Self-Managed Class-Struggle Alternatives to Neo-liberalism, Nationalisation, Elections

Lucien van der Walt

The 1970s-plus rise of neo-liberal policies profoundly destabilised Left currents that sought social change through the state. Old statist roads – the social democratic Keynesian welfare state (KWS), Marxist central planning as exemplified by the Soviet Union (USSR), and post-colonial nationalist import-substitution-industrialisation (ISI) – had some achievements.

But all had, on the eve of neo-liberalism, entered economic and political crises, and inherent flaws.

The subsequent neo-liberal victory entailed more than shifts in ideas and policies. These were part of a deeper shift in capitalism that reflected and reinforced the historic failure of statist roads. To follow the old routes today, whether through new Left parties, or efforts to win state elites to defunct policies, is futile.

What is needed is a working class Left approach freed of the failed statist past, resolutely opposed to capitalist and nationalist solutions, and rooted in historical anti-statist, libertarian Left traditions. While the Left remains statist, it is crippled by past crisis and current powerlessness, under intellectual and political siege.

Why a European Unemployment Insurance would help to make European Monetary Union more sustainable

Sebastian Dullien

Since the onset of the euro-crisis, the old debate pertaining to the supra-national stabilisers in the euro-area has gained new relevance. While economic textbooks have long stipulated that countries forming a monetary union need an alternative mechanism for dealing with asymmetric shocks and even the early feasibility studies on Economic and Monetary Union EMU had demanded a supranational transfer scheme (MacDougall 1977), EMU came into existence in the late 1990s without such a scheme.

By now, most observers agree that the euro-crisis was (with the exception of Greece) is not the result of irresponsible fiscal policies, but the consequence of problems in the banking systems which resulted partly from national boom-and-bust-cycles. Hence, for a more sustainable and better-functioning monetary union, a growing body of literature now asks for mechanisms to dampen booms and bolster recessions.

The new debate can best be observed in a number of European Union documents, such as the European Commission’s roadmap detailing propositions for a more complete monetary union; as well as that dubbed the “four presidents‘ report” prepared by the president of the European Council, in conjunction with presidents of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the Eurogroup. The European Commission’s concept for “Social Dimension of EMU” is also an example of such documents, all of which call for a “fiscal capacity” for the eurozone.

Worker Cooperatives as a Response to the Crisis

Pierre Laliberté

In recent times, it has become commonplace to say that we are not so much facing an economic crisis as much as a crisis of the prevailing economic model. Undeniably, not only has neoliberalism failed to deliver decent social and environmental outcomes, but it has even failed on its own terms: delivering economic growth and stability.

The dominance of the financial interests and liberalisation has wreaked havoc on workers and communities alike. It has imposed new costs on governments and led to increased insecurity the world over. Yet for all the obvious limitations of the “model”, the way forward is not always clear, as if even the victims and critics of the system had internalised Margaret Thatcher’s infamous TINA.[i]

Beyond the necessary mobilisations to resist self-defeating austerity measures and to reform political and economic governance, it is important that workers and their organisations get a tangible sense that organising the economy around more ethical and democratic principles is both possible and viable.

It so happens that cooperatives have proven just that. Every day, throughout the world, tens of thousands of workers go to work in workplaces that they run themselves along cooperative principles.