In just a
few month's time, the US political machines will start to swing into
action, in earnest, to begin the process of selecting candidates for
the US Presidential elections. Eight years ago, when that same
process started to get underway, there was great excitement at the
fact that a young senator, from Illinois, was rapidly gaining
support, having come from nowhere, to challenge Hillary Clinton, who
until then had been thought to be the inevitable Democrat nominee.
That senator
was Barack Obama, who despite an Irish sounding surname, was also the
surprise contender for the simple reason that he was the first black
candidate ever to seem to have a good chance of winning. But, of
course, history records that not only did he beat Hillary Clinton to
win the Democratic nomination, but he was to go on and win the Presidency itself, by a wide margin, against the challenge from
right-wing Republican John McCain, backed by the even more right-wing
Sarah Palin.
What perhaps
made Obama's nomination more interesting was the political terrain on
which he mounted his challenge. Bill Clinton had based himself, in
the early 1990's, on a fairly traditional social-democratic platform,
that contrasted with the conservative politics of the Reagan/Bush era
that preceded him. Clinton inherited the economic conditions that
period had created. Conservative governments in the US and UK had
responded to the stagnation of the long wave downturn, and the
process of de-industrialisation that flowed from old, low-profit
manufacturing industry migrating to Asia and Eastern Europe, in
search of higher profits, by themselves proffering support for the
kind of backward looking, low-paying employers whose outlook they
shared.
In effect,
these conservative governments adopted the same kind of protectionist
stance conservatives have generally adopted in more straightened
economic times. The protectionism was of the worst kind; protection
of these, often small, always inefficient, firms by means of
releasing them from the requirement to meet some kind of minimum
standards of how they treated their employees, or the environment in
which they operated.
At the same
time, and in conditions where the open advocacy of Keynesian fiscal
stimulus was frowned upon, as contrary to the new orthodoxy, the
conservatives turned to that new orthodoxy when a new big financial
crisis erupted in 1987. Alan Greenspan pumped millions of dollars
into the economy, the stock market crash was more than reversed
within the year, property prices began a massive rise, and the stage
was set, along with the Big Bang of financial deregulation, for a
period of debt fuelled financial speculation, whose culmination we
are on the verge of experiencing, in the shape of a Big Bang of a
quite different type.
By the time
Clinton came to office, in 1992, therefore, the conditions were
established. At the tail-end of the long wave downturn, the US was
showing all the signs of an economy in relative decline. Its old,
big, heavy industries were no longer competitive with their
equivalent, newly built, up to date competitors in China and
elsewhere, who also employed workers paid a fraction of their US
counterparts. The US had some world-beating industries in
technology, media and so on, but not enough had been invested in
them, in the previous period of encouraging a low-wage/high debt
economy, and these new industries required relatively little in the
way of inputs that would generate wider economic growth, and employed
a relatively small number of very high value, highly paid workers.
This in
itself was a contributory factor in creating a bifurcated economy,
where large numbers of low-paid workers existed alongside this group
of highly paid workers. Bill Clinton, encouraged by his wife,
Hillary, had made health-care reform a centre piece of his
social-democratic agenda. But, when he needed to get cross-party
support to push through economic reform measures on tax, to bring a
spiralling budget deficit under control, he readily dropped it.
What made
Obama's stance more interesting was that Hillary Clinton, not
surprisingly, stood on the same ground that Bill had been driven to.
Not surprisingly because, despite all of the controversies over
Whitewater, Monica Lewinski and so on, Clinton's Presidency had been
seen as one of the most successful of recent generations. Not only
had the budget deficit been overcome, largely as a result of
reversing the dreadful Lafferite tax experiment introduced under
Reagan, but the budget had gone into surplus, and the economy had
started to grow.
It was
Clinton who developed the “Third Way” also adopted by Blair. In
reality, the “Third Way”, was nothing but the social-democracy of
Anthony Crosland. The only difference was that this was
social-democracy for a globalised world. The formation of a single
global economy had found its manifestation, in the 1990's, after the
collapse of Stalinism, in a rapid spread of globalised industrial
capital. Its spearhead was the huge multinational industrial
corporation.
Unlike
Colonialism, which was based on the extraction industries and
recreated feudalistic, rent based economies, these large industrial
corporations needed and created, modern industrial societies, in
which to operate and extract relative surplus value. Experience in
the developed economies had shown that the best political shell to
achieve that was the modern, bourgeois social-democratic state. Its
not surprising then that such states also mushroomed across the globe
during this period.
But, this
global economy lacked a global state, to set the rules, and maintain
a level playing field, as it does at a national level. Imperialism
developed as a system of states, but with these huge multinational
corporations increasingly footloose, and able to base themselves
wherever they could obtain advantage, not only did they require some
state functions to be undertaken at an international or at least
intra-national level, but nation states themselves needed to come
together to co-ordinate their activities, or face growing impotence
and irrelevance, as economic power moved increasingly out of their
influence. Existing international bodies like GATT were beefed up to
become the WTO, and a string of forums were established that brought
together the leading economic powers.
But, absent
a global state, the role of enforcing a global rule of law fell to
the US, as the hegemonic military power. Of course, just as the US
uses the position of the dollar as global reserve currency, so it
used its position as global policeman to further its interests. The
fact that this is a system of states does not mean that there is no
hierarchy within it.
The policy
of Liberal intervention, that starts with Clinton and Blair, is
basically the same social-democratic ideology applied at an
international level. It says, if we want to have economic
prosperity, there has to be compromise and negotiation in place of
conflict, and that requires a set of rules that have to be obeyed.
That applies both to the needs of multinational industrial capital,
in being able to invest confidently across the globe, as well as the
need to be able to trade and transport commodities across trade
routes.
When Obama
stood on a platform of opposing the war in Iraq, as a mistake, of
closing down Guantanamo, pulling out the troops from Iraq, and
Afghanistan, offering an open hand to Iran, and refraining from
further foreign adventures, this was then a break from the ground on
which Hillary Clinton was standing, and on which Bill Clinton had
previously stood. Moreover, where Bill Clinton had quickly dropped
healthcare reform, in favour of bi-partisan politics, and Hillary
Clinton was not proposing to resurrect it, Obama made it central to
his domestic policy agenda.
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