Trouble for Workers and the Poor: Economic Globalization and the Reshaping of American Politics
In recent decades in the United States, even as inequalities of income and wealth have greatly increased, redistributive programs have tended to be curtailed. In some cases, government policies have begun to exacerbate, rather than moderate, inequality. Since this has occurred not only under the Republican Reagan and Bush administrations, but also in the Democratic Carter and Clinton administrations, it suggests that the politics of redistribution may have been fundamentally transformed. Moreover, evidence from aborad indicates that there has been a shift away from redistributive policies throughout the advanced industrial world. The implications of this trend and the prognosis for the future depend upon its precise political causes. To the extent that it has resulted from changes in contingent political forces -- especially increases in the political power of capital and concomitant losses of power by labor, together with much stronger anti-redistributive stands by business -- one can imagine a revival of redistribution, based on increased organization, mobilization, and political struggle by working people and the poor. Some signs of such struggle have in fact appeared. To the extent that the trend is structural, however -- based on changed technology and such international economic factors as lower trade barriers, extensive immigration, lower transportation and communication costs, and increased capital mobility -- the heightened power of capital and weakness of labor are likely to persist for a long time to come. Moreover, economic globalization may be making it more and more difficult for governments to redistribute income without counterproductive effects such as capital flight, loss of export competitiveness, and increased immigration of low-income people. Thus economic globalization may gravely impair, or even eliminate, the capacity -- as well as the will -- of nation-states to redistribute income or wealth within their boundaries. If this is so, remedies will be hard to come by. The logic of economic globalization implies that only global remedies will work. It is possible that only worldwide organization by workers, or universally applicable treaties and agreements, could effectively check (let alone reverse) increases in income inequality in advanced industrial countries. But such solutions would arouse intense political opposition and would probably face conflicts of interest between workers in rich and poor countries.
Social Movements and the Problem of Globalization
Alternatives 23 (1998), 149-173 Social Movements and the Problem of Globalization Cecelia Lynch* There is a developing understanding among some “progressive” con- temporary social movement groups that economic globalization poses the primary obstacle to the fulﬁllment of their goals. This un- derstanding is well placed and overdue. Yet any effective response to globalization is predicated upon the ability of social movements to articulate a meaningful normative, or discursive, challenge. The par- ticular form of contemporary social movements’ inherited interna- tionalist focus, along with both activists’ and theorists’ past rejection of issues and politics deemed too class-based, has resulted in what we might call the discursive demobilization of movements on questions of economic praxis. This article thus seeks to open dialogue about the ability of what currently constitutes the normative challenge to globalization on the part of contemporary movements to reverse this discursive demobilization. “Globalization,” a phenomenon that succeeds the concepts of “modernization” and “interdependence,” now constitutes the touch- stone of any discussion of the contemporary world political economy. At the same time, there is heightened interest in the role of social movements in processes of change in world politics, and conse- quently in what is termed by some “transnational” or “global” civil so- ciety.1 As Stephen Gill points out, economic globalization affects so- ciety, on the group, national, and transnational levels: “[T]here are connections between the processes of economic globalization, and the way the outlook, expectations, and social choices of individuals and groups are being reshaped and reconﬁgured”? Although globalization is much discussed, disparaged, or touted, de- pending on the audience, disagreement remains concerning whether it is highly or marginally significant, new or old, and a phenomenon of *Dept. of Political Science, Northwestern University, Scott Hall, 601 University Place, Evanston, Ill., 60208-1006 149
Aristocratic Century: The sinews of power: political
In his excellent book on the Secretaries of State, Mark Thomson offered ‘the paradox of continuing domination of the aristocracy and the simultaneous insignificance of the House of Lords, per se ’. It is true that, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the supremacy of the House of Commons in financial matters was a wellestablished convention. The claims of the Commons to an undisputed control over money matters, which had been urged before the Civil War, were resumed immediately after the Restoration and a protracted dispute with the House of Lords began. In 1661 the Lords resolved that there were no precedents in history for this new claim by the House of Commons. In 1671, the Commons retorted that taxation ought not to be questioned by the Lords and in 1678 they reiterated that supply was ‘the undoubted and sole right of the Commons’ and ‘ought not to be changed or altered by the House of Lords’. The Lords' attempt in 1692 to assess their own taxes was also abandoned, though they retired under cover of a rather insubstantial smoke-screen that they maintained their power of amendment to be a ‘fundamental, inherent and undoubted right from which their lordships can never depart’. That established, they departed. Geoffrey Holmes quotes a nice example from 1702 when the bishop of Carlisle found himself the only peer answering to a money bill, ‘no other lord in the House regarded what was doing, this being only (pro forma) to preserve a seeming right to dissent from, or amend, any part of a money bill’.