REBUILDING A LEFT ECONOMIC
ALTERNATIVE:
Policy Alternatives for the New World Order
Jim Stanford*
Originally presented to Federal NDP Renewal Conference,
Ottawa, September 1994
* Economist, Canadian Auto Workers Union (CAW-Canada), 205
Placer Court, North York, Ont., M2H 3H9, (416) 497-4110. Views
expressed are those of the author and should not be attributed to the
CAW-Canada.
Introduction:
It is an understatement to admit that socialist economic
policy-making is in a state of disarray. The traditional pillars
of a socialist economic program--public ownership and state
economic planning--have been largely rejected as ineffective, both
in motivating economic development and in promoting socialist
goals. Socialist economists and left political parties have been
relegated to fighting rearguard actions in defense of what few
interventionist policy tools still remain from the post-war golden
age of the mixed economy. The economic imperatives of
globalization and deficit reduction are demolishing even the
mildest remnants of welfare state capitalism.
Free-market capitalism finds itself in a position of
unprecedented, unchallenged global hegemony--the structures and
ideologies of this system being propagated and implemented
virtually everywhere in the world, with less resistance than ever
before. Within such a pessimistic setting, it is hard to envision
a rebirth of a socialist economic alternative. It is thus little
wonder that so many left economists are tempted to make a virtue
out of a necessity--to accept and even welcome the triumph of the
free market economy as an inevitable manifestation of economic
rationality, and to then set themselves the task of doing what they
can to somehow make the economic outcomes of this system fairer and
more humane.
I come to an alternative conclusion, in the face of the
current global dominance of the free-market vision, and the gloomy
prospects for a socialist economic project. The time is ripe for
a fundamental rethinking and ground-up reconstruction of an
alternative to free-market capitalism. This reconstruction will be
informed by the failures of previous experiments with socialist
economic policy, and equally importantly by the failures of global
capitalism, despite its all-powerful position, to improve the
economic well-being of the vast majority of the human race. With
unregulated markets ruling the world, it is all the easier to point
out their flaws and their often catastrophic effects. And with the
slate of real-world socialist experimentation wiped virtually
clean, it may perhaps be easier to envision the precise, concrete
mechanisms and structures that will need to be created as part of
a socialist economic project, without being wedded to the flawed,
rough-draft visions of those mechanisms and structures that were
attempted in practice.
This article will not provide any step-by-step recipes for
concocting a socialist economic policy. But it will attempt to
suggest a broad direction for the future intellectual and political
evolution of a movement for a socialist economy. I start with the
issue of public finances, which has dominated most economic debates
in this decade. But I see the problem of the government deficit as
a metaphor for the deeper, lasting problems of the free market
economy, and for the choices which socialists face in how to
address those problems. I suggest some broad features of a
potential future socialist economic program, and discuss the
political opportunities and constraints associated with this
program.
The Debt and the Deficit:
The current preoccupation with the state of public finances
has constrained progressives from proposing new forms of public
intervention, and indeed has made it difficult to argue even for
the preservation of existing forms of intervention. How should
socialists address the deficit? To borrow the language of the
Federal NDP "Renewal Workbook", the deficit is a problem, not the
problem. But the deficit and accumulated public debt is becoming
a big problem, one that is increasingly handcuffing the ability of
government to address deeper, underlying economic problems.
Indeed, persistent structural deficits in Canada are a symptom of
underlying economic weakness, not its cause. But like an
opportunistic infection that can attack someone with a serious
disease, the symptom can eventually kill the patient. And the
deficit is an issue on which the left has been incoherent and
unconvincing.
There are many progressive reasons why continued public
deficit financing, and the cumulating debt which accompanies it,
should be seen as a major economic problem. Here are four:
* The payment of huge public debt service charges has
highly regressive effects on income distribution. Given
the skewed distribution of wealth in Canada, collecting
money from taxpayers and giving it to wealth-holders is
surely more regressive than other income distribution
issues (such as the distribution effects of consumption
taxes) which have traditionally infatuated the left.
* The existence of a permanent structural deficit prevents
government from playing a stronger counter-cyclical role.
The government has less financial leeway to increase
spending during recession. Worse, with public spending
consisting so heavily of interest charges (paid to
wealthy households or financial institutions with very
low spending propensities), public spending ceases to
have very much of a stimulative effect.
* Public deficits--at least as they are currently financed,
and this is an important caveat--are the dominant
contributor to a looming Canadian foreign debt crisis.
The foreign financing of a significant share of public
deficits is leading to an international debt servicing
problem far greater than that associated with another
favourite issue of the Canadian left: high levels of
foreign direct investment (FDI) in Canadian industry.
* The most serious, but least-recognized, problem
associated with public deficits is the loss of control
over monetary policy that they imply--again, at least as
our deficits are currently financed. As discussed below,
restrictive interest rate and monetary policies have been
the most important and effective weapon in the successful
neoconservative strategy of slowing economic growth,
deliberately increasing unemployment, and reversing the
post-war gains of labour. To some extent this policy
direction could be turned around, through the re-
regulation of financial institutions and interest rates,
given sufficient political pressure and complementary
interventionist policies in Canadian industries and the
labour market. But as long as Canadian governments are
going cap-in-hand to global financiers in search of
liquidity to finance their deficits, then we can only
accept the terms we are offered. Financial self-
sufficiency will be an essential prerequisite for
restructuring our financial system.
Our socialist economic strategy should include as one
component the relatively fast balancing of public budgets. There
is nothing "left-wing" about running up a public debt. The most
advanced social-democratic economies of Europe have had much
smaller deficits (and hence smaller debt-servicing charges) than
Canada: governments in these countries collect taxes to pay for
their public interventions. Left governments which have attempted
to finance social change through large deficits, without addressing
the deeper structural constraints posed by the private profit-
seeking economy, have inevitably collapsed amidst hyper-inflation
and economic turmoil, leaving capital (especially international
capital) more dominant than ever.
Beneath the Deficit:
This left-wing coming-to-grips with the problems posed by
public debt is a metaphor for the overall political and
intellectual problem which we face. The left is told that we must
face the facts about the new global economy, give up our old
dogmas, become more realistic and credible in what we advocate.
This advice is offered not only with respect to public deficits,
but also regarding other important issues: tax fairness, free
trade, indeed our attitude towards private enterprise itself.
There is some truth, of course, to the notion that we must
update our arguments to reflect what has happened in the national
and world economies. Some of our traditional, most sacred
arguments and demands simply are not relevant anymore, may no
longer even promote our ultimate socialist goals. But the problem
in simply endorsing a "get-real" strategy, and implicitly or
explicitly endorsing a free market approach, is that it mystifies
the economic problems which we are supposed to be facing up to, and
diverts attention from the underlying crisis in the new, all-
powerful world market system.
For example, within our country it is said that we simply
cannot afford traditional left goals: quality public programs,
higher wages, a more equal distribution of income. Right-wingers
use this rhetoric to launch an all-out attack on public programs
and regulation in general; the "realistic" left limits itself to
calling for targeted programs and stricter, more punitive entrance
requirements.
But we must remember that these are demands that in many cases
we had already achieved, 20 or even 30 years ago--the quality of
our public programs and the equity of our distribution of income
have been going backward since at least the mid-1970s. And so the
key question that we can't lose sight of is: Why can't we afford
these things anymore? Our economy is fantastically productive,
relative to the 1970s when somehow we could afford new programs,
higher wages, and more social equity--with a balanced budget, to
boot. If properly utilized and distributed, our society has
economic resources which are clearly capable of supporting existing
and expanded public and social goals.
When we simply accept that we must wake up to a new reality of
globalization, all-knowing financial markets, and fiscal
constraints, we ignore the deeper structural crisis that underlies
the immediate problems we are dealing with. We obscure the true
causes of that crisis, we let the system and the economic elites
who run it off the hook, and we comfort ourselves with some common-
sense ideology about how we have been living beyond our means and
simply have to tighten our belts.
Canadians have not been living beyond their means--this
argument is a hoax. Instead, our economic system has been vastly
underperforming: collectively, we have been living (and more
importantly, producing) far below our means for most of the last
two decades. That is the root of the economic and fiscal problems
that have developed in Canada. This underlying reality of
controlled, deliberate, permanent recession suits the most powerful
economic agents in our system just fine. And now, the need to
"face facts" is invoked in order to ram the round peg of what
remains of Canada's public programs into a square hole created by
permanent economic stagnation.
The first priority of a left economic platform must be to
expose the failure of the right-wing free-market program, rather
than simply accepting the consequences of that failure as our own
constraints.
The Permanent Recession--Its Causes and Consequences:
What explains this ongoing crisis in the free-market economic
system? Answering this question will in turn imply some
suggestions about ultimate solutions to that crisis.
The permanent recession springs from root problems in two
fundamental processes of the capitalist economy--problems that
began to be encountered after the three golden decades of stable
expansion and near-full employment that followed World War II:
i) problems in the labour process: that is, how our economy
organizes and motivates work, and
ii) problems in the capital accumulation process: how our
economy invests in machinery, productive facilities, and
technology, and how it oversees the wise and efficient
use of those capital resources.
Most social-democratic economic policy was formulated in the
context of a vibrant welfare-state capitalism. Issues of managing
work and investment were left, for the most part, up to the private
sector. The interventionist state limited itself to trying to
guide and stabilize those processes (through both macroeconomic
management and various laws and standards, such as labour
standards, which constrained the actions of profit-seeking private
agents), and redistributing to some degree the fruits of the
private sector's productivity (through progressive fiscal policy,
pro-union labour relations structures, and the provision of a
growing "social wage"). This happy accord, which produced (for as
long as it worked) tremendous material progress for working people,
seduced most social-democrats into abandoning the notion of
fundamentally restructuring the capitalist economy. This
political-economic rapprochement was summarized in the old social-
democratic cliche: "let the capitalists take charge of production,
but socialists will look after a fairer distribution".
The problem is that production and distribution cannot be
separated. The state cannot for long "trick" capitalists into
doing what they do best with a strong profit motive, while
simultaneously redistributing that profit away (through high wages
or high taxes). After 30 years of the welfare state and full
employment, which underwrote a vast increase in the political and
economic power of working people, the system ran into a limit--a
limit which was felt first and foremost through crises in the two
central economic processes mentioned above.
While it worked, welfare-state capitalism embodied a
convenient coincidence of economic interests. The private sector
managed work and investment. A long profit-led boom was all the
stronger thanks to the positive multiplier effects contributed by
growing wages and mass consumption. With full employment and rapid
economic growth, the state had ample resources to fund improved
social programs, a growing public sector, and initiatives to reduce
poverty. The huge postwar expansion of collective bargaining
further compressed the structure of income distribution.
The bottom-line consequence of all this for employers,
however, was a long historic rise in the wage share of output,
mirrored by a decline in the profit share. At the microeconomic
level of production, the key labour process problem faced by
employers is how to extract productive labour effort from workers
at a minimal cost. This problem became increasingly binding, as
full-employment and expanded unionization enhanced labour's
bargaining power over both wages and work practices, and expanded
social programs provided workers with some opportunity for
decommodification (that is, for a degree of social and economic
security that was independent of their status as sellers of labour
services). So wages were higher and productivity lower than
employers would have preferred. Net profit share was further
squeezed by tax measures and by increasingly competitive markets
(due in part to free trade and international competition).
The consequences of this redistribution from profits to wages
were not felt immediately: the profit share started at a very high
level after World War II, and was initially sustained by rapid
increases in productivity and the beneficial effects of high rates
of capacity utilization on profitability. Eventually, however, the
crisis in profitability sparked a crisis in the capital
accumulation process, and by the mid-1970s private investment
slowed and the profit-led system began to grind to a halt.
Starting around 1980, the elites of this system engineered a
great U-turn in the dynamics of economic growth, in an attempt to
undo the "damage" to the profit system caused by 30 years of full-
employment and an expanding social sector. Most importantly,
elected and unelected institutions embarked on a program of
deliberate economic stagnation. Permanent unemployment was re-
established in order to discipline labour: undermining both wage
demands and worker resistance to speed-up and other "productivity-
enhancing" practices in the workplace. But unemployment alone does
not sufficiently discipline labour if social programs provide
unemployed workers with some degree of economic security, and thus
another element of the strategy of permanent recession must involve
disassembling those programs.
In this strategy of deliberate stagnation, no instrument
proved more powerful than the monetarist high-interest rate
policies which were implemented almost universally in the
industrialized market economies. Indeed, the onset of high real
interest rates provides the best indicator of the timing of this
sea-change in macroeconomic management. High rates on financial
capital are a blunt, destructive, but effective way of both slowing
down the entire economy and shifting the structure of income
distribution back in favour of capital. They require that any new
real investment which can still occur must be much more profitable
than in the past, due to the high hurdle rate of return dictated by
financial markets. And the international integration of capital
markets ensures that monetarism is a global agenda, not one which
can be ascribed (as the Canadian left did with John Crow) to the
personal obsessions of individual central bankers.
Monetarism was initially promoted as a means of battling
inflation. But the behaviour of central banks during the current
low-inflation recovery indicates that they are guided by a more
important but unstated objective. The fact that they (and the
stock markets!) are alarmed by cycle-peak growth rates of 3-4% (far
slower than Canada's average growth rate from World War II to
1980), despite the large gap that exists between actual and
potential output, suggests their true mission: maintaining the
state of controlled, permanent recession.
This U-turn has been reasonably successful, in terms of its
objectives (but not in terms of human well-being!). Unemployment
is high, the expectations and demands of workers have been revised
dramatically downward, real wages have stagnated, productivity
growth has accelerated, and the profit share of output has
rebounded impressively. In some cases, when this social
restructuring is especially successful, the leash of controlled
recession can even be modestly relaxed.
Nowhere is this more clear than in the U.S. So fundamentally
has a new regime of insecurity and institutional powerlessness been
consolidated there, that the unemployment rate there has fallen
below 6%, but the decline in real wages has hardly slowed, and
there is hardly a peep of resistance from labour. When workers are
politically, economically, and institutionally so weak, it does not
take very much unemployment to discipline them (although full
employment will never be in the cards). In these terms, the U.S.
economy may be poised for a long period of reasonably vibrant, but
still tightly-controlled, profit-led growth--one which will expand
output and accumulate capital, but leave most Americans worse off
year after year.
Two Options for Dealing with the Crisis:
When we start by recognizing and indeed highlighting the
underlying economic problems which have constrained the free-market
system, then it seems that socialist economic policy-making can go
in one of two broad directions:
i) It can attempt to manage the economic crisis of the
market system--organizing the necessary adjustments to
the permanent recession in a way that is somehow more
fair and humane than would be organized by pro-business
governments. Call this option structural adjustment with
a human face.
ii) It can recognize the moment of crisis in the global
market system, and start to develop policies and
institutions--and just as important, the social and
political base to successfully implement those policies
and institutions--which will attempt to resolve the
crisis through systemic change. Call this option a
strategy of structural change.
Under the first option, a social-democratic movement would
share the same underlying political-economic assumptions as other
political parties--accepting the premise that economic policies
must promote the cost-minimizing extraction of labour effort in the
workplace, and profit-driven capital accumulation as the engine of
economic growth. The movement would help society adjust to the new
economic "realities", by dismantling or downgrading the structures
of the post-war welfare-state system in light of the economic and
fiscal realities posed by the permanent depression. But it would
do so in a way that attempts to protect some social equity
considerations -- or at least as many as can be protected, given
the fundamentally regressive nature of the overall project.
The Ontario government's social contract is a good example of
this model of social-democratic economic policy. The NDP
government inherited a fiscal crisis, one that was not the result
of overpaid public servants or too-generous social programs, but
rather a legacy of Canada's vicious 1990-91 recession: deliberately
brought on by federal policies of free trade, fiscal cutbacks, and
above all high interest rates. What should a progressive
government do in such a difficult situation? The Ontario
government's choice was structural adjustment with a human face:
accept the constraints of the permanent recession as more-or-less
given, and then set about "responsibly" managing the necessary
adjustments to this situation. The NDP's "comparative advantage"
in this task was that its ties with labour made it easier to cajole
or forcibly extract the cooperation of unions, in return for some
possible marginal benefits in terms of the "fairness" of the final
package (at least in relation to alternative cutback packages).
One of the social contract's architects, Peter Warrian, summed
up this "human-face" approach nicely:
"The underlying reality is that the economics of the
public sector has changed as definitively as the fish
stocks in Newfoundland. What distinguishes us as social
democrats is how we deal with it: humanely and with
effectiveness".
Elsewhere in the world, too, this approach explicitly informs
social-democratic economic strategy, and leads many social-
democrats (even backed by business, in some cases) to advance
themselves as being best able to facilitate maximum structural
adjustment. Less "humane" right-wing versions of adjustment will
be resisted by working populations, hence expending needless time
and energy on social conflict; Social-democracy can accomplish the
same goal more smoothly and peacefully. For example, the PRI in
Mexico has used its social-democratic roots and "solidaristic"
public programs to smooth the path of a brutal structural
adjustment there. Far from being alarmed at the rebirth of
socialist parties in Eastern Europe, business leaders have actually
hailed these parties' ability to more effectively sell cutbacks and
structural adjustment to their electorates; "socialists can make
the bitter pill easier to swallow", said one free-market economist
of the Eastern European leftists.
I use Ontario's social contract as a stereotype of this
strategy, but in fact most of the NDP's policies throughout the
period of the decline of welfare-state capitalism have been limited
to putting a human face on restructuring, on deregulation, on
globalization. Even some of the party's most courageous stands--
such as opposing the NAFTA and promising to abrogate the FTA in the
last federal election--amount to little more than "Neo-Liberalism
Light": a bit less free trade, a bit less deficit-cutting, a bit
less privatization. None of these come close to addressing the
underlying problem of the free-market economy, this "new reality"
that we all have to adjust to. What is lacking is a vision of how
to change that reality, not just adjust to it.
Rebuilding the Alternative
There is an alternative to structural adjustment, but it
requires preparing ourselves to fight for and implement structural
change. This is a huge, profoundly difficult long-run task. There
are no models or recipe books to guide us. The things that have
been tried in the past--simple nationalization, central planning,
worker co-ops--have generally failed. I feel like socialists must
have felt 100 years ago, in 1894, after 20 years of global
recession, with the global hegemony of capitalism unchallenged.
Now, like then, we have to make it up as we go along.
This is why socialists around the world are in such
fundamental crisis, searching for a path along which we can start
to rebuild an alternative to the free-market system whose
constraints and "new realities" imply such poverty and pessimism.
It is much easier to retreat into accepting the basic economic
structures (and the policies which they presuppose) as inevitable,
tinkering with them around the edges to draw on a happy human face.
But that greatly undermines the political bargaining position of
working people. For in the process of developing and fighting for
fundamental alternatives over the past century, socialist movements
have left working people much stronger than they were 100 years
ago--even though we have not achieved our nominal goal. We can do
the same over the next 100 years, whether or not we manage to
attain socialism at the end of it all.
What will a rebuilt socialist economic program look like? I
cannot present any detailed set of instructions. But by referring
back to the two economic problems which underpin the market
economy's permanent recession, I can at least suggest the questions
that we will have to answer in the course of developing our
program.
i) Reconstructing the Labour Process: If we want to
simultaneously achieve full employment, high wages,
social security, and economic productivity, then we will
need a whole new model of how to manage and motivate
work. The current market system of labour extraction
relies heavily on the stick, not just the carrot: the
risk of being thrown out of work and into poverty is an
essential ingredient in enforcing productivity and
limiting wage demands. Permanent unemployment is a
prerequisite for this model. We will need to replace this
with a program of wide-ranging labour-market regulation,
whereby wages, employment, and working conditions are all
collectively managed with an eye to both efficiency and
equity.
ii) Socializing the Capital Accumulation Process: Growth and
employment in the current system are strictly constrained
by the requirement of high private profitability. This is
how the system automatically recreates unemployment and
stagnation: if profits are too low, private investment
stops (ie. capital goes "on strike"), and the system
grinds to a halt until high unemployment has disciplined
labour and restored profitability. We need to eliminate
the barrier that profitability poses to full employment,
and this will involve some kind of socialization of the
investment process--the exercise of some kind of
collective social control over capital.
Learning from the lessons of the past, these goals will be
difficult to achieve in a traditional top-down fashion--by
nationalizing large firms, for example, and appointing sympathetic
directors to run them more in the "public interest". Instead, I
propose a kind of economic revolution in the Gramscian sense:
instead of trying to take over existing economic structures, we
gradually build up our own alternative structures alongside them,
slowly expanding their size and credibility, until they have
eventually become more important and powerful than those initial
structures. I propose a movement for Community Entrepreneurship,
but not in the "up-by-your-bootstraps" small-business sense implied
by many community economic development advocates. Imagine, rather,
a broader process of getting communities to collectively perform
the tasks for which we have traditionally relied on private
entrepreneurs: coming up with new product or process ideas,
employing capital and workers, and organizing and managing
production.
There are many ways in which this could occur, and the real-
world process of rebuilding a socialist economic vision will
require a diversity of experimentation. Let me propose one
concrete but by no means exclusive example. Canada has a
thriving auto parts industry. But the industry, by and large, is
failing to take advantage of a strategic opportunity: as more auto
parts production is subcontracted from the major auto-makers, there
is a need for advanced firms (called "Tier 1" firms in industry
jargon) to step forward with complex, high-technology, pre-
assembled auto parts sub-systems. The economic and social benefits
of this type of production are much greater than the more
standardized mass production which is the industry's traditional
bread and butter. But the Canadian industry, by and large, is not
filling this need, largely because it is composed of small, highly
competitive firms which do not have sufficient capital resources or
technical know-how to develop and produce these new auto parts sub-
systems.
Community entrepreneurship could step into the void.
Collectively, Ontario has technical know-how and highly skilled
auto parts workers. Publicly-controlled capital (perhaps sourced
from a public industrial development bank, as proposed by the
Canadian Labour Congress) could fund both R&D (at community-based
research centres) and the initial product development initiatives
that could be spun off from that R&D. Smart public management
could unite technical know-how, with capital and labour, with the
emerging markets provided by the major auto-makers. Over time a
public, community-based, high-tech auto parts industry could
develop, one that would be gradually able to challenge private
firms for new opportunities, and perhaps even branch into other
industrial activities. The industry would be amenable to measures
(such as reduced working time) aimed at sharing more widely its
economic benefits; as a publicly-owned industry, it will not be
seeking cheaper foreign production locations for its innovative
products.
There is nothing magical about capital. No pot of gold
savings is required. Capital is created by private banks, as a
line item in a chequing account, when the bank is presented with an
investment opportunity that it deems appropriately profitable and
secure. By changing the criteria which guide this capital-
formation process we can gain access to the financial resources
which will be necessary. Much more difficult questions involve how
to collectively manage those resources, ensuring that both capital
and labour are used productively and flexibly.
Socialist Economics and Political "Realities":
The minimum program of a movement for a socialist economy
should be to reverse the great economic U-turn that has been
engineered over the past 15 years. Expose whose interests have
been served by the permanent recession, reduce real interest rates,
put productive investment before the interests of financial wealth-
holders, re-elevate full-employment to the top of the economic
agenda. This is an intimidating political and economic challenge
but all it would do is put us back where we were at the end of the
1970s; when welfare-state capitalism was reaching the limits
imposed by its continued reliance on profit-driven labour
extraction and capital accumulation. That is why we also need a
maximum program, one which proposes to gradually replace these
pillars of the free-market economy with more humane and ultimately
more efficient alternatives.
As a political platform, the program sketched out above is
sparse and undeveloped, and would likely be ridiculed in the
political mainstream as far-fetched and dangerous. I cannot
pretend that it presents a complete, comprehensive, or credible
alternative economic program. But it does propose a direction for
our long-run policy-development efforts. It is an economic
strategy rooted in the finest tradition of democratic socialism:
one that provides a vision of ultimate social transformation--
peaceful, gradual, but thorough. It rediscovers our movement's
socialist roots, and recasts them in light of what we have learned
in the past half-century.
Is the program electable? I would not underestimate its
political appeal. It has some attractive and novel features, such
as focusing public attention on what has happened in our economy,
on the new power that business has attained, and on how that power
is being squandered. It puts the free-market economic project on
the defensive, instead of accepting its underlying precepts and
fighting a few skirmishes around the fringes. But it is extremely
unlikely that a party espousing such a program could be elected in
Canada in the near or even medium future. And even if it were, it
would not yet possess the political or economic base to implement
the sort of social change we are proposing.
However, I would argue that the more important task for
socialists is to help Canadians understand what is happening in the
economy, why their standard of living is deteriorating, and what
sorts of challenges will have to be overcome if we are to put the
economy back into the service of Canadians rather than their
oppression and exploitation. This could prove to be a more
important contribution to a strong and vibrant socialist movement
in the long-run, and hence to the ultimate economic and political
well-being of working people--whether or not it involves electing
an NDP government.
The alternative, in my mind, is worse. It plays at managing
the crisis. It aims to obscure the true causes of the crisis by
pretending it is inevitable and beyond our control, and thus serves
to demoralize and demobilize. Socialists can do better than this.
Rebuilding a Left Economic Alternative
by Jim Stanford
JS:nk:jmopeiu343
December 5, 1994
