Global reformists (2001)

Book Review from the May 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism’. Edited by Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens, (Vintage 2001)

This is a collection of essays by various “lefty” and centrist writers on aspects of global capitalism. The essays are sandwiched between an opening dialogue between the editors and a concluding chapter curiously titled “Fighting Back” (against whom or what?—certainly not global capitalism).

Manuel Castells outlines three sources of unsustainability for what he calls info-capitalism. One of these is “the social, cultural and political rejection by large numbers of people around the world of an Automaton whose logic either ignores or devalues their humanity”. Unfortunately he follows this by suggestions for taming the Automaton (global capitalism), not for getting rid of it.

Vandana Shiva is scathing about global capitalism and its effects on poor people and the environment: “Instead of getting rid of pollution, systems are being evolved which allow the rich to sell their pollution to the poor . . . The proposal to give market values to all resources as a solution of the ecological crisis is like offering the disease as the cure”—good diagnosis, pity about the lack of treatment.

Arlie Russell Hochschild describes how a Philippines mother-of-five migrates to the US to work as a nanny to the young son of a wealthy Beverly Hills family. The family pay the nanny the going rate, and the nanny pays her domestic worker the going Philippines rate. The nanny would have preferred staying home to look after her own children. The Beverly Hills family are satisfied with the deal. So Hochschild asks: are that family getting emotional surplus value?

In the face of this and much other evidence that global capitalism is destroying or severely damaging human relationships and values, you would expect the editors to condemn the system and urge its replacement. Not a bit of it. Hutton does not go beyond recognising the driving force behind global capitalism: “Its overriding objective is to serve the interests of property owners and shareholders, and it has a firm belief . . . that all obstacles to its capacity to do that-regulation, controls, trade unions, taxation, public ownership, etc—are unjustified and should be removed.”

Giddens, seeking to magnify the minuscule differences between himself and Hutton, claims that “Capitalism, at least for the moment, has hardly any critics.” Not true. Capitalism has plenty of critics, but none of them (except socialists, of course) carries their criticisms to the point of advocating the removal of the system whose deficiencies they eloquently describe. Instead they accept the myth that There is No Alternative.

The editors say in their concluding chapter “the task, surely, in the absence of alternatives, is to keep the current system going and improve it.” It doesn’t seem to occur to Hutton and Giddens that this “task” is effectively to condemn us to endure some form of capitalism for ever. Echoing Fukuyama, we really have, according to this scenario, reached the end of history.

Stan Parker