File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9706, message 103


Date: Wed, 18 Jun 1997 14:37:44 -0800
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari)
Subject: M-TH: Jospin's compromise


Forwarded from the progressive economics network. I hope I am not violating
any rules by sending this to both lines. All the best,Rakesh

Surely it can't come as any surprise that Jospin caved in to Blair and
Kohl so easily, given the fact that the Socialists have long stood behind
Maastricht, even if they disagreed with the fiscal austerity versions of
same. Now that the official social democrats of Europe in their various
stripes more or less agree on an EC in which the "socially excluded" are
dealt with by being offered EC-backed loans if they are deemed
credit-worthy (Clinton's domestic micro-credit model applied to EC), thus
resurrecting the old liberal utopia of a nation of shopkeepers, what
can/should the left reply in return ?

Please, it should not revolve
around holding Jospin to his promise to create 700,000 new jobs. The
recent pen-l discussion on overwork and consumerism should drive home
how bankrupt neo-Keynesian measures such as this are, be they achieved
via subsidies to capital, or via state-driven taxing and spending. (I
should say parenthetically that I am impressed with the maturity and
subtlety of red-green thought on this list lately, so rarely have I
encountered eco-socialist ideas on this list in the past).
Liberals in this country have focused on "jobs, jobs, jobs" and under
Clinton's watch "the economy" (reified) has generated lots of jobs, and
where has that got us ? I have not heard or seen Jospin utter one word
about the social and ecological use-values of these 700,000 new jobs. Do
the Communists and the Greens in France have any agenda as to the
use-value contents of a full employment strategy (I assume they do) ?
The Socialists' recent (and now discarded ?) advocacy of an EC-funded
trans-European high speed rail system was all about reducing the turnover
time of capital and bolstering EC competitiveness (and soaking up surplus
labor-power simultaneously), nothing about the qualitative (i.e. quality
of life and ecological) virtues of mass transit.

Jospin's campaign
promise of the 35-hour workweek and work-sharing seems a bit more
palatable. But I would imagine it was only a rhetorical gesture with no
strategy about how to achieve it (since Mitterand promised the same 15
years ago, before money and investment capital markets were as fluid as
they are today, and got thoroughly punished), and, anyway, alongside this
proposal there was no mention of what social and ecological use-values
reallocated labor would be accomplishing. Like the anarcho-punk
demonstrator's billboard in Amsterdam read, "get a life, not a job".
Social democracy is dead. It was normatively bankrupt, and now it is
pragmatically bankrupt, b/c the international market will no longer
tolerate it, its standard-bearers will no longer defend it. Cutting-edge
social movements, recognizing that it was normatively bankrupt and is now
politically impracticable, have moved on to pressure for better things.

John Gulick
Sociology Graduate Program
UC-Santa Cruz




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