June 26, 2018: Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality
(i) Free trade, (ii) the industrial research lab, (iii) the gold standard, and (iv) high finance to lobby for peace and channel money to régimes that played by the rules of the game—those were the key stabilizing institutions of Gold Standardism. (i) Labor unions, (ii) Keynesian demand management, (iii) social insurance, and (iv) high-throughput oligopolistic assembly-line manufacturing—those were the key stabilizing institutions of Fordism.
So what are the next key stabilizing institutions? There is no guarantee that there will be any. There was, after all, a 33-year gap between the breakdown of Gold Standardism in 1913 and the first clear signs of the successful construction of Fordism in 1946. If we see 2000 as the last gasp of successful Fordism... then we may have a long slog. For who in 1913 would have predicted the future and bet that labor unions, Keynesian demand management, social insurance, and high-throughput oligopolistic assembly-line manufacturing were the key institutions to be building?:
Nicolas Colin: Doom, or Europe's Polanyi Moment?: Polanyi's... The Great Transformation... is really about the social and economic institutions that are necessary to support the market system and to make economic development more sustainable and inclusive...
...The 'Great Transformation' in and of itself is the painful process a society must go through to imagine and set up these indispensable institutions—a process that includes softer ways, like elections and collective bargaining, but also more destructive paths, like fascism and war. What Polanyi describes in his book is in fact the long economic transition between two very different worlds. One is the 19th century gold standard economy, whose prosperity culminated in the US during the Gilded Age. The other is the 20th century Fordist economy that only found its balance—and entered its Golden Age—after most developed countries had imagined and implemented the proper social and economic institutions in the wake of World War II—that is, after Polanyi finished writing his book....
As Joseph Stiglitz wrote in the introduction to a recent edition of Polanyi's book, "rapid transformation destroys old coping mechanisms, old safety nets, while it creates a new set of demands, before new coping mechanisms are developed." Indeed the first half of the 20th century was marked by the long and violent crisis that saw a confrontation between two very powerful movements.... A country approaching the fascist phase showed [common] symptoms, among [them] the spread of irrationalistic philosophies, racialist aesthetics, anticapitalistic demagogy, heterodox currency views, criticism of the party system, widespread disparagement of the "regime," or whatever was the name given to the existing democratic setup.... These are the bare outlines of a complex picture in which room would have to be made for figures as diverse as the Catholic freelance demagogue in industrial Detroit [antisemitic Catholic priest Charles Coughlin], the "Kingfish" in backward Louisiana, Japanese Army conspirators, and Ukrainian anti-Soviet saboteurs. Fascism was an ever-given political possibility, an almost instantaneous emotional reaction in every industrial community since the 1930s....
Yet another sign of a Polanyi moment is the dispute around what would be the best remedy to the multi-dimensional crisis we are currently going through. Like what happened in the 1930s between the elite who advocated restoring laissez-faire and the labor movement, we are currently seeing two movements at odds with each other. On one side are those who would like to restore the old Fordist economic order.... On the other side are those who reckon that we are undergoing another 'Great Transformation'. For them, it's high time we begin to tackle many difficult institutional challenges so as to support the growth of the digital economy instead of fighting it: imagining a new welfare state, a new financial system, a new tax system, new regulations, and upgraded infrastructures...
June 27, 2018 at 12:00 in #shouldread, #weblogging | Permalink | Comments (5)