[Working people never stopped fighting as neoliberalism was
imposed. Bouts of resistance kept resurfacing, but remained localized
and politically narrow. In the absence of structures that could give
workers confidence in collective struggles, workers were left with
survival tactics that came at great cost and unintentionally
reproduced neoliberalism’s individualist ethos.]
[[link removed]]

BEYOND FATALISM: RENEWING WORKING-CLASS POLITICS  
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Sam Gindin
March 19, 2023
Socialist Project: The Bullet
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_ Working people never stopped fighting as neoliberalism was imposed.
Bouts of resistance kept resurfacing, but remained localized and
politically narrow. In the absence of structures that could give
workers confidence in collective struggles, workers were left with
survival tactics that came at great cost and unintentionally
reproduced neoliberalism’s individualist ethos. _

,

 

The following is a forward from the new (fourth) edition of From
Consent to Coercion: The Continuing Assault on Labour. Those
interested in purchasing a copy can get a 25% discount using the code
“Evans25” on the UTP website
[[link removed]].

“We need to ask ourselves,” Leo Panitch and Donald Swartz stated
in the third edition of From Consent to Coercion, “whether free
pertains to those who do business or whether it pertains also to the
majority of Canadians who do not _do_ business.” Their book, now a
classic, focused on a critical expression of the tension between
liberal democratic principles and capitalist realities: the
substantive right of workers to strike. Canadian workers were
officially granted the basic democratic right to form unions, but the
substance of that right – the withdrawal by workers of their labour
power – was regularly suspended when workers successfully used it.
This was so especially, but not only, in the public sector.

From Consent to Coercion (1985) was updated in 1993 and 2003 and,
after a long and significant 20 years, is now updated here once more
and in its original spirit by Bryan Evans and Carlo Fanelli. What
makes the original book and all its updates such a definitive work is
its meticulous research and an analytical framework that merged
history, political economy, class conflicts, and the role of the
state, all without ignoring the specificity of Canada. Scholarly yet
accessible, it is unashamedly partisan in its support for unions
without exempting unions from its critical gaze. Through addressing
the move from “consent to coercion” in labour relations, it also
captures the broader shift that emerged in late 1970s capitalism and
was popularly summarized as “neoliberalism.”

Neoliberal Restructuring

Neoliberalism revolved around a restructuring of class forces and
social priorities in favour of competitiveness and private profits. At
its advent, a good many progressives confidently argued that this new
era would quickly collapse from its economic contradictions – and if
not, it would be discredited and defeated once its class biases, false
promises, and authoritarian tendencies were exposed. Three decades
later, with neoliberalism still standing, it became common to hear
that the state’s active response to the 2008–09 financial crisis
had finally ended neoliberalism, a hasty declaration that was repeated
regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yet neoliberalism persists. It has remained the dominant form of
capitalism framing all the editions of From Consent to Coercion. It
is now the capitalist norm not just in Canada but near universally.
What now appears the aberration in capitalist history isn’t
neoliberalism but the standard it is compared to – the mythologized
postwar “golden age” with its expectations of steady progress for
working people. Like the parrot in the Monty Python sketch, that
earlier era “is dead, is no more, is bereft of life.”

No other capitalism is today on offer; neoliberalism has become
synonymous with capitalism itself. The working-class frustrations that
accompanied this social shift did erode the legitimacy of political
parties and the state. And capitalism itself no longer carries its
past popular esteem. But neoliberalism’s ongoing _authority_ in
organizing our lives endures. The latest update of From Consent to
Coercion emphasizes what is most significant about neoliberalism’s
dominance since the early 1980s: it has been lamented but largely
“uncontested.”

Its duration now exceeds four decades (a decade longer than the period
from the start of World War I to the end of World War II). Why has
this anti-social restructuring of society, with its gross and rising
inequalities, permanent insecurity, and ever-narrowing substantive
democracy been tolerated for so long, especially by the labour
movement? This is the central question today for the labour movement
and left in developed capitalist countries.

Adolph Reed has aptly characterized neoliberalism as “capitalism
without a working-class opposition.” Reed, as does From Consent to
Coercion, sees this as a crisis in liberal democracy with dangerous
implications. But though the book is a call to end the undemocratic
attack on labour rights so as to retain vital space for furthering a
deeper democracy, its authors know full well that this is contingent
on a renewal of the trade union movement. To that end, the last
chapter of the book provides a number of creative, concrete, and
eminently _practical_ proposals for regenerating unions so they have
the capacity to challenge this resilient scourge. Yet some very few
exceptions aside, those proposals have till now not been seriously
discussed in unions, never mind strategically taken up. Again: why?

Working-Class Opposition

Neoliberalism does not bear the full responsibility for the weakness
of the labour movement. Rather, it consolidated weaknesses that were
already there. Countering neoliberalism’s hegemonic hold on society
demands appreciating that the common contrast between neoliberalism
and the “golden age” also included _continuities_ in both the
nature of the state’s agenda and the limited responses of labour.
Elaborating on this necessitates a brief historical interlude. In the
first half of the twentieth century, capitalism had presided over two
catastrophic world wars, the Great Depression, and the rise of
dangerous nationalisms. What came into question was not only the
tendency to globalization that Marx predicted, but liberal capitalism
itself. In the closing years of World War II, the American state
emerged to lead in overcoming this threat. The challenge was to
replace the fragmented capitalism of empires, colonies, and
protectionism with a world of sovereign states whose economies would
be internationally open and linked by private corporations acting
through markets.

The flow of natural resources, goods and capital would be determined
not by military strength or administrative barriers but by free trade,
free capital flows, and competitiveness (with US military power in
reserve for dealing with countries wavering in their acceptance of
this new order). Each state would have a responsibility to establish
the conditions for private capital accumulation within its own
territories and guarantee equal treatment for domestic and foreign
capital. All this would be constitutionalized via international
treaties that superseded national parliaments. Canada became an early
model of the integration of sovereign states into a world
superintended by the American state. In the immediate aftermath of the
war in Europe and Japan, aspects of this vision, such as the removal
of trade barriers and especially free capital flows, necessitated
compromises to deal with the pressing concerns of economic
reconstruction, legitimation, and the restoration of capitalist power.
But the direction of development was evident.

The continuity here – from the postwar making of a global capitalism
committed to corporate freedoms and property rights to neoliberalism
– is clear enough. However, this itself does not do away with the
distinctiveness of neoliberalism. A major difference between the two
periods remains, and it lies in the two eras’ responses to
capitalism’s “labour problem.”

In the postwar years, several factors coalesced to emphasize gaining
workers’ acceptance to capitalism’s new road. In some countries
the capitalist class had lost legitimacy during the war. As well, the
requisites of Cold War ideological conflict gave significant weight to
generally demonstrating capitalism’s compatibility with democratic
worker rights and material advances. And with the postwar boom in full
swing, states in the developed capitalist countries generally had the
capacity to meet at least some significant working-class demands
(often, as in Europe, with the aid of the United States). Above all,
workers came out of the war strong, confident, and determined to make
up for their deprivations during the Depression and the war.

Especially critical here was the _form_ taken by the postwar
accommodations to the working class. To undermine postwar sentiments
calling for a radical redistribution of wealth and economic power,
working-class militancy was consciously channelled into individual
consumption and cross-class cooperation in supporting growth. Unions
were accepted, but only alongside the marginalization of their most
radical activists and constraints on solidarity actions across
workplaces. (The marginalization of the radical left was especially
pivotal in countries like France, Italy, and Greece, where the
anti-fascist role of communists during the war led to considerable
popular support at the war’s end.)

The “welfare state” provided a measure of security for workers,
but in a way that _supplemented_ consumerism rather than looked to
replace it with decommodified collective goods. Unemployment
insurance, for example, was structured not to remove the discipline of
unemployment but to keep laid off workers in the workforce and curb
opposition to economic restructuring and imports. Canada’s universal
health care system, undoubtedly a great boon to working-class
families, never went so far as to include pharmacare, dental care, and
eye care, never mind socializing the production of drugs and hospital
supplies.

This kind of integration into the capitalist project allowed for a
degree of autonomy and militancy that made it possible for workers to
make significant gains _within_ the capitalist paradigm. By the end
of the 1960s, however, with the postwar boom fading, this became a
problem for corporations and the state. And absent a larger vision and
political program on the part of labour, the crisis for capitalism
became a crisis as well for labour.

With capitalist structures of economic and political power remaining
largely untouched, the welfare state was vulnerable to reversals as
circumstances changed. And labour, limiting itself to economic
militancy and generally fragmented struggles, paid little attention to
converting its strength at the time into a broader, robust social
force. What bridged the fate of the labour movement across the two
periods was that the limited horizons of the labour movement in “the
best of times” foreshadowed its defeats in the making and
perpetuation of the neoliberal times to come.

The state staggered through a decade of experimenting with various
fixes to the crisis of the 1970s and when they all proved inadequate,
the stumbling led capitalist elites and the state to the conclusion
that there was no longer a middle ground. Options had become
polarized. The impasse could only be broken by either greater
regulations on corporations or breaking the working class and pressing
ahead with _more_ capitalism. Even though they were uncertain how
working people would react, the capitalist elites and the state
responded radically and decisively to this choice. The labour movement
and its political arm, social democracy, did not – they hoped that
this aggressive turn was temporary or looked instead for a
non-existent middle ground.

Labour’s response emboldened unremitting attacks on workers’
gains. The partial accommodation to workers’ needs gave way to an
uncompromising assertion that “there is no alternative.” Fatalism
replaced legitimation as the key to reproducing capitalism. And it is
fatalism that is now the labour movement’s greatest enemy.

It was not that working people stopped fighting as neoliberalism was
imposed. Bouts of resistance did keep resurfacing, but they remained
localized, sporadic, and politically narrow. Consumption was
maintained and even increased for most families despite austerity and
stagnant wages. But in the absence of structures that could give
workers confidence in _collective_ struggles, workers were left with
survival tactics that came at great cost and unintentionally
reproduced neoliberalism’s individualist ethos.

Individuals worked longer hours or picked up extra jobs. Total family
hours in the workforce increased even as the alleged liberatory forces
of technology marched on. Speedup and weaker health and safety
conditions were tolerated, personal debt increased. Young people
stayed longer with parents to save for a mortgage. Lower taxes were
viewed as a de facto wage increase they had missed out on, even as
this _implied_ greater pressure on the social programs desperately
needed. While competition among corporations drove some out of
business, this created further opportunities for the strong and
consolidated capital _as a class_. For workers, however, competition
is death; it undermines the key strength that gives power to the
right/freedom to withdraw their labour: their solidarity.

Looking back over the near four decades covered by this book,
neoliberalism seems to be less something new than a particular phase
of capitalism’s fundamental drive to subordinate
literally _everything_ – human labour, social relations, social
institutions, nature – to the unrelenting discipline of
competitiveness and thereby to capital accumulation. This is a
tendency, not an inevitability, but if this anti-social “logic” is
to be challenged, then that challenge will have to come from a
transformed labour movement.

What we now need to confront with “sober senses” is that there may
be no dynamic internal to unions that can lead to such a union
renewal. After all this time, the rampant frustrations with
neoliberalism have not done it. The inequities and gaps in our health
care and social protections have been dramatically exposed by the
pandemic, but unions are not coming out of the pandemic more organized
and mobilized (some major labour leaders even cozied up closer to
conservative politicians). And though the environmental crisis looms
with no plan to deal with its scale, here too labour has not taken on
the potential of hegemonic leadership.

Union leaderships have either settled into the comfort zone of lowered
membership expectations _easing_ pressure on the leaders or
reluctantly succumbed to the fatalism that neoliberalism so powerfully
radiates. Or they mean well but have so very little in the way of
recent experiences to encourage thinking and acting more ambitiously.
For their part, workers seem too fragmented, too dependent on their
bosses (even when they despise them), too drawn into immediate
survival mode, too exhausted by work and the weight of daily life, and
too alienated from even their own structures to participate in
challenging and changing them. And perhaps above all, there is no
organization of committed socialists to act as a catalyst to bring out
the best of working people, including their prime organization –
their unions.

A World to Win

The necessity of a party not only favouring workers but for achieving
socialism was implicit in all the editions of From Consent to
Coercion, but this latest edition poses it explicitly in the
concluding paragraph of the book. The accumulated defeats in the
absence of an institution explicitly committed to class formation have
made addressing this imperative. How else to explicitly address class
formation, democratize knowledge, develop the individual and
collective capacities of working people to imagine a world beyond
capitalism, analyze and understand their circumstances, debate without
rancour, strategize, lead struggles, and win others over to the
creation of a world not yet on the horizon?

Such a party cannot of course just be conjured up by fiat. The
long-standing dilemma is that a party needs a popular base, but
without a party it is hard to imagine such a base emerging. The only
answer to this conundrum is to go beyond waiting for the
“objective” circumstances, appreciate that a socialist party is a
voluntarist intervention that will always be a “premature” leap
into the semi-darkness, yet also respect that _some_ base is still
necessary. The immediate goal must therefore be to set in motion
processes that engage workers and the infrastructures and
relationships that might at some point – indeterminate today –
contribute to the creation of an institution capable of freeing us
from the debilitating muck of neoliberalism/capitalism to the end of
realizing our fullest collective potentials.

From Consent to Coercion has been so indispensable to this project
because of what it exposes about both liberal democracy and the limits
of the union response yet understands that unions remain an
indispensable democratic force in capitalist society. The challenge
the authors pose is the critical necessity of union renewal – not
the conversion of unions into socialist organizations, which is not
their role in representing workers with different politics, but into
working-class institutions open to the socialist ideas that are, from
a _practical_ perspective, essential to better addressing their
members’ needs. That is, providing internal spaces for broader
working-class education and deeper participation; seeing local unions
as centres of working-class life; extending union battles to the class
as a whole; joining the fight against other oppressions that are not
“identified” as class struggles but are, at their core,
inseparable from them; always raising expectations; and appreciating
capitalist limits as contingent barriers to overcome. •

_Sam Gindin was research director of the Canadian Auto Workers from
1974–2000. He is co-author (with Leo Panitch) of The Making of
Global Capitalism [[link removed]] (Verso),
and co-author with Leo Panitch and Steve Maher of The Socialist
Challenge Today
[[link removed]],
the expanded and updated American edition (Haymarket)._

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