Name: Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?
ISBN: 9780393609936

Robert Kuttner

A song of angry men -- A vulnerable miracle -- The rise and fall of democratic globalism -- The liberation of finance -- The global assault on labor -- Europe's broken social contract -- The disgrace of the center left -- Trading away a decent economy -- Taxes and the corporate state -- Governing global capitalism -- Liberalism, populism, fascism -- The road from here -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index

Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?

"Democracy is no longer writing the rules for capitalism; instead it is the other way around. With his deep insight and wide learning, Kuttner is among our best guides for understanding how we reached this point and what's at stake if we stay on our current path."--Heather McGhee, president of Demos

Sophie Shrimpton

I read the first two chapters of this for the critical theory reading group. The below is assuming Kuttner doesn’t change track in the rest of the book. 

The book taught me new historical facts and context but did not teach me new theory. Kuttner is a class reductionist and glorifies the New Deal era. At points he openly disparages various minorities - e.g. for “arguing about toilets”. He fails to account for how social hierarchies cut across capitalism, and how those two systems are intertwined. He fails to acknowledge that the New Deal was built on the (very low paid) back of people of colour, on the unpaid reproductive labour of women and relied on exploitative industries which contributed to our current climate crisis. He fails to acknowledge how growth assumptions embedded in capitalism will constantly work to erode state institutions, meaning any decent level of market regulation and control will always be temporary. How can we possibly maintain a New Deal system without the impetus of war? How can capitalism ever be ‘managed’ when it will always strive to wrest back market ‘freedom’? 

A good system shouldn’t be a constant struggle for power reliant on a fragile global convergence of interests. A good system should be self-reinforcing and provide for the needs of people and harmonious environment. Kuttner does not provide a design for this system.

Quotes:

“There is no global lender of last resort, no global financial supervisor, no global antitrust authority, no global tax collector, no global labor relations board, no global entity to enforce democratic rights or broker social contracts”

“International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, are far less transparent and less accountable than their domestic public counterparts, and easier for corporate elites to capture and dominate”

“history doesn’t repeat, but sometimes it rhymes”

“In countries where rulers invoked his name, there was no “dictatorship of the proletariat,” just plain totalitarianism. Most important for our purposes, Marx—in his conjuring of a global proletariat—left out nationalism. He left out the fact that the reaction against a predatory capitalism that annihilates social institutions more typically ended in fascism”

“The institutions often turn out to be more fragile than they first appear, and they require continual renewal”

“On pocketbook issues, wealthy donors, in effect, pay Democrats to abandon their normal instincts to defend workaday voters—to become less like Democrats. For Republicans, reliance on big money reinforces a natural affinity of conservatives, corporations, and laissez-faire economics.
Democratic”

“Bannon favored a large program of public infrastructure, tax increases for the rich, and a get-tough program with China intended to bring home industrial jobs”

“Political associations, to Tocqueville, were “great free schools” of democracy. They breathed civic life into formally democratic institutions of government. To engage with public issues, people did so more effectively in groups, not as isolated individuals”

“In a mass society, there is a loss of institutions of representation or of political voice that connect people to one another. This atomization, in turn, leaves people alienated and primed to embrace dictators. As William Kornhauser wrote, in his classic Politics of Mass Society, Caesarism thrives when people are drawn to totalitarian leaders and “there is a paucity of intervening groups to channelize and filter popular participation in the larger society.” In these circumstances, “mass participation tends to be irrational and unrestrained”

“In addition to the impact of growing income gaps, three trends over the past half century have intensified participatory inequality. First, large mass-membership organizations that once engaged lower- and middle-class Americans in civic and political life have atrophied. Second, an entire habitat of mutual self-help organizations, ranging from unions to local building and loan societies, which also served as a civic training ground and an avenue of influence for the nonrich, have been substantially depleted as well. Finally, the mass entry of women into the labor force without a proportional reduction in the hours worked by most men has deprived localities of civic capital”

“Unions lost membership because of relentless attacks by corporations, the outsourcing of jobs heavily concentrated in unionized sectors, deregulation and privatization, and the shift in the federal government’s role from benign neutrality under Roosevelt and Truman to full-scale assault under Reagan and the Bushes.”

“Why did Democrats move toward the center and Republicans to the far right? Several things occurred. Money became more important in politics. The Democratic Leadership Council, formed by business-friendly and Southern Democrats after Walter Mondale’s epic 1984 defeat, believed that in order to be more competitive electorally, Democrats had to be more centrist on both economic and social issues. As old-fashioned progressive Democrats retired, some were replaced by corporate Democrats. Others were replaced by right-wing Republicans, as the Democratic Solid South gradually became the Republican Solid South, fueled by racial and regional resentment.”

“strategy was to deny Democrats successes on any issue. Under Obama, Republican legislators vowed to vote against the Affordable Care Act, sight unseen. Democrats, meanwhile, viewed themselves as the party of government, “the grown-ups in the room,” and were more inclined to compromise in order to keep government functioning. This asymmetry enabled Republicans to roll Democrats, time after time. The tactic reached an apotheosis under Obama, a leader with a personal affinity for compromise, of which Republicans took full advantage.”

“This politics of deliberate blockage served Republicans in multiple, mutually reinforcing respects. It denied the Democrats successes, even when Democrats held the White House. It seriously hurt both the prestige and the efficacy of government. Since Democrats represent the proposition that affirmative government is needed to serve the people, this was a double setback for them, and a win for the Republican ideology that government is a waste of money.”

“Because working-class people need affirmative government far more than affluent people do, Republican success in creating deadlock undermined politics and government as a balancing mechanism. The cynical Republican strategy of deadlock strengthened the Republican story that government is a hopeless mess. The perceived failures of government served to recruit aggrieved working people first to the Republican Party, then to the Tea Party, and then to Trump.”

“The reign of finance in the 1920s had proved both deflationary and destabilizing—promoting speculation during booms and austerity during busts, and creating protracted unemployment. Joblessness, in turn, fed fascism and pan-European war.”

“They concluded from the ruinous events of the previous decade that fascism grew in the soil of human misery; that laissez-faire capitalism generated depression; that Europe must never again suffer a civil war; and that to fuse these several goals, Europe needed to move in the direction of both a managed form of capitalism and a federation”

“the postwar bargain was built more on a convergence of circumstances than on durable, permanent changes. The bargain proved surprisingly fragile, once capitalists regained their normal, temporarily suppressed powers in a still-capitalist economy”

“History is a blend of deep structural forces and contingent events that can be lucky or unlucky”

“On balance, the formal labor partnership gave labor an institutional role but sapped labor militancy as a social movement. When labor was again under siege in the late twentieth century, that militancy would not be there to draw on”

“The practical experience of labor solidarity offset the social conservatism of much of the working class. The labor movement gives working people a political understanding of class. To this day, union members and their families vote far more progressively than do people with identical demographic and occupational characteristics who are not in unions”

“Roosevelt was able to expand labor regulation, social insurance, and public investment only by guaranteeing the Dixie members of his coalition that nothing in his program would alter the Southern Jim Crow system of white supremacy. Indeed, some of the New Deal actually extended state-mandated segregation to the North, into neighborhoods that had previously been integrated”

“The Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow,” King said from the steps of the Alabama capitol following the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery. “And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than a black man”

“the euthanasia of the rentier,” meaning that a modern economy relying on public credit and low interest rates could innovate and achieve full employment without being at the mercy of the whims of stockholders, bondholders, and speculators”

“Keynes’s core insight was that market economies tended to get stuck at levels of output and employment well below their capacity for growth. The international correlate was the tendency of global finance to produce systemic austerity by placing fiscal balance, currency stability, and debt repayment ahead of economic growth. This bias was “pro-cyclical,” producing euphoric booms as finance chased fads, followed by crashes and then recessions or depressions.”

“Keynes’s proposed mechanism was a provision that fined chronic creditors and allowed other nations to “discriminate” (his word) against the exports of creditor nations. In the context of 1944, the only such creditor nation was the United States.”

“To that end, discrimination against imports was expressly permitted when necessary to keep down domestic joblessness, and in the draft charter the ITO’s members made a commitment to domestic policies”

“In theory, the IMF was supposed to provide advances that would allow nations to defend currencies against private speculation. In practice, the actual IMF did little of this, and it later became a leading instrument of the very austerity it was intended to contain”

“World Bank provided only a fraction of the reconstruction aid and aggregate demand that was needed”

“Some economic historians contend that the imperatives of recovery and rebuilding were the core explanation for the stunning revival of postwar Europe.”

Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?

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