Hilary Wainwright
Delivered 12 October 2010
It's exciting to contribute to a conference where trade unions are moving on to the high ground and proposing alternatives, in alliances with groups sharing a common interest in quality public services.
It's exciting to contribute to a conference where trade unions are moving on to the high ground and proposing alternatives, in alliances with groups sharing a common interest in quality public services.
I want to explore lessons we can draw from practical experiences of such strategic trade unionism.
But first a point about the context.
We face the extraordinary situation in which what began as a crisis of the financial markets, and the institutions that drove them, has now become a crisis of public spending to be solved, it is argued, through cutting back on social provisions.
We need to have some explanation of this process to develop effective strategies - both in the short and long term.
I want to focus on the implications of one part of the explanation which I think has a special importance for the distinctive role of trade unions – in particular public sector trade unions - in the coming years.
A key factor that allowed the dominant narrative to move from a financial crisis, to a political bail out, to the current crisis of public spending and cuts in social provision was an absence of sustained mainstream voices articulating the values and goals of public good and societal needs. There was no effective counterpoint to the pressures and imperatives of the corporate market. I'm not talking here about a radical socialist programme, all I mean is a greened social democracy that meant it.
A key moment in this process was the weakness and ultimate marginalisation of voices in the US and in Europe arguing for the billions spent to save the financial institutions to be used to initiate a dynamic of democratically directed investment towards goals of environmental sustainability and social and employment justice.
This was a political weakness – especially in the UK and the US - at the very moment when briefly, political institutions had real bargaining strength vis a vis financial power.
This de facto defeat for democratic public intervention at a decisive moment, consolidated the fundamental neoliberal notion that public spending, especially on social provision, holds back the private sector, the sacrosanct driver of the economy. (see notions of 'crowding out'; a 'burden' etc )
In other words, the financial crisis is completing the delegitimisation - within the political and media institutions - of the economics of social need and public goods; the economics of the non-commodified sphere that has since 1945 existed as a compromise within capitalist economies.
This process of marginalisation must be understood, in part at least in the North, asssociated with the structural inability of social democratic and euro-communist parties to renew themselves in the 70s and 80s in order to improve, extend and support innovation in the public services which they helped to create.Instead we have seen their defensive acquiescence in the treatment of public goods as secondary and contingent of theon the permission of the financial markets.
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