The Irrepressible Left

...But it creates a new context in which many millions of producers and consumers are also, albeit in a shadowy fashion, owners of collective means of production...

...a government commission is studying electoral reform and new democratic bodies are to take over in Scotland and Northern Ireland...

...Political arrangements that were already conservative at the close of the eighteenth century now need a radical democratic overhaul...

...Even within the narrow limits of prevailing legislation some social funds and prolabor funds have been established.' If retirement funds could claim the maximum tax exemption only by complying with social priorities in making their investments, then a mighty new lever of economic and social policy would have been established...

...Europe famously gave birth to the distinction with the French Revolution...

...To distribute risk evenly and discourage corporate privilege, it would be necessary for individuals to sign up for, say, a minimum of at least three different funds...

...In the United States, President Bill Clinton now suggests that better use be made of the surplus in the Social Security fund while in the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Tony Blair has promised that all citizens will benefit from a statefunded "stakeholder" pension and insurance scheme...

...But to impinge in a serious way, a new scale of priorities will have to be embodied in new laws and new institutions...

...But these gains have been eroded by the growth of tax-privileged second-tier systems and by the failure of governments to maintain adequate levels of universal provision...

...Now to a greater extent than in the past it finds itself answerable to other "stakeholders": consumers, the community, and a layer of owners that includes about half the workforce...

...The United States has at least a collective memory of the democratic way of tackling THE IRREPRESSIBLE LEFT such issues—the Constitutional Convention...

...Funded social provision should be available to every citizen and no tax privileges should be given to any retirement fund that pursues its members' immediate interests at the expense of the wider community...

...If the generalized introduction of such concessions threatened to reduce the overall tax take, then more reliance could be placed on consumption taxes...

...Because the institutions of what Daniel Lazare has called "the frozen republic" were initially designed to give property a free rein, it would be particularly foolish for socialists to suppose that they are apt for calling capitalism to account...

...Politicians have liked to offer tax concessions to encourage citizens to save for old age...

...NAFTA claims to pay some attention to ecological concerns and the condition of labor, yet lacks even the nominal democratic accountability embodied by the European Parliament...

...Likewise, some regional or national groups lean to the left and others to the right...

...Although the accumulation process cannot be tackled, or even restrained, solely from the heights of state power, central states still have a role to play in corralling the wild forces of capitalist accumulation...

...While it is far from inevitable that strategies of "strong socialization" will succeed, it is certain that they will be attempted, with the consequent possibility that trial and error will lead to increasing effectiveness...

...Nevertheless, measures favorable to the beneficiaries of existing funds can be combined with regulations that assert social priorities...

...The tax concessions available to socially responsible funds might be allowed only for the standard tax band, so that higher earners would still pay the difference between the standard and the higher rate...

...But it remains fundamental nonetheless...

...disputes concerning where members should sit are very rare...

...4 In my view the case for the socialization DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 45 THE IRREPRESSIBLE LEFT of the accumulation process is already overwhelming...

...Privately managed funds must also furnish profits to the owners, a charge that collectively owned funds escape.' The new salience of pension funds and provision for old age places on the agenda a notion that had all but disappeared, that of planning...

...14-17...

...6. Sec Robert Brenner, "The Economics of Global Turbulence: A Special Report on the Global Economy, 1950-98," Nese Left Review 229 (May-June 1998...

...Indeed, equality of respect prescribes a generous measure of liberty and informs such luminous watchwords as "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" and "the free development of each is the precondition for the free development of all...

...In the past, management was tempted to make concessions in this area because future obligations to retirement funds did not figure on the balance sheet...

...6 Yet within the new glohalized context there is also evidence of both a "weak socialization" and of renewed oppositional class struggle...

...Simply making funds more accountable to their existing members is not enough, both because many are now excluded from such provision and because democratic regulation of pension funds critically involves the allocation of tax privileges...

...4. Sec Roberto Unger, Democracy Realized (New York and London: Verso, 1998...

...These people are now, without difficulty, identified as the right...

...over two hundred years later there is still a formalized left-right spectrum in European politics, as the arrangement of the European Parliament testifies...

...THE INTERPRETATION of the "stakeholder pension" outlined here aims to strengthen and democratize key institutions within civil society...

...But Washington commentators still refer to the left of the Democratic Party or the right of the Republicans and their discourse is quite intelligible...

...The right, by contrast, is willing to tolerate or encourage inequality and exclusion on the grounds that they promote market efficiency or correspond to some natural hierarchy or are required by respect for established property rights...

...THE NEW LEFT may have overdone "national nihilism," but its profound skepticism concerning the workings of those two magnificent antiques—the U.S...

...But global competition now sets narrower limits on this...

...Fiscally privileged pension, insurance, and retirement funds set up in the name of employees now own nearly half of the stock of large corporations...

...The new politics of identity and ecology do THE IRREPRESSIBLE LEFT not challenge the left-right distinction, though in any actual movement that distinction has always existed along with identities that could not be wholly specified in terms of the political spectrum...

...Although the vision of the classical left still has much to recommend it, I am not urging that we simply need to continue asserting the agenda of historical social democracy or to revive the social planning of the postwar Golden Age or to rediscover true socialism...

...1. See, for example, Keith P. Ambachtsheer and D. Don Ezra, Pension Fund Excellence: Creating Willie for Stakeholders (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1998), pp...

...the cost of this to the public treasury is not readily evident, while it promises to remove some of the strain from public social-security provision...

...As Roberto Unger has pointed out, countries with generous social provision, such as Germany or France, often fund it through levies on consumption...

...But though individuals would have areas of choice, the funds themselves should be collectively owned if they are not themselves to be the plaything of market forces...

...They can ask why employees should be forced to invest in corporations that flout workers' rights or menace the environment or simply neglect to invest in sustainable development...

...Today's new social movements very properly challenge the onward and upward vision of harmonious progress nourished by classical liberalism...

...Moreover, reforms that do not begin to socialize investment will always be at the mercy of capitalists and financial managers, who are quick to lose confidence in governments of the left...

...in the circumstances of the time these were the opponents of bureaucratic privilege and corruption...

...Gray capitalism is by no means exempt from the crisis and conflict with which we rightly associate earlier versions of this mode of production...

...Commentators 42 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 have little difficulty identifying most Green groups with the left because they oppose laissez-faire economics, come down on the egalitarian side of most arguments, and resist chauvinist and militarist politics...

...As currently structured, it is certainly part of the problem...

...The populism of the radical right, the libertarianism of some free marketeers, and the political indeterminacy of issues of individual morality mean that alignment along the leftright spectrum by no means exhausts the language of political division...

...The extraordinarily irresponsible activities of these managers are, bizarrely enough, rewarded by special tax exemptions and mandated by trustee law...

...In the United States, ruling institutions seem almost impervious to reform, whether from right or left...

...Their failure to win this reform set the scene for the subsequent destruction of the Swedish welfare model.' The pay-as-you-go method of funding pensions and welfare had the great merit of exemplifying civic universalism and redistribution...

...Notably absent from these proposals is any notion that the investment of such funds should obey a logic of social priority...

...The left in the English-speaking countries still needs to draw on the legacy of the sixties New Left, with its salutary rejection of state paternalism and national reformism...

...Attempts to introduce a Scottish Parliament and a Northern Irish assembly were defeated...

...There have always been issues and policies that are not securely anchored to one end of the political spectrum...

...Yet under trustee law, the interests of the supposed beneficiaries of these funds are subject to extremely narrow and rigid interpretation by the trustees or fiduciaries...

...Equality of respect and an equal claim on material resources support one another...

...August Bebel's hugely popular writings on the "woman question" might not satisfy contemporary feminists, but were certainly more progressive than the sexual politics of any bourgeois political leader of the time, as was the early SPD's parliamentary support for the civic rights of homosexuals...

...In formal legal terms, this new vulnerability is very modest because of the negligible obligations imposed on the pension funds and the negligible rights accorded to policy holders...

...Welfare regimes have been nurtured by the conservative right as well as by communists, by liberals as well as by nationalists, by fascists as well as by social democrats...

...For a time the Russian Communists were able, by trading on their name and voicing the concerns of those afflicted by shock therapy, to play the part of the left, but before long their flirtations with the chauvinist right, their evident biddability, and their basic subservience to Boris Yeltsin undermined their credibility as a force of the left...

...312-3...

...Even if many trade-union leaders, and leaders of left-wing parties, wish to go on in the old way and respect the existing property system, the new structures themselves set up a continual possibility, and even necessity, of asserting a degree of "strong socialization," in the shape of collective control over the path of accumulation...

...Perception of the need for democratic reform is likely to go hand in hand with a new program of social advance...

...But it is potentially vulnerable to challenge from a new quarter...

...Today, in the epoch of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and a new wave of social movements, even the most rigid institutions may need to adapt...

...On the one hand there is good reason for employees to avoid investing much of their savings in the firm or branch that employs them, but on the other hand employees do have an interest in living in a region with a decent social infrastructure and a variety of sources of employment...

...And they can ask why funds that recognize no social obligations should continue to receive fiscal privileges...

...4-12...

...Today a number of these liberals now exercise power themselves, looting the public even more flagrantly than their predecessors...

...The now-prevailing structures of gray capitalism actually increase this vulnerability DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 43 THE IRREPRESSIBLE LEFT by widening the numbers of those who might appear to have something to gain from capital flight...

...As Robert Brenner has recently reminded us, the world economy is currently structured by a ferocious process of intercontinental rivalry...

...The defeat of the ERA shows how resistant U.S...

...Nevertheless, through all the fog of claim and counterclaim, those who strive for larger and more-inclusive rights, for greater equality, for more-adequate public provision, and for democratic governance of the economy, in doing so define themselves as the left...

...institutions are to even modest amendment...

...The anarchy of the global economy can no longer be tamed by either the Keynesian welfare state or communist autarchy...

...Ultimately a socialization drive would require social-investment boards accountable to particular groups...

...Senate nor the British House of Lords are remotely plausible repositories of popular will or agencies of egalitarian economics...

...Yet at the same time the prestige of politicians is low and the taint of corruption haunts both Congress and presidency...

...Employees and policy holders will need new laws and institutions if their interests are to prevail...

...Consti44 n DISSENT I Fall 1998 tution and the British Crown-in-Parliamentis a necessary ingredient if we are to get beyond the impotent bluster of radical patriotism...

...The corporate elite still confronts labor, and has to reckon on a state that does not always do its bidding...

...It is the new setting of global capitalism that necessarily furnishes both the problem and elements of the new collectivist solution that would give substance to the noble aspirations of the historic left...

...But today republicanism has suddenly become respectable...

...The chaos and disarray of international capital render such fatalism absurd and give us reason to believe that a new hour of reckoning is at hand...

...Even right-wing politicians now toy with proposals for endowing all citizens with their own insurance and pension fund...

...The inegalitarian impetus in civil society needs to be reversed and the public context of social life asserted...

...5. A point conceded even by the World Bank's report on pensions with its heavy bias toward private provision...

...Robin Blackburn is editor of New Left Review, the author of The Making of New World Slavery and The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, and Senior Research Fellow 1998-1999, Kings College, Cambridge...

...Anyone who has read the fundamental texts of the German Social Democrats (SPD), the first organized Marxist party, realizes the importance to them of discourses relating to sexual rights, nationality, and the environment, as well as to class and capital...

...See Averting the Old Age Crisis (Washington: World Bank, 1994), pp...

...The approach advocated above would supersede the stockholder model of capital markets with, in the first place, a more constant and committed relationship between funds and firms, by taxes levied on short-term speculative holdings...

...Where it is attenuated this is itself a sign that democratic political life is limited and probably threatened...

...concessions of one sort or another have always been indispensable to brokering coalitions and establishing legitimacy...

...However, the antistatism and cosmopolitanism of so many of the new social movements—which one can trace to remote New Left origins—are simply a starting point...

...Yet at another level, the pension and insurance funds could offer trade unions and social movements an extra front along which to press their claims...

...Neither the U.S...

...The currently prevailing forces of international competition constitute a formidable obstacle to any such vision...

...Sometimes it might seem easier to envisage the end of capitalism than the reform of the U.S...

...Politics is about negotiating alliances and striving for the upper hand...

...46 n DISSENT / Fall 1998...

...It is one that any public employee, any trade unionist, any college professor, can advance in direct, albeit modest, ways in the management of their own retirement funds...

...The basic left-right distinction is a crude binary that only announces the first of a succession of distinctions and combinations...

...Progressive lawyers are already exploring definitions of policy-holder interest that refer to the "whole person" and not simply the fiction of the isolated individual...

...In Moscow in the late eighties and early nineties the left referred to those who supported Mikhail Gorbachev or pressed him to go further...

...Karl Marx was surely right to insist that the pattern of social relations is always determined by what happens to the economic surplus...

...In the United States political differentiation has long been weaker because of the power of money and because of its archaic system of representation...

...But even those who sing the praises of "pension fund excellence" find it difficult to deny that the interests of the beneficiaries should be accorded unambiguous priority' Neoliberal ideology prescribes its own myopic and atomistic definition of the interests of policy holders, of course, but it is by challenging such definitions that a new collectivism may be constructed...

...Instead, citizens are urged to place their faith in the stock market and its "prudent experts" at a time when the latter have bought into a gigantic bubble economy, based on an extraordinary speculative inflation of assets...

...In the end, social democratic reform policies could always be sabotaged by capital outflows, as happened in both France and Sweden in the 1980s...

...The "weak socialization" includes the apparatus of what I have here called "gray capitalism...

...But it does not postulate civil society as a sphere of innate virtue— and government and state as a realm of necessary alienation...

...Yet in the Progressive era it did prove possible to replace indirect by direct elections...

...Senate...

...THE NEW political economy offers vantage points for democratic intervention that are quite different from those that gave birth to social democracy and communism...

...But this is only one aspect of the required structural reforms, since it is also necessary to establish vehicles and regulations that embody a new definition of the public interest...

...And electoral reform of the first-past-the-post system could be achieved even short of this, thus furnishing more scope for the distinctive programmatic politics of the left...

...In other postcommunist states the left-right dichotomy is also evident notwithstanding the very powerful forces tending to homogenize politics...

...I have chosen to stress an egalitarian and democratic collectivist reform of gray capitalism because I wish to resist the siren song of New Age political and social thinking, promising altered consciousness within an unchanged political economy...

...The proposal sketched here would be egalitarian, and thus genuinely of the left, only if there were a progressive tax regime and generous public provision for carers and the unemployed...

...But they have not thereby faulted the principle of equality or disproved that our world must accommodate a new collectivism...

...When trade unions negotiate on behalf of their members, the issue of retirement provision often looms large...

...In the United States, as in the United Kingdom, the precise rights of pension fund beneficiaries are a notorious gray area under existing legislation...

...The implication of the argument sketched above is, in part, that citizens should be empowered by being given a direct say in the management of funded socialsecurity provision...

...As recently as ten years ago it was impossible to question the British monarchy or the first-pastthepost electoral system...

...3. See the contribution by Jonas Pontusson to Mapping the West European Left, edited by Perry Anderson and Peter Gowan (London: Verso, 1994...

...2. See Rebecca Bauen, "Pensions for Progress: Targeting Union Retirement Money to Save Jobs," Dollars and Sense, January-February 1996, pp...

...As it happens, a very significant cost advantage accrues to collective funds compared to individual schemes, since the latter inescapably incur heavy administration charges—unless the individual concerned has vast resources...

...I have accorded the socialization of investment a certain prominence here because it furnishes a point of convergence for different egalitarian, democratic, and ecological movements...

...These funds, which now determine the pattern of economic activity, are subject to the notorious short-termism and "herd instinct" of financial managers...

...There was a time when national tax-andspend policies could bring about socialization of a portion of the surplus...

...A strange combination of fiscal regulation and class struggle has resulted—in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere—in a new pseudocollectivist financial superstructure that we might provisionally call "gray capitalism": partly because it is based on retiree funds and partly because the property claims involved remain unclear...

...But it is nevertheless an essential dimension of political choice...

...In the seventies and eighties the Swedish trade unions pressed for the establishment of regional Wage-Earner Funds, to which corporations were obliged to contribute, as an expression of such a social logic...