Imagined Property - thoughts from out there

Ignatieff, Liberals and the Great Middle...

Listening to Michael Ignatieff last Sunday (April 19) on CBC radio I began thinking - which was itself an interesting reaction.  Despite my obsessive interest in politics, I find myself turning off the radio when local politicians are speaking - those I support embarrass or worry me while those I oppose irritate me more...  but I listened to Ignatieff.  And although I have not supported (well ok have generally opposed the Liberals) I found myself wishing he was Prime Minister.  The thought came to me that we could have a world renowned intellectual as Prime Minister!

After that thought came the pre-programmed Liberal Party of Canada advert - that Michael Ignatieff, despite the difficulty in saying his name, was the next Pierre Elliot Trudeau...  this made me think of my first political campaign.  Oh I was a LONG way from the action - Christina Lake 1968 listening to the speeches from the Liberal leadership convention.  Trudeau beat Winter - that is what I remember.  And then Trudeau mania and the Trudeau poster in my bedroom.  Trudeau beat Stansfield and the country moved on to 1970 and the October Crisis.  I was almost old enough to vote when I heard Tommy Douglas speaking against the War Measures Act.  So I never did vote for Trudeau.  I threw my lot in with the New Democrats and began my life as a "bourgeois intellectual".  But for the October Crisis I might have been a Liberal and who knows where I might have gone, but as it all turned out, I ended up working for unions...

Ok, I was thinking but still listening to Michael, as I am sure some of his friends might dare to call him, and I heard him talk about George Grant (Lament for a Nation  - great book) and the question about the difference between the Liberals and the Conservatives.  He said a number of things but the two things I remember were (1) that Liberals were not ideological and (2) that they were centrists.

Ok.  Ok. I tell myself.  Ignatieff is an intellectual.  Surely he was simply pandering to the anti intellectual ill informed masses whose votes he needs to do smart things...  Still it was disappointing to hear him say that the party was no ideological because how else can it be 'centrist'.  I mean the whole idea of the party is an ideological construct as part of a further construct of what makes a nation or for that matter politics.  The French Revolutionary Assembly may have had a geographical or physical presence but the whole notion of 'left' and 'right' and thus 'center' have been 'ideas' ever since.  If the party is not ideological, then how sensibly can it be 'centrist'?  

And so, I sighed and tried to forgive Mr. Ignatieff.  Admittedly my brief thought of him as a fellow traveller was fanciful.  

So I began thinking of how Liberals were centrists.  Well in the context of Canadian Federal politics over the last 40 years they are 'centrists' as they claim policies which seem to sit in between the Conservatives (as they now are) and the NDP.  In this they are well served by the NDP as this party survived, unlike the Progressive Movement in the US, and provided the socialist threat which made the Liberals appear 'centrist'.  Of course, the NDP also provided most of the policies which defined the Liberal agenda - the national health program, old age pensions, unemployment insurance and so on.  The demise of the Liberals as a political force was, I suspect, in some part due to the shifting of the whole political agenda to the right in the 1980 - 2000 period which resulted in the demise of the NDP as a serious national force. The Liberals became a centrist party without anything to the left and got sucked to the right...  but here I wander...

Leaving aside party politics, there are a number of major contemporary issues facing the Canadian 'nation' which can be arranged as dualities - a range of ideas between two poles, thus permitting a 'centrists' position.  An enduring BIG one is 'federalism' (which usually translates as the status of Quebec within Canada).  At one end there is the "independence of Quebec" and at the other is "Quebec as just another province".   This is BIG but it is not my issue - I have tried to be 'consistent' in my political positions and if national self determination is something to support for Angola, Timor and so on - so it is for the people of Quebec (which also needs to include the Cree Nations to the north - the geographical nation of Quebec is not necessarily the same 'place' as the Province).   But again, I feel quite distant from this issue.

Another BIG issue which has, however, been closer to my heart is that which for lack of a better word can be called 'economics'.  Here the traditional duality is often described (in effete bourgeois circles) as labour and capital.  In business magazines this duality is discussed in terms of the market versus 'big' government.  On the one side of the debate are those who "believe" that the market (structured by that invisible hand) would determine 'value' and coordinate supply with demand (to allocate resources etc) while at the other end were those who believed in the state (the role of government or the public sector) and the need for 'public planning' etc. The grouping of ideas of each sides was labelled, usually by those on the other side, as an "ideology".  The market side became known as "neo liberals' or "Chicago School" or, for the desperate, right wing nuts while the government side became known simply as the opposition - the success of the market side in selling their message becomes obvious as I try to find a 'nice' label for the 'other' side.  The political labels, social democrats, socialists, or communist all has negative baggage (and I would argue was inaccurate) - often those who opposed the free market guys were simply seen in negative terms as pro big government, nanny staters, pro- union, or simply losers and so on...  the market and its allied notions seemed to be winners.

The important thing, however, is to understand that for twenty maybe thirty years this economic debate has involved concepts of capital and labour but it has not been between capitalism (as an ideology) and socialism (as a competing ideology of social structure).  Concepts of labour and capital seemed to inform the debates between market (neo liberal) and planning (pro-government planning) forces, but on both sides proponents accepted as inevitable (dan dare I say durable) the basic ideology of capitalism.   By the 1990's socialism had become "capitalism lite".  The political spectrum had not so much shifted to the right as disappeared.  There was no 'left' there anymore.  And thus, as I argue above, the center also could not hold...

But then, the financial collapse of 2008 happened.  And as I mentioned in my last post, people started noticing 'labour' again.  My question is whether this reappearance of 'labour' will revive the old debate, that between capitalism and socialism or will the struggle continue between those who favour market forces (the privateers) and those who see a role for government etc.  I suspect that without the revival of socialism or some other ideology which confronts capitalism the result may be disappointing.

So getting back to Ignatieff - the question is that he may be a centrist but what or where does he imagine the debate?   Is it a debate about capitalism itself or about the role of government?  And if it is about the latter, where does he stand with respect to the role of private capital in the provision of public services....  and so on...  But then one must ask if this is the right kind of questions because what if the debate should be about capitalism itself - what if the questions are not about the role of government but the possibility of government?  

To get an idea of someone who keeps asking these questions check out Jim Kunslter's blog...  

[and on this subject - I must thank Karen B.  I not only have trouble pronouncing Mr. Ignatieff's name, I seem unable to spell it!]

The great transformation - debt and the degradation of labour...

This month's Harper's Magazine includes yet another article on the economy - "Infinite Debt" by Thomas Geoghegan.  

No surprises that folks keep writing on the subject. What is surprising is that where the analysis is leading. It is leading back to an appreciation of labour.  Geoghegan argues that the 'cause' of the financial collapse is not simply the result of poor regulation and greedy bankers, although both were part of the mix. No, for Geoghegan, a labour lawyer from Chicago, the cause can be found in the degradation of labour typified by outrageous business practices in the 1980's and 1990's and the glorification of capital exemplified by the abolition of ancient laws prohibiting usury.  He writes:

First, we removed the possibility of creating real, binding contracts by allowing employers to bust the unions that had been entering into these agreements for millions of people. Second, we allowed those same employers to cancel existing contracts, virtually at will, by transferring liability from one corporate shell to another, or letting a subsidiary go into Chapter 11 and then moving to “cancel” the contract rights, including lifetime health benefits and pensions. As one company after another “reorganized” in Chapter 11 to shed contract rights, working people learned that it was not rational to count on those rights and guarantees, or even to think in these future-oriented ways. No wonder people in our country began to live for the moment and take out loans and start running up debts. 

And then we dismantled the most ancient of human laws, the law against usury, which had existed in some form in every civilization from the time of the Babylonian Empire to the end of Jimmy Carter’s term, and which had been so taken for granted that no one ever even mentioned it to us in law school. That’s when we found out what happens when an advanced industrial economy tries to function with no cap at all on interest rates.

Here’s what happens: the financial sector bloats up. With no law capping interest, the evil is not only that banks prey on the poor (they have always done so) but that capital gushes out of manufacturing and into banking. When banks get 25 percent to 30 percent on credit cards, and 500 or more percent on payday loans, capital flees from honest pursuits, like auto manufacturing.

Why is this surprising that analysis might lead back to an appreciation of labour?  Afterall classical economists from Ricardo on saw labour as a primary source of value.  Well after 20 to 30 years of being ignored or reviled, it is surprising to see labour make a comeback.  And then the introduction of the status of "labour" into the meltdown mix made be think of Polyani (the author of The Great Transformation). Of the many points he made in that book, one I remember was his explanation for the difference in status (or lack there of ) of manual and factory jobs between England and Germany.  The difference, Polyani wrote, could be explained at least in part by the fact that workers in the UK were forced into the factories and suffered a diminution in status about 50 years before the serfs in Germany were sent off the land and turned into workers.  The timing and the fact that for one group their lives as workers were worse than they had been before and for the other life in factory was an improvement has consequences which shape the world of work today.  

Geoghegan argues that talent flooded into the financial sector in the US because that was where the money was to be made...  I wonder, though, how much of the explanation rests with the relative low status of any manual or factory work in the US - as in the UK.  Why would the ruling class in either country worry about keeping factory jobs in the country when, of course, they were best done by the socially (or dare I say racial) inferiors - at home or somewhere else?   The enduring prejudice against those who sold their labour to the man is evidenced everywhere. Why else would so many people, so ill suited to academic life enroll at universities?   And why would skilled tradespeople and their associations (ie unions) be the object of so much public derision.  Yes, part of the problem in the current financial situation is the degradation of labour ...