the 1980s at the hands of what might properly be called capitalist militancy. This was accompanied by dramatic technological change, massive industrial restructuring, labor market flexibility and the overall discipline provided by “competitiveness.”

It was also accompanied, of course, by massive economic inequality. But this did not mean capitalism was no longer able to integrate the bulk of the population. On the contrary, this was now achieved through the private pension funds that mobilized workers savings, on the one hand, and through the mortgage and credit markets that loaned them the money to sustain high levels of consumer spending on the other.

From an excellent essay by Leo Panitch in the Monthly Review magazine.

At another point he mentions the race issue:

That the fault line [i.e. the current credit crisis] should have appeared in “sub-prime” mortgage loans to African-Americans is hardly surprising — this has always been the Achilles heel of working-class incorporation into the American capitalist dream.

Michael Blim writing in 3quarksdaily suggests that there are 7.2 million American households at risk of losing their homes:

The 7.2 million households comprise 28% of all American households with mortgages. They owe $332 billion in loans, and 2.2 million have lost or will lose their houses without a federal remedy, according to the Center for Responsible Lending. A majority is white, but a disproportionate number of blacks and Latinos are vulnerable too. For instance, among whites, 17% have sub-prime mortgages; the figure is 55% for blacks.

Arthur Silber of Once Upon a Time is on about race and economics too. But mainly he’s talking about how the attacks on Jeremiah Wright and the way he is unfavourably compared to Martin Luther King shows how cack-handed the debate on race is in the US Election. He links to an interesting interview in Salon with Jonathon Walton about King, and the way he is being contrasted to Wright.

Let’s talk about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Martin Luther King. Some of Wright’s critics have contrasted his approach to that of King, who they portray as using reconciliation rather than confrontation. Is that an accurate portrayal of King? Is that an accurate portrayal of Wright?

No to both. It’s a mythic portrayal of King, a nostalgic portrayal of King — because King was accused and vilified for being controversial, actually more controversial than Jeremiah Wright.

Didn’t King become more radical in the course of his career, in the period leading up to his assassination?

It was largely because of the fact that he moved from civil rights to human rights. One of King’s famous quotes after desegregation laws had been passed was that he began to find out that it mattered little if African-Americans — he said Negroes, of course — have the right to eat at the counter if they don’t have a dollar to spend at the lunch counter.

But there is little discussion about the connection between race and the economy, or about how the majority of the working poor are Black in all the comment about race in America.

The Real News Network has a series of reports discussing the US economy with Panitch. In one he makes the point that the need for a more radical approach to the economy – he calls it economic democracy – is not even being mentioned in the debates or the media coverage surrounding the US election. This is hardly surprising, he argues, because the notion of economic democracy has been sidelined since the New Deal:

The issue of economic democracy that had been placed on the political agenda alongside the New Deal’s public infrastructure projects was set aside for the remainder of the century after the FDR’s administration’s self-described “grand truce with capital” in the late 1930s.

I did not know that.