“On Globalisation – Critique or Nostalgia?”: A Rejoinder

This is a rejoinder to a note written by Prof. T Jayaraman (TISS, Mumbai) on Prof. Prabhat Patnaik’s article “Workers united: The growing resistance against globalization” published in ‘The Telegraph’, Calcutta on October 20, 2016.

Prof. Jayaraman’s note and my response can be read here: https://www.facebook.com/sunand.sfi/posts/10208663247551383

My comment is reproduced below:

Very disappointing analysis [by Prof. T Jayaraman].

i) is a silly argument. Do we, in the Left, need to be told everytime that what is referred to as “globalisation” today is the set of policies and processes associated with the era of neoliberal capitalism, the era where international finance capital is pushing open national borders to free capital flows and free trade (not free labour flows)? PP himself has written about it so many times, so has so many others associated with the Left movement in India and elsewhere.

ii) Is Jayaraman contesting the fact that the era of neoliberalism has accentuated the “deprivation experienced by the working people”? Does he make no distinction between the era between the end of World War II and 1970s on the one hand and the post-1970s neoliberal era? The former was marked by Keynesian demand management in the advanced capitalist countries and relatively autonomous policies of capitalist development in the third world. This era is often referred to as the “Golden Age of Capitalism” – living standards of the workers in the advanced capitalist countries went up, real wages increased, employment levels were very close to full employment, wage share and profit share were fairly stable for a long time, social security systems and welfare states were set up owing to the “communist threat” and the greater influence of the communists and social democrats in the capitalist West, public sector enterprises were set up, large parts of the economy were nationalised. The neoliberal era has been remarkably different. Welfare states are being whittled down, social security is under attack, public sector enterprises are being privatised, real wages are stagnant or declining, profit share shot up and wage share declined, unemployment rose. I can go on and on. It doesn’t make any sense to demand that every article has to include a primer detailing these.

iii) Nowhere does PP say that the antidote is “nationalism”. What he is saying is that countries should delink from the process of globalisation, which means they should stop pursuing the policies of free capital flows and free trade. This will, in turn, necessitate more changes in economic policy, and if those changes are consistently pursued, the forces driving those changes would come into conflict with capitalism itself. The contradiction can be resolved ultimately only with the transcendence of capitalism itself. But the hostility of large segments of the European Left towards nationalism blinds them to the need to delink. As regards different kinds of nationalism, Jayaraman would not have written what he has if he had read PP’s article during the height of the nationalism debate in JNU: https://goo.gl/ojDz0R

iv) Jayaraman is making the very same discredited arguments that have been made by dominant segments of the Left in Europe. Communist Parties such as KKE and the CPI(M) have found these arguments to be hollow, and have rejected them. Jayaraman should at least read the articles published in ‘People’s Democracy’ about Brexit: https://goo.gl/9oK8uO

v) Critiquing “productionism” does not mean development of the forces of production is not needed. The productionism referred to by PP is a claim that neoliberal policies lead to economic growth and hence are justifiable even from  a Left perspective. Apart from the fact that even economic growth in capitalist countries has been lower in the neoliberal era compared to the Golden Age, whatever growth that is occurring (with spurts of high growth in some countries) cannot be a justification to support neoliberal policies. There is no need to feel offended by a critique of productionism.

vi) Yet another strawman argument. Nowhere does PP say that the alternative is to go back to Mao’s China or Nehruvian India, which should be clear to those who have been following this writings and speeches. Watch his recent lectures on the occasion of the centenary year of the October Revolution. Marxists indeed do emphasise the capture of state power to fundamentally alter the world. The objective of radical action is to capture state power and change the character of the state itself; radical action entails building up the capacity to do precisely this.

The one argument in Jayaraman’s entire note that I agree with is that PP is bundling all kinds of Left together, when it is absolutely clear that there are very large segments of the Left (including in India) which stand opposed to globalisation, which are not plagued by hostility towards all kinds of “nationalism”, and which are not beholden to the notions of “productionism”.