Suchergebnisse

Explores the link between the emergence of neoliberalism & the defeat of working class politics/unions to argue that the current economic crisis has discredited neoliberalism's free-market ideology & revealed neoliberal policies as a social disaster. Nonetheless, neoliberalism remains embedded in state structures & policy instruments. Its objective of disorganizing unions & other working class organizations continues to be the greatest obstacle to the establishment of a postneoliberal political order. Challenges to unions like pressure on wages/workplace controls & flexible labor market policies placed the union movement in a defensive position. However, the decline in employment resulting from the economic recession, the deterioration in public service working conditions, & the closing of the gap between social justice movements & the union movement have produced openings for new union activism. It is contended that strengthening the labor movement requires it to become part of a reconstruction of the left. The potential for breaking through the structures of neoliberalism & creating a new union politics as part of a true postneoliberal social order is discussed. J. Lindroth

Ruling Canada: Corporate Cohesion and Democracy, Jamie
Brownlee, Halifax: Fernwood Books, 2005, pp. 168.For a discipline explicitly engaged in the study of power,
particularly as exercised in liberal democracies, it is striking how
little Canadian political science has actually done to examine the
concentration of private economic power, the political organization of the
business classes and the extension of that power into the political realm.
Indeed, Canadian political science has been principally preoccupied with
power insofar as it pertains to the constitutional distribution of power
and the relative access to political power of the multinational and
multicultural constituent groups comprising Canada. The enormous
concentration of economic power—the top 25 firms accounting for over
40 per cent of business assets and the monopolies with over $100 million
in revenue accounting for 80 percent of business assets (p. 31)—has
largely been occluded from serious scrutiny. The mythologies of a
pluralist Canadian democracy are better preserved in the absence of
conceptual and empirical debate about the economic foundations of
political power.

Remembers Paul Sweezy (1910-2004), & also reflects on his contributions to building a space for formative Marxist thinking in North America & his efforts to advance Marxist theory around the world.

Introduces a review forum on a book by Jim Stanford, Paper Boom (Toronto: Lorimer, 1999). While Robert Brenner's book-length manuscript in New Left Review (1998) argues that the economic stagnation that has existed since the mid-1970s should be attributed to horizontal competition between national complexes of fixed capital rather than vertical relationships among the social classes, & Brenner fails to adequately consider Canada's current economic situation in his hypothesis, Stanford's new book challenges accepted macroeconomic politics & thinking. His work is critical in developing a more thorough understanding of capitalism in Canada. Though Stanford goes beyond the Keynesian position, he leaves several critical questions unanswered. It can only be hoped that Stanford's work will serve to promote extensive debate in the Canadian Left regarding the development of an alternative economy. K. A. Larsen